When I was posted with the UK Foreign Service to the Middle East, I encountered a regular irritant. Whether it was in Egypt, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, my hosts had a habit of becoming less gracious and more critical whenever they raised the issue of Political Islam in Britain. Sometimes they used the outright derogatory term: “Londonistan”. The Egyptians in the 1990s, the Saudis 20 years later, and the Emiratis a further decade on, all warned that Islamists, under the guise of peaceful dissidents, were incubating a threat to the Western way of life no less real than the violent threat posed by Al-Qaeda and like-minded groups whom we prioritised as dangerous terrorists.

I think most of us would recognise that British official complacency about the Muslim Brotherhood project was a historic error. The UK belatedly appeared to get serious about it in 2014, when David Cameron commissioned two brilliant friends of mine, Sir John Jenkins and the late Charles Farr, to conduct a review. That review remains the single most important document about the Brotherhood in the UK but it landed badly in 2015. Senior officials and politicians alike left the authors in no doubt that their findings were unwelcome. Nothing was done about them.

On a certain level, we can say that the Saudis, Egyptians and Emiratis were right. And yet, the British retort that those countries do not tolerate political opposition and so force dissidents to seek asylum elsewhere was also true. Neither the UK nor any other Western democracy can apply solutions that work in Arab autocracies. That is why this Henry Jackson Society report is so important, and so well-timed. We are at the start of a long-overdue British pushback against Islamist entryism, which has (tactically unwisely) grown much more visible in the aftermath of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, and now increasingly manifests itself in aggressive antisemitism that is forcing a political response. Calibrating that response requires the intelligent study of how the UK’s allies have responded and how applicable those policies might be in Britain. I was with the author, Emma Schubart, at a recent conference in Rome that gathered an extraordinary array of international experts to provide insight and advice on how to address this transnational challenge.

Policy makers should therefore pay attention to this report. One of its key sentences reads: “Allied practice suggests that the most defensible path is a tiered approach: terrorism proscription where the evidence supports it; sanctions and immigration measures against foreign affiliates; and a strengthened domestic regulatory regime for extremist organisations that operate below the terrorism threshold.” Based not just on Middle Eastern examples but more relevantly on evolving European experiences and the new, galvanising US move against the Brotherhood, HJS have produced a really valuable guide to the policy options available to the British government, and which might prove effective. In my contacts with British and American officials, I will certainly be commending it to them.

Edmund Fitton-Brown
Former UK Ambassador to Yemen;
Former Coordinator of the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban;
Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies