This post, authored by Steven Tucker, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
Did you see that huge Muslim gathering held in Suffolk recently, which had to be called off early due to a major far-Right terror plot being hatched against it? You may well have done, as the news was all over the media and referenced in alarmist tones by leading politicians, up to and including the Prime Minister (both the ones we’ve had this week).
But did you also see that the ‘plot’ didn’t even exist? Quite possibly not, because the subsequent release of everyone concerned (bar one aberrant and misleading exception, who we’ll come to later) didn’t get anything like as much space in the media, and no mention at all from any of the politicians who had so eagerly jumped the imaginary gun to condemn it.
Empty threats
The disrupted event, called the UK Ijtima, attracted 15,000 members of the Religion of Peace from around the world to gather in the grounds of the country estate of Shrubland Hall in Barham to engage in events of a peacefully peaceful nature. This peace was suddenly shattered, however, when armed counter-terror police descended, warning visitors of a severe threat to their wellbeing in the shape of the nearby presence of some white people, causing the jamboree to be closed down a few hours early on Sunday July 12th. Eight men across the country were detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, whilst a further four individuals were apprehended upon different grounds like conspiracy to commit murder. Counter-terror cops confirmed the arrests were “Right-wing terrorism related”.
Then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, another recent victim of things having to end early, was quick to express shock at the “credible, serious threat”, as was his soon-to-be successor, Andy Burnham.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood went further, saying the prompt police action “undoubtedly saved lives”, making a statement in the Commons, playing up the cancellation as all part of a wider campaign of terror and intimidation being waged against Britain’s Muslims by the agents of Anglo-Saxon hatred.
Hannah Spencer, the Green Party MP for Gorton and Gaza, joined in, demanding stronger governmental action against “anti-Muslim hatred” and bemoaning how the “alarming incident” in Barham “has barely been covered in the news”, even though it appeared on the BBC, Sky News, ITV and many major newspapers.
The lengthy ITV report is particularly cringeworthy and dhimmified. An interviewee, before any details of the ‘plot’ were even known, says that, if it had succeeded, it could have been the biggest terror massacre in British history. ITV would not have run an interview just after Axel Rudakubana’s arrest in 2024 with someone saying the same thing about his own plan to kill thousands with the bioweapons he was brewing in his bedroom, because Axel was from a minority group himself, and so speculating about his own case was officially discouraged by media and politicians alike, even though his offences, unlike those of the white Barham ‘terrorists’, were actually real.
Others doing their best to inflate the risk included the Muslim Council of Britain, who used the incident to specifically warn that “the threat facing Muslim communities is real, not imagined”. A few days later, of course, it turned out the precise reverse was true as regarded Barham, yet still the MCB’s statement remained online and unaltered.
Did it really matter to those bemoaning the ‘threat’ so loudly here that it ultimately did turn out to be wholly imaginary, though?
PCS gone mad
The PCS, our main civil service union, momentarily confused itself with the CPS, and put out an eerily similar statement to the MCB on the ‘plot’, also presenting it as part of a wider pattern:
There is no doubt there was a serious risk to life. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood described a “credible threat” and said that police action had “undoubtedly saved lives”. Britain’s Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) confirmed that the investigation was “Right-wing terrorism related”. This is not an isolated incident. There is increasing evidence of growing Islamophobia and alarming Islamophobic attacks. On Friday June 19th PCS condemned violent attacks targeting Edinburgh’s Muslim community. This followed serious violence earlier the same month over several days in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In Manchester and Stockport, mosques have been attacked during evening prayers.
The other attacks upon Muslims referred to by the PCS here were real, physically extant events. The pseudo-events in Barham later turned out not to be. Fran Heathcote, the PCS General Secretary, reassured her union’s Muslims that the difference didn’t matter, though. Look at the sentence I’ve highlighted in bold:
Firstly I am thankful that this potentially catastrophic attack was prevented on this occasion without injury. However, I recognise that the threat facing Muslim and other religious communities is very real. Once again, we send our solidarity to those affected who may be feeling frightened and insecure at this time. PCS is ready to support any of our members affected by such events whether threatened or real. This kind of violence has no place in any society. We stand firmly against racism and religious intolerance in all its forms.
A union which explicitly promises to protect its members from imaginary threats? Would that include handing them out free cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, and silver bullets to see off werewolves? I wrote on the Daily Sceptic recently about a bizarre new far-Left faux-academic philosophy called ‘eventism’, or the unjustifiable social prejudice against false claims of things which never actually happened at all. This philosophy, which allows minority groups like Muslims to demonise majority groups like whites as being collectively ‘guilty’ of crimes like rape, murder or slavery even if they have never personally committed them, seems also here to apply to non-existent acts of ‘terror’ like the one which never occurred at Barham.
Bodies like the Muslim Council of Britain expressly want to use such purely imagined ‘events’ as a basis for implementing concrete polices. As the MCB said in its post-Barham statement, “The MCB calls on ministers to match the language of condemnation with actual action and policy, not another round of statements that change nothing.” If you want “actual action”, rather than mere abstract words, isn’t that a kind of eventism in itself?
Droning on
What actually happened at Barham during the Ijtima, then? It is quite hard to ascertain for certain, due to the mainstream media, police and previously mouthy politicians, all of whom must now know, failing completely to tell us. So, we have to guess.
The best explanation (officially unconfirmed) I have seen appears in a TikTok video from Shayne Wiskin, a Right-wing campaigner who says an anti-immigration patriot group, as it would style itself, had gone to the Ijtima bearing drones. The Ijtima gathering is banned in several Islamic nations around the globe, with the parent sect which organises it, Tablighi Jamaat, sometimes accused of being extremists. Fearing such rumours may be true, the patriots, from something called the British Security Project (BSP), decided to go to a nearby field and pilot some drones equipped with cameras overhead just to check the festival-goers weren’t secretly building a nuclear warhead.
If this narrative is true, then the supposed ‘Nazi terrorists’ were nothing of the kind, just the modern-day equivalent of Uncle Jimmy and his Fairly Secret Army from the 1970s Reginald Perrin sitcoms, attempting to protect the nation from fifth-columnists armed with little more than broomsticks and bravado. The BSP aspires to place over 120,000 members in schools and on trains nationwide, just in case a jihadi or a paedo happens to wander into one someday. This might be difficult as yet, as it would seem lucky to have 120 members. It sounds more like well-meaning fantasists than genuinely dangerous men. To be fair to the police, though, if the below alleged photographs supposedly showing BSP drone-operatives at work are real, they did look somewhat suspicious, and it was hardly unreasonable to investigate what they were doing, albeit the ultimate decision to go in so hard with nationwide arrests of alleged ‘accomplices’ appears to have been rather over the top.
It isn’t so much that the police approached these people that is the problem here – if those were masked Muslims flying drones over a Christian gathering, I’d certainly want them taken in for questioning – it was the political and media reaction to the arrests that was more worthy of critique.
Event management
Having expended so much political capital upon condemning this “credible, serious threat” to the Muslim population, politicians, activists, unions and media could hardly just come out and openly admit they had got it all horribly wrong. This, for example, is how ITV News obediently and uncritically reported the Muslim Council of Britain’s initial comments about the affair on its website:
I would have loved to have seen a follow-up headline saying ‘Far-right danger MCB described as ‘real, not imagined’, turns out to be imagined, not real’, but I suspect that would have been far too humiliating for ITV to own up to. Also, once again, to do so would have been ‘eventist’, and so just another unacceptable form of systemic white racism.
The main Establishment face-saving tactic rolled out has been simply to stay silent. Mahmood, Burnham and Starmer don’t seem to have issued any corrections or apologies, nor do the MCB or PCS union. As for the media, several outlets have dutifully printed follow-up stories explaining how everyone arrested was later released facing no specific terror charges. However, these seem less prominently reported than the initial news of the arrests, and one particular report, from the BBC, was framed in such a way as to make it all sound like the direct opposite of what really happened:
If you only read the headline there, which many users will, it sounds like there was a real terror threat in Barham after all. But if you examine the whole story, it turns out one of the men arrested, during a search of his home and vehicle, was found to possess two extendable batons and a stun-gun. He had made no attempt to take them to the UK Ijtima, had no intent to use them there and wasn’t even present in Barham during the gathering, being apprehended in distant Basildon. For this, the man has already been charged, tried and sentenced to six months in prison on a suspended sentence: the wheels of justice really can spin quite quickly on the odd occasion the state actually wants them to. Elsewhere, the BBC reported the other men’s release in more honest terms, but the headline reproduced above looks like a clear exercise in damage limitation.
Speculation nation
There’s something about all this that does not add up. I would guess it’s more an exercise in quietly obscuring yet another DEI-created policing cock-up rather than a case of initial intentional elite conspiracy, but Reform UK’s Deputy Leader Richard Tice thinks otherwise. Tice questions whether the whole thing was some government false-flag psy-op to counteract the widespread belief that the murderer of his fellow Reform member Ann Widdecombe may have been a far-Left extremist, by spuriously dragging alleged far-Right extremists back into the headlines instead. (Some have even tried to link the British Security Project to Ann’s killer.) In other words, ‘White woman killed for real, make the headlines about poor brown men feeling threatened by made-up non-threats’: anti-eventism activism in action.
This is pure speculation on Tice’s behalf, of the kind you would normally expect politicians like Mahmood, Starmer or Burnham to immediately condemn – but on this occasion, neither their lips nor their Twitter-fingers, moved. Why? Perhaps because, if they had done, Tice could legitimately have shot back that they were guilty of doing precisely the same thing themselves first.
‘Don’t speculate about motives,’ our leaders command us whenever a Muslim attacks people shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ In this case, some white persons do basically nothing, and our leaders themselves can’t stop speculating right from the start, because, when possessed by the dogma of ‘eventism’, fictional ‘events’ (inverted commas) which tell the right story become somehow automatically much truer than factual events (no inverted commas) which do not.
We were always brought up to believe that actions have consequences. Today, it seems children are more likely to be taught that complete non-actions have consequences too. Being arrested by counter-terror police for doing absolutely nothing wrong, for example.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.
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