Comment

Rishi Sunak must take Islamophobia as seriously as any other prejudice

Editorial: The government was quick to condemn the threat of violence against MPs but slow to condemn hatred in its own ranks

Saturday 24 February 2024 18:42 GMT
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Lee Anderson attacked Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, saying that ‘Islamists … have got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London’
Lee Anderson attacked Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, saying that ‘Islamists … have got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London’ (Getty)

Ministers were quick to condemn Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, for giving in, as they saw it, to threats of violence against MPs. Sir Lindsay appeared to have changed the rules of parliament under pressure from MPs who feared for their safety if they were not allowed to vote for Labour’s compromise motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

When pro-Palestinian demonstrators are guilty of intimidation or antisemitism, Rishi Sunak is rightly prompt and forthright in denunciation. Yet the prime minister seems to be slower to speak out when his own MPs express Islamophobic sentiments.

Lee Anderson, until recently Mr Sunak’s red wall mascot as a deputy chair of the Conservative Party, disgraced himself on Friday in an interview on GB News, a TV channel with its own questionable record. Mr Anderson attacked Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, saying that “Islamists … have got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London”.

It was an absurd and offensive thing to say, and several honourable voices in the Conservative Party spoke out promptly against it. Political Islamism is a specific ideology, namely the belief that society should be governed by the precepts of some version of Islamic law. It is mostly non-violent but includes some strands that seek to impose its values by force. Mr Khan has nothing to do with any such beliefs, being a Labour representative of a pragmatic stripe.

By coincidence, Mr Khan has just written for The Independent to mark the 25th anniversary of the Macpherson report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence. The Macpherson report mainly concerned anti-Black racism but in his article, Mr Khan restates his opposition to racism, prejudice and irrational hatred in all forms. That includes the antisemitism that is a feature of some forms of Islamism, and it includes the Islamophobia of which Mr Anderson’s interview was such a graphic example.

After a while, Mr Anderson was finally suspended from the parliamentary Conservative Party on Saturday afternoon. We would give some credit to the prime minister and to Simon Hart, the chief whip, if the Conservative Party’s initial response on Friday night had not been to defend Mr Anderson. Tory sources tried to claim that he was referring to the failure of the police under Mr Khan’s mayoralty to stop Islamists from using pro-Palestinian marches to promote their ideology. That was not what he said, and besides, Mr Khan has no operational control over the Metropolitan Police.

Nor have we heard from Mr Sunak or the Conservative Party about Liz Truss, the former prime minister and still a Conservative MP, who disgraced herself in Washington DC. She failed to challenge Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, when he described Tommy Robinson, the English Defence League founder, as a “hero” in conversation with her. She also said, “That’s correct,” when Mr Bannon appeared to describe George Galloway’s Workers Party, which is contesting the Rochdale by-election on Thursday, as a “radical jihadist party”.

The Independent has no time for Mr Galloway’s politics but to call him a jihadist is simply a slur. Nor are we naive about the threat from extremist Islamism. But the kind of comments made by Mr Anderson and Ms Truss make it harder to tackle that threat. Any effective strategy has to start by trying to separate the extremists from the vast majority of law-abiding proud British Muslims.

Equally, the police should be doing more to intervene when pro-Palestinian marches engage in the kind of racist chanting or display racist placards that make Jews feel unsafe on British streets.

But the responsibility of the prime minister is to deal with prejudice and racism from whichever quarter it comes. He should not have allowed the implication to hang in the air that he thinks the left’s antisemitism is worse than the right’s Islamophobia.

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