David Pidcock (1942-2021)

David Musa Pidcock, founder of the Islamic Party Of Britain, has died; he had been ill for some time.

I can’t really claim to have known David Pidcock well; I spoke to him over the phone a few times but I met him only a handful of times if that. The time I remember was in August 2013 at the West London studio of the official Iranian broadcasting company. We appeared on a discussion programme together, and I can say in all modesty we made a class double act.

I didn’t agree with all David’s views, for one thing I am a lifelong atheist; for another, I have never believed in the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion, but he was a true friend to me during my darkest hour. I won’t go into detail here but it will suffice to say that while I was in Brixton Prison he sent two party members to see me on different occasions, both white converts like him.

David Pidcock was a native of Sheffield, the son of an RAF engineer; his mother was born in then Imperial India. The third child of six, his mother was a staunch Catholic, and the young David attended a Roman Catholic school. His father died when he was eleven, so he started work as a teenager, holding down various jobs until he went into business on his own account.

David developed a conspiratorial mindset after a run-in with a local Freemason. There are two extreme views here: one is that this is all bunk, conspiracy theories, yadda, yadda, yadda; the other is that a grand conspiracy controls everything. Unsurprisingly, David took the latter route, but there is a third explanation. In Britain, the Economic League founded in 1919 blacklisted working men it considered trouble-makers. Although that body was wound up in 1993, there are many such organisations and unofficial networks, both formal and informal, that operate worldwide, and if you are not a member of the club, you will make no progress. Donald Trump discovered that in spite of his enormous wealth, and so-called cancel culture is an extreme version, a group of largely anonymous politically correct morons who seek to destroy anyone who doesn’t conform precisely to their views.

David Pidcock’s personal experiences and researches led him to believe the most powerful and most corrupt of the modern world’s power brokers were the money creators. And was he wrong?

In 1975, he travelled to Saudi Arabia on business where his encounter with a foreign Moslem led to his converting to Islam.

In 1989, along with German convert Sahib Mustaqim Bleher, he founded the Islamic Party Of Britain; a journal named Common Sense was also published. The website is extant; a few scanned copies have also been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

The Islamic Party Of Britain concentrated heavily on the banking system; anyone who is familiar with Islamic banking will understand why.  Muhammad Nejatullah Siddiqi’s book Banking Without Interest is a good introduction; the classic Louis Even short story Salvation Island is a simplified version.

But the Party and Pidcock also campaigned on other issues, including the ludicrous attempts of the so-called animal rights movement to ban halal and Kosher slaughter, which have now in fact been banned in Belgium and Greece.

Like all Moslems, David Pidcock sympathised with the plight of the Palestinians and was opposed to the demonisation of Iran, the latter being one of the few mistakes made by Donald Trump, probably because there is no significant Iranian vote in the US.

Although the Islamic Party Of Britain has been dormant if not extinct for some time, its work and his will continue. David Pidcock will be sorely missed by his family, friends, and associates.