Dear Sara,

Responding to your article in todays Daily Telegraph.

The polarisation of opinion is destabilising and will lead to more unrest and personal injuries and deaths. but the ones driving this are the Left and not the Right. In fact the hard left are treating people who have what used to be a centrist and mainstream view as if they were right-wing fascists and making ordinary members of society, especially those who are male, white, Christian and taxpaying, feel as though they are being made pariahs and being made to pay for the privilege, to use the word they normally use to oppress us and make it look like we’re the oppressor.

We need to get back to a code of what is and what is not acceptable as mainstream, and the key parameter that nobody seems to be talking about is respecting the issue of freedom of choice.

If a person has the freedom to choose something, then they also have the responsibility for their choice, and maybe can be called upon to justify it. Where someone doesn’t have a choice, they did not exercise a freedom and therefore people should not expect them to justify it, that seems to me to be the most important aspect people never think of. In my own philosophy it stands next to the so-called “golden rule” of doing to others what you would like them to do to you. Because even that golden rule refers to things where people still have free agency.

If someone does to me something I don’t like but did not choose to do it, let us say that they bump into me but only because they were pushed unexpectedly by someone else, then I cannot blame them. They did to me probably something that they wouldn’t want me to do to them, but they didn’t choose it, hence the agency rule overrides the golden rule.

Taking this as a guide, Sara, one could begin to make a code which gradually replaces what we see as Neo-Marxist political correctness into a code based on chivalry, good-manners and that good-old Christian concept of neighbourly love. If you are the Commissioner for countering extremism, then what you need to do first if you will pardon me telling you your job (which is something I admittedly don’t like when someone does to me, but it does happen all the time and this is for the greater good) is to DEFINE what is extreme and what is not extreme by reference to adherence to these high-level principles.

What is fashionable and unfashionable in terms of specific doctrine can change over time, but certain ideas like fairness to all, or that he who pays the piper calls the tune, therefore people paying taxes should not be pushed away from the front line of access to the benefits bought by those taxes, in case of need. You need to consider defining what the traits are of something that could be described as extreme and anything which can justify itself with motherhood concepts ought not to be so defined.

As a final note, anyone who has 100 Muslim organisations braying to have them removed from office must be doing something right. Rather a lot right, even. So I’m hoping to hear of your successes in the future.

Yours faithfully,

David J. James