So how does the CBI suggest that an improved transport infrastructure should be financed? Some right-wing newspapers occasionally campaign for increases in nurses' pay and at the same time scream with fury about higher taxes to pay for the rise. Everyone wants better public services and yet disapproves of tax rises. Can Mr Brown create a new progressive consensus that agrees on the priorities of public spending and how this should be paid for?Probably not, but it is worth a try. Outside these private exchanges, a noisy contradictory debate takes place in public.With good cause the CBI calls for billions more to be spent on transport in Britain.
Yet at the same time, business leaders fume when taxes and borrowing are increased. The driving force remains the original alienation of the individual, for whatever reason, and the general environment in which it develops.Would alienated youth still take to the bomb if there weren't the issues of Palestine and Iraq to inspire their sense of injustice? Again difficult to weigh precisely. Although much has been made of the middle-class background of the bombers, such factors have always been true of revolutionary cadres (think of early communism in Europe and China). If anything, these are more likely to be aroused to violence against other sects of Islam than against Western targets.Would it make much difference if all the radical preachers were silenced, gagged or jailed? Probably not. There is a case for clamping down on incendiary speeches of whatever sort, certainly anything that promotes violence. But that is not where the impressions which radicalise the young probably come from.Would Muslim youth feel so strongly if they were not already alienated at home? Not easy to decide. Indeed, al-Qa'ida recruits are usually from a quite different background to the poor, ill-educated children from the slums and the rural backwaters educated in the madrassas of Pakistan.
But it is not without foundation.Most of Muslim "hotspots" are in areas of "occupation" of Muslim communities by non-Muslims, from Chechnya through Palestine to Kashmir. Arabs may find it difficult to accept their own responsibility for their misfortunes, but it is hard to deny that the Middle East is a mess of Western making, from the post-First World War carve-up to the exploitation of oil.You don't have to be a susceptible youth going to the wrong mosque to develop a sense of anger and injustice at what is happening in Palestine and Iraq. That assumption (for assumption it is) may be exaggerated or heightened by the media which radicalised young British Muslims watch and read. They may be all Muslims, but their circumstances are specific to themselves, as are the causes of alienation among their young.Where a common religion comes into play, and where it becomes a means of identity, is in the sense that globalised communications have given the impression of Muslims everywhere being the victims of injustice and oppression. Even in Europe it is quite wrong to lump Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, Kurds in Sweden, Algerians in France or Turks in Germany with Bangladeshis in London or Pakistanis in the east Midlands. The circumstances of southern Thailand are quite different from conditions in Palestine or the stirrings in Central Asia. Blaming it all on mad mullahs makes it easier to "do something" in response - close down mosques, refuse entry to preachers, gather a chorus of rejection from community leaders - but it doesn't begin to get to the root of the problem.For a start, to wrap up every bomb in an Islamic land with the epithet "Muslim extremism" is grossly misleading.
