Michael Gove can’t even define extremism – so how are the Tories going to stop it?

To curb the rise in antisemitic and anti-Muslim intolerance, the government has published its long-awaited definition of ‘unacceptable’ speech and conduct. The trouble is, says John Rentoul, nobody quite seems to know what it amounts to…

Announcing the government's new definition of extremism, Michael Gove confirmed ‘From the river to the sea’ – the controversial chant used on pro-Palestinian marches – was acceptable, as it is open to different interpretations (Jordan Pettitt/PA)

The chant I really don’t like is: “Yemen, Yemen, do us proud! Turn another ship around!” The ignorance of calling on a theocratic dictatorship to attack international shipping in the Red Sea, in supposed solidarity with the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, is provocative.

But that is the point of it. People who feel strongly about a cause have always wanted to shock respectable opinion, and often think that the moral rightness of the underlying cause justifies the offence.

Should it be a crime to chant support for Ansar Allah, the Yemeni movement known as the Houthis, one of the slogans of which is “A curse upon the Jews”? Probably not, for the reason given by Michael Gove, the cabinet minister who is responsible for the government’s new definition of extremism.

He was asked on the Today programme this morning if the definition covered “From the river to the sea”, another chant often heard on pro-Palestinian marches. He said it didn’t, because the phrase itself was open to different interpretations, and what his definition was trying to do was to describe the kinds of ideologies that are unacceptable.

This is correct, as Gove almost always is. “From the river to the sea” is mostly used by pro-Palestinians as a provocation, because it reflects the ambition of Hamas and similar organisations (including the Houthis) to destroy the state of Israel and claim all the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean for Muslims. But it has also been used by advocates of a Greater Israel, who want to claim all the land for Jews.

And it has even been used, rather less often, by utopians who want a single state in which “all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty”. That is what Andy McDonald, the Labour MP, said at a pro-Palestinian rally last year, and which the Labour Party has now concluded was not “conduct that was against the party’s rulebook”, so he has been restored to membership of the parliamentary Labour Party.

Gove was less sure about whether projecting “From the river to the sea” onto Big Ben should be covered by his definition of extremism. It was a matter for the police, he said, who would have to decide whether it constituted a public order offence.

The question, Gove implied, was whether the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) might be an organisation that was promoting an extremist ideology. The PSC organised the demo outside parliament when the message was projected onto the Palace of Westminster. Ben Jamal, the director of the PSC, said it hadn’t done it, but “I wish we had”.

But if Gove’s new, “precise” definition of something that is bad but not unlawful cannot answer that question, what is the point of it?

This is something the prime minister felt so strongly about recently that he dropped everything on a Friday evening to pop out of his front door to warn the nation about it. Once he had calmed down over the weekend, he seemed to have forgotten all about it, because he hasn’t mentioned it since.

What, anyway, was “it”? Rishi Sunak’s emergency address to the nation was prompted by the election of George Galloway in the Rochdale by-election, but the prime minister gave the impression that this was a harbinger of mob rule of our streets. That was foolish, because it is not true, and Sunak looked as if he was telling us that he was presiding over disorder.

Now that the government’s definition of extremism has been published, Amol Rajan, the BBC presenter, asked Gove precisely the right question: “What is the problem to which this non-statutory definition is the answer?”

Gove repeated his well-known views about the problem of the Islamist ideology espoused by a minority of British Muslims. We know what they are because he wrote them in a book called Celsius 7/7 in 2006. Gove is an outstanding interviewee on this subject because he knows what he thinks, but the very clarity of his answers made it all the more obvious that he hadn’t answered Rajan’s question.

The real answer was provided by Michael Ashcroft, the pollster and former Tory peer. He published a poll today that found that a lot of voters – 46 per cent – say that “we need tough new laws to clamp down on extremism in Britain”. This isn’t a majority, and 38 per cent say “we should use the laws we already have to deal with extremism”. But what is significant is that 60 per cent of Conservative voters want new laws.

They are not going to get them. A new definition of extremism will have to do, but it looks awfully like an attempt to energise the Tory base. That would seem to be all that this is about: an attempt by a rudderless and failing Tory government to rouse its core support in order to stave off meltdown at the general election.

The correct response to people chanting support for the Houthis is to point them towards the AFP report last month of a Houthi-run court in Yemen sentencing 13 people to public execution for homosexuality. Trying to define bad words for official disapproval is a foolish diversion.