Are there Taliban in our green and pleasant land?

The other day I was talking to a friend who had a serious problem with a large quango that is supposed to look after the countryside. He is unfortunate enough to have a remarkably robust species of lichen on his land that ecologists are interested in, and a Site of Special Scientific Interest has been created to ensure its protection, although there is absolutely no indication that the lichen is in any danger, or is ever likely to be.He needed to do some work in the area concerned and, although there was no question of the lichens being harmed, it was necessary to get permission from the quango. Letters and phone calls got him nowhere, so a site visit was arranged. He had assumed that, as is usually the case, once he met someone face-to-face common sense would prevail and an agreement which accommodated everyones interests would be quickly reached. He is rather proud of his lichens and is keen that they should continue to flourish.

At this stage I should say that the quango is very, very environmental and so is my friend. He moves in environmental circles, does environmental things, and is happily convinced that humans are destroying the planet, which gives him even more environmental things to do. On the other hand, there is a part of him that still takes a very levelheaded view of bureaucracy, activism and extremism.

When I spoke to him he said that the person from the quango and he had spent several hours walking the land, examining, considering and discussing everything. “And did you managed to sort it all out?” I asked.

“You must be joking”, he said, “she was a complete Taliban”.

I’ve never herd this term used in that context before, but I certainly know what he meant.

Since then, I’ve heard a similar kind of usage.

The playwright Richard Bean was being interviewed on an arts programme not long after this happened. He tends to write funny plays about difficult subjects like immigration, and this gets him into a lot of trouble with certain sections of the chattering classes and some activists too. That doesn’t mean that he is in any way racist; you don’t get your plays performed by the National Theatre and Hull Truck if you are. It’s just that Bean has a sense of humour and doesn’t see why everyone should be terribly earnest, politically correct and pow-faced all the time. This has caused him a lot of trouble as this anecdote demonstrates:

BEAN: ….. at one point there was a group of protesters standing outside Whitechapel Tube [station] and they cooked up this lie that [they said] in a previous play of mine – in The English Game – I’d had a dog called Mahomet in the play. Absolute nonsense! There’s not even a dog in the play as you know. So they were standing there outside the tube with whatever material they had and they were approaching people who were obviously Muslims in the tube and trying to get them to join the campaign and go and protest. But I suppose that it’s a lesson about the modern world is that in a campaign they don’t mind it they are lying really.

There had also been a series of obviously coordinated attacks on him in The Guardian and he said of the perpetrators:

I call them Hampstead Hamas, {those] kind of liberal orthodoxy bullies ……

I don’t know why this made me think of George Monbiot, because he lives in Wales now, and before that I think he lived in Islington not Hampstead, but it made me think of him anyway. Are there Islington Hezbollah too I wonder.