Suella Braverman is gone, but her message was heard loud and clear. “Hate marchers” who are not interested in Gaza, but in asserting “the primacy by certain groups – particularly Islamists”. This is how Suella Braverman described pro-Palestine protesters in a piece for the Times last week. Far-right protesters, including Tommy Robinson, turned up in London on Saturday, the day of the pro-Palestine march, to assert their own primacy, and clashed with police. This was not inevitable, but always highly possible. A swirl of Islamophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric have been part of our politics for so long that all it took was one motivated actor to convert them into something explosive.
Her departure won’t change that. I thought Islamophobia, though durable in both mainstream politics and the press, seemed a bit of a retro thing, peaking some time in the early 2010s, then replaced by a more generic, Brexit-triggered hysteria about “sovereignty”. It seemed that the time had come, in our carousel of public enemies, for another to replace Muslims. Brexit obliged, giving us civil servants, judges, lawyers, and treacherous remainers. But it appears that all it takes is one event and one high-profile politician to summon what is now clear has always been lurking. An episode in which Muslims – spoken of often as “immigrant” outsiders, whether British or not – can be cast as the mischievous protagonists, their motivations suspect, their organisation sinister.
It has been easy to forget just how pervasive anti-Muslim messaging was, because we have in recent years also become engulfed in all manner of culture wars about identity, history and gender. But for the decade and a half after 9/11, it was open season on Muslims, first as terror suspects, and then as just dodgy wrong ’uns. One may not recall the detail of all the allegations, yet the essence has lingered and settled in our collective psyche. How could it not, when we were told that Christian children were forced into the foster care of Muslim families who “didn’t speak English”; that one in five British Muslims had sympathies with jihadis; that they were trying to ban £5 notes because they were not “halal”; that there was a plot to take over British schools and Islamise them?
Far less visceral and memorable were the tiny corrections (only wrested because one man complained, and complained and complained). Or the deep-dive investigations into the veracity of such claims, years after the fact, that were largely ignored or dismissed. Or the warnings that came not just from Muslims, but from places such as the University of Cambridge, whose findings that the “media was fuelling rising hostility towards Muslims in Britain” were presented to the House of Lords, politicians and journalists.
Yes, it’s easy to forget, because sometimes when something is so ubiquitous, it becomes like the weather. Away from the media, Islamophobia became incorporated into the bodies of the state. You would be entirely forgiven for not seeing how anti-terror legislation normalised suspicion, surveillance and discrimination, because those who suffered didn’t have a voice – and those who did, thought the collateral damage was justified. From 2001 to 2009, there were more than half a million stops and searches in the streets using section 44 of the Terrorism Act. A report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Durham University found that none of them led to any convictions in relation to terrorism. There are Muslims in Britain who have never known anything different, who grew up in this heavily securitised environment and under the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, which mobilises untrained teachers and youth workers to monitor and report their behaviour.
It wasn’t all just about religion. Muslims became the focus of a larger fixation with immigrants, one that was sublimated into concerns about security, integration, and not respecting British “values”. And then it all took another turn, where the very existence of Muslims, immigrants and people of colour became policed for evidence of aggressive demands for special rights – and the “wokeness”, indulgence and timid political correctness on the part of governing authorities. When Braverman said there is a “perception that senior police officers play favourites,” she was tapping into that history.
But it’s not all history, although that history is important and layered, like the stacked sediments of soil, each marking an era. Look now to the present, and how quickly the Gaza conflict and support for a ceasefire became reduced to notions of “infiltration” by people whose loyalties lie elsewhere, and the fracturing dangers of multiculturalism. Never mind that the protests have included a wide cross-section of society; never mind that the events in Gaza are an issue of global concern, and that calls for a ceasefire have been made at the United Nations by more than 100 countries, and among US congressional staffers. Never mind, because such calls are more easily discredited when they are depicted as the demands of outsiders, motivated by nothing other than a desire to undermine the host nations in pursuit of their own cultural and political agendas.
And really, how can that not be the way after so many years of this intellectual and state orientation? How can that not be the way when outrageous slurs about Muslims in public life, such as those levelled at Sadiq Khan by Zac Goldsmith during a disgraceful mayoral campaign, result not in censure and shunning but elevation to the House of Lords? How can that not be the way, when immigrants are spoken of as “illegal”, constituting “net” numbers that are simply too high, or like germs, for which the environment must be made “hostile”? And how easy then does it become, when you dedicate so much airtime, ink and government resources to our grim obsession with Muslims and immigrants, for someone like Braverman to simply crank up the thermostat, and for it all to catch fire?
Only once that happens and far-right groups clash with police does the alarm and condemnation flow hot and indignant, sometimes from those who had little to say about any chapter in that entire history of incitement or even played their own part in it. Objections from such quarters, and her sacking, are only because of the decibel of Braverman’s rhetoric and its violent expression on Saturday. Don’t switch it off, just turn it down.
But these things are impossible to limit. They become hardwired in such a way that they warp our highest offices. The default becomes divisiveness and overreach in security matters, even more so under the desperate Tories. The result is all sorts of tensions – between the police and the government, between those on the ground and those in Westminster, which ultimately hold even our prime minister to ransom, so captured is he by the power of noxious notions within his own party and base.
The bigger disfigurement is an inability to make connections, to understand that you cannot spend years hammering large sections of society without that somehow leaking into your civil rights, your freedom of speech and assembly, and, as happened on Saturday, without summoning the darkest of forces on to your streets. The scenes over the weekend were chilling, but is there any more fitting metaphor for where we are than the arrival of far-right protests around the cenotaph, to trample over sacred spaces in the name of protecting them?
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist. This piece has been updated to reflect Suella Braverman’s sacking as home secretary
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