Labour has demanded an apology from Sadiq Khan’s Conservative opponent in the London mayoral election over comments and actions that led to her being accused of Islamophobia and racism.
Susan Hall was also challenged in a letter from the Labour party chair, Anneliese Dodds, to commit to not using “any further Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hatred” as part of her election campaign in London.
The intervention comes as the Conservatives come under mounting pressure over comments by the party’s former deputy chair, Lee Anderson, who had the party whip suspended on Saturday after he refused to apologise for saying Islamists had “got control” of Khan.
Past comments and actions attributed to Hall, whose candidacy has been dogged by controversy over stances such as her support for Donald Trump, were listed in Dodds’s letter. They include:
• Claiming that Jewish Londoners are “frightened” of Khan, which Labour described as a “divisive and Islamophobic dog-whistle”.
• Endorsing a tweet from a far-right figure calling Khan the ”mayor of Londonistan”, a known Islamophobic trope.
• Liking a reply to a tweet about Khan’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls that said: “Well said Susan, that Labour Traitor RAT Likes that sort of thing”, in an apparent reference to female genital mutilation.
Labour drew on material highlighted by the campaign group Hope Not Hate as part of an investigation into Hall.
“Until you have provided an apology and much-needed clarity on your past statements – and until you have issued a full and unqualified condemnation of Lee Anderson’s comments as ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic’ – Londoners will be entitled to question your commitment to defeating not only anti-Muslim hatred, but all other forms of bigotry and racism,” Dodds wrote.
Hall used an article published by the Standard on Monday to condemn “the monstrous abuse” Khan has faced, but Dodds said she had not gone far enough.
In Hall’s Standard article, which was headlined “We Conservatives must criticise Sadiq Khan for his policies and politics, but never for his Muslim faith,” she did not mention Anderson by name.
She wrote: “I may be one of Mayor Sadiq Khan’s biggest critics, but I also see the monstrous abuse he gets as one of the country’s most prominent Muslim politicians. No one should have to put up with that, and I wholly condemn anyone who does it, or fuels it. His faith is one of his positive characteristics, not something to be suspicious of.”
A spokesperson for Hall said the Conservatives had “already responded” and pointed to the Standard article.
Hall, a London assembly member, was the Conservatives’ surprise choice last year to take on Khan in this year’s mayoral election, in part because of her low profile, but also her hard-right views and strong support for Trump and Liz Truss.
In its investigation into Hall last year, Hope Not Hate found that she had liked tweets praising Enoch Powell, as well as some containing Islamophobic abuse towards Khan.
In February 2020, Hall liked a message on Twitter, now known as X, praising Powell, a former Conservative minister whose name became a byword for racism in UK politics after his notorious “rivers of blood” speech in 1968, which warned about immigration to the UK.
The tweet depicted Powell with the words: “It’s never too late to get London back,” an apparent reference to the city’s multiculturalism.
• This article was amended on 27 February 2024. An earlier version said that Enoch Powell said that immigration would lead to “rivers of blood”. In fact the speech is often referred to as the “rivers of blood speech” after a reference in it to Virgil’s Aeneid when Powell said: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”
