Michael Gove on extremism: the imperturbable in pursuit of the indefinable | Zoe Williams

Michael Gove stood before the house with his elaborately courteous mien dialled up to the max. The secretary for levelling up is so polite now that it reads as a kind of schoolboy humility as he gallops through his words, mindful of the great honour of his colleagues’ attention.

“The United Kingdom is a success story,” he said, “a multinational, multi-ethnic, multifaith democracy, stronger because of our diversity.” This was the preface to the government’s new extremism guidelines, and there’s a world in which a celebration of diversity would be a reassuring starting point. That’s not, unfortunately, the world we’re in: the text of this guidance, as Gove describes it, doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, the subtext warps and weaves with every intervention, and the context makes a joke of the whole thing. Let’s not forget the lovely manners, though.

So, nothing to worry about, folks, and barely anything to see: the new definition of extremism “will not affect gender-critical campaigners, those with conservative religious beliefs, trans activists, environmental protest groups, or those exercising their proper right to free speech”. Even if it did, it wouldn’t be law, it would merely be guidance. Even if you find yourself denominated as an extremist organisation, this will only affect you in so far as the government itself won’t engage with or fund you. “Try getting a bank account once you’ve been branded by Gove as an extremist,” George Galloway put in later, and said it with a plangent authenticity that made it sound as if he actually had tried getting a bank account and, sucks to be him, was still cash-only for the time being.

The case of Galloway is just one of many sinkholes in this guidance. Gove congratulated him warmly on his election, paused to admire George’s rhetorical flourish, before underlining that “nothing in this definition [of extremism] would prevent any honourable member from making his case”. But let’s take a quick squiz at what Gove thinks extremism means: “The promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to negate the fundamental rights of others, or intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve these results.”

The day after Galloway was elected, the Conservative party sent out an urgent fundraising email reminding people that he’d “called for the deaths of British soldiers” and saying his was a “toxic brand of politics”. Is he protected from the extremist tag by dint of having been elected? Or because Gove has known him a long time? Or because he wasn’t saying that ideologically, it was more of a throwaway remark?

“The devil is not just in the detail but in the enforcement,” said Anna Firth, the Conservative MP for Southend West, who wants to see an end to the “hate marches” (others know them as demonstrations for a ceasefire in Gaza). I’m not sure the devil would be able to locate any details, in an idea so endlessly interpretable: “violence” and “intolerance” are themselves quite different. How do you know if you’re creating a permissive environment? How do you know if you’re doing it on purpose?

Angela Rayner’s response was studiedly collegiate and low-impact. She agreed that “the whole house should work together” on the “scourge of Islamophobia, neo-nazism [and] antisemitism”, and asked some quite baggy questions about why it’d taken the government 13 years to address all this.

What followed from the backbenches were variations on this theme: what about me? If I agree with gender-critical organisations, or fought apartheid, or oppose the bombardment of Gaza, or wanted peace in Northern Ireland before that was fashionable, does that make me an extremist?

No, no (I precis), you guys are all fine, Gove soothed. But why? If extremism is anyone creating a permissive environment for negating the fundamental rights of others, it’s pretty rum for, say, an anti-abortion campaigner to be automatically exempt from the label (as a “conservative religious group”) just because Gove says so.

Peter Bottomley weighed in on the issue to randomly defend Kathleen Stock, the gender-critical academic. “Filling in the gap between what is not necessarily criminal but should be identified as wrong is an important thing,” he said. One wonders what filling in that gap would look like, and who gets to decide.

Far more immediately problematic, of course, is the point raised by a number of MPs (Alison Thewliss, Andy Slaughter), that this definition of extremism would take in some high-profile Conservative donors, Frank Hester’s comments, but also Paul Marshall, who recently liked a tweet that read: “Civil war is coming. Once the Muslims get to 15 to 20% of the population, the current cold civil war will turn hot.” It sounds pretty extreme. But which of us can say for sure that he liked it intentionally? Does the Conservative party itself meet its own definition of extremism?

Gove was untroubled by any possible contradictions; he took Milton’s Areopagitica as his guide, which won’t tell him very much about white replacement theory, but if there’s ever any trouble from the Levellers, he’s your man.

It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it, to have this from the levelling up secretary. Nobody ever knew what “levelling up” meant. It turns out his bailiwick is a bit wider than supposed, to take in “all the things which nobody can agree what they mean”.