“If we don’t make the white vote angry, he’s gone,” wrote the campaign staffer. “Go strong on the militant Moslem [sic] angle,” while making Tory voters fear “they are being used by the Moslems”. You may think the above writings are an example of a particularly vicious British National party intrusion into our democratic process. But this was the 2010 campaign of Phil Woolas, Labour’s immigration minister under Gordon Brown.
The result? A leaflet asking voters to stand by their candidate, claiming the Lib Dems wanted to “give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay” and warning of the “extremists” winning, accompanied by images of angry Islamist protesters clutching banners such as “Behead those who insult Islam”.
When Woolas was ejected from parliament for lying about his opponents, Labour MPs mutinied in his defence and raised money for a fighting fund: one fellow MP offered £1,500, while others demanded the then deputy leader, Harriet Harman, resign for backing the court’s decision to expel him.
Today, after days of an attempted Islamophobic pogrom on English streets, the question we should all be asking is: how did bigotry against Muslims become so widespread, acceptable and mainstream in Britain? There are obvious culprits. A vicious rightwing press has long presented Muslims as a dangerous enemy within, and Muslim migrants and refugees as hostile invaders. The Tories have created an Islamophobic cesspit: Sayeeda Warsi, the most senior Tory Muslim politician, has waged a lonely protracted battle to expose anti-Muslim prejudice within the party that she says “exists from the grassroots, all the way up to the top”.
But ignoring Labour’s role – past and present – in making Muslims a stigmatised, caricatured and feared minority would be an assault on the truth. It was Labour that embroiled Britain in the calamities of Iraq and Afghanistan, in which western violence slaughtered thousands of Muslims. That radicalised a minority of Muslims, but because a discussion about foreign policy was treated as verboten, this was framed as an inherent problem within Islam itself. “Many millions” of Muslims simply had a viewpoint that was “fundamentally incompatible with the modern world”, declared Tony Blair.
When, in 2006, the Labour cabinet minister Jack Straw declared he was uncomfortable speaking to Muslim women wearing a veil, calling it “a visible statement of separation and of difference”, it triggered days of Islamophobic bile in the rightwing press. New Labour’s clampdown on civil liberties legitimised Islamophobia. Amnesty International said of the 2003 counter-extremism strategy Prevent: “Islamophobic stereotypes associating Muslims with extremism or terrorism have played a major role in referrals to Prevent.”
What of Keir Starmer’s Labour? When, in the 2021 Batley and Spen byelection, a senior Labour official briefed the Mail on Sunday that the party was haemorrhaging Muslim support because of antisemitism, the party’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, promised an inquiry: Labour has yet to confirm this has happened. When the broadcaster Trevor Phillips was readmitted by Labour after being suspended under Jeremy Corbyn for, among other things, calling Muslims “a nation within a nation”, many Muslims felt they had been sent a message. In 2020, the Labour Muslim Network found a quarter of Muslim members had directly experienced Islamophobia in the party – in 2022, almost half of them said they believed Starmer had dealt with Islamophobia “very badly”. More recently, when predominantly Muslim councillors quit Labour in disgust at the party’s position on Israel’s unfolding genocide, one official briefed it was “shaking off the fleas”. Some in Labour, too, partook in the widespread demonisation of Gaza protesters as a dangerous rabble, which inevitably focused attention on their Muslim contingent.
Actions, consequences. Bigotry against Muslims has long been normalised in this country: from the poison pen of the Daily Mail columnist to the genteel liberal Islington dinner party. The guilt of the British right is without doubt, but Labour has its own profound questions to answer. As the party of government, it is now charged with ridding society of the demonstrably dangerous cancer of anti-Muslim hate: but to succeed, it must look within its own ranks, too.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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