Why Britain needs to wake up to extremism
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the world reacts to the attacks on Bondi Beach in Australia, Conservative peer Paul Goodman joins Tim Shipman and James Heale to discuss the failure of successive British governments to properly tackle extremism – especially Islamist extremism – over the past two decades. In the post 'War On Terror' era, there was a reluctance by some to discuss the problem openly as it got tied up in other polarising topics like immigration. Though that reluctance appears to be fading, Paul argues that there is a 'communalist air of voting' in British politics now, and he warns of the dangers that face British politics if fragmentation becomes entrenched in party politics.
Plus – Trump is suing the BBC for $5 billion. What's his motivation?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Give something clever this Christmas. |
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| 0:28.3 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heel and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman, |
| 0:32.2 | the political editor of The Spectator and Paul Goodman, Conservative Peer, a former editor of Conservative Home. |
| 0:37.4 | Now Paul, you've written for The Telegraph today a brilliant piece on the Bondi Beach attacks. |
| 0:42.1 | Tell us about your argument that you're writing there. |
| 0:44.1 | So, in the aftermath of the Bondi Beach horror, rather like the aftermath of the Manchester Synagogue attacks, |
| 0:53.2 | or in fact any domestic terror incident here. There's a natural |
| 0:57.8 | focus on the victims, in this case Jews in Australia, and there's a certain solidarity with that |
| 1:05.8 | community. People queue up to support the security services, mourn the dead, and try to support the Jewish community. |
| 1:14.3 | My argument is that what's going on is in fact rather bigger and that it affects everyone, |
| 1:19.7 | not just a particular group of people for whom one would feel support. |
| 1:25.7 | And so the argument really is this, that there's a connection pretty clearly |
| 1:30.1 | between the charts of globalise the interfaida, the picketing of synagogues, the Holocaust |
| 1:38.2 | denial, the endless agitation, understandable, but questionable in many ways, over Gaza. |
| 1:47.5 | There's a connection between that and what happened in Manchester and what happened on Donday Beach. |
| 1:52.4 | There's also a connection between that and what's happening in our domestic politics. |
| 1:57.6 | Our politics is fragmenting. |
| 1:59.9 | The monopoly of the two big parties was long ago |
... |
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