The British Right’s Paranoid Grandstanding About Muslims and Immigration Distracts from the U.K. Government’s Fecklessness
It is blaming multiculturalism for its failure to stand up to violent extremists on all sides
Britain recently experienced a brief but intense political and media firestorm. The controversy started in the House of Commons when the leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, prevailed upon the speaker of the Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to set aside longstanding parliamentary rules to allow a vote on a Labour amendment to a controversial pro-Palestinian motion about the Parliament’s position on the war in Gaza. The speaker justified his decision on grounds of preserving the safety of MPs facing serious threats from (presumably) Muslim protesters over the question.
This breach of protocol and whiff of appeasement in the face of purportedly Islamist threats led to intemperate remarks and a media free-for-all. Conservative Member of Parliament Lee Anderson alleged that “Islamists” had “got control” of the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, a British-born Labour politician of Pakistani heritage. Suella Braverman, a Conservative MP and former Home Secretary, levied the more general accusation in The Telegraph that militant Islamists were now “in charge of” Britain. Conservative MP Paul Scully—who has since withdrawn his comments—claimed that parts of London and other major cities were “no-go areas” for many people due to the communities’ large Muslim populations. All this stirred up the typical social media maelstrom, including strident expressions of support for the MPs’ claims. Adding to the cacophony on the other side of the pond in the U.S., Bari Weiss’ The Free Press ran a piece titled, “Are ‘Islamists in Charge of Britain’?” Its conclusion? British democracy has ceased to operate by its own rules to “prevent elected representatives from being hounded, if not killed, by Islamist mobs.”
Threats leveled at MPs are a grave matter. But this incident says far less about Islamist influence in Britain than it does Conservative politicians’ addiction to made-for-the-web hyperbole and the Labour leadership’s willingness to exploit legitimate concerns for political ends. Sadly, this lack of political seriousness by the U.K. governing class misdirects public attention away from a broader, fundamental failing of the British government to stand up to escalating violence and intimidation—whatever its source—on Britain’s streets and in its public life.
Muslim Menace? Or Muddle and Manipulation?
The allegations made by the Tory MPs and the amplification of those claims by people on various media platforms tell us something about the current mindset of the right in Britain: They traffic in paranoid nonsense. For example, Scully’s suggestion that Brick Lane, a predominantly Bangladeshi area of the East End, is a “no-go area” will strike anyone who has ever visited London as completely delusional. It is, in fact, a popular stop for tourists and other Londoners, not least for its Bengali food and character.
The same can be said for the other predominantly ethnic or religious minority areas of London and Britain’s other major cities, such as Sparkhill in Birmingham, which Scully also named. Contrary to what may be a common American perception, there simply aren’t no-go areas in major U.K. cities that people avoid because they feel unsafe. There aren’t even areas that most British people avoid because they have a largely ethnic minority population. Yes, inevitably, there is a small minority for whom being in the presence of people who are visibly Muslim or ethnic is so distressing that they want to avoid the experience, but it is fair to say that it is they who have a problem.
The idea that Mayor Sadiq Khan or British state institutions favor or indulge radical Muslims is also nonsense—self-evidently, one would think. Under Khan, London has been strongly committed to a “pride” agenda, with prominent displays of rainbow flags and public parades. This is hardly part of a radical Islamist worldview. The British state as a whole is also strongly committed to LGBT+ inclusion, and it is consciously secular in its everyday workings—again, hardly evidence of leaning toward the distinctly nonsecular Islamist project. Indeed, Khan himself first rose to prominence as an MP in 2005 for boldly condemning a series of suicide-bombing attacks perpetrated by British-born Islamic radicals in London.
Moreover, the foreign policy of both the British government and most of the parliamentary opposition is generally supportive of Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza for Hamas’ attacks of October 7, 2023. This stance is also clearly not in line with the views of most of Britain’s Muslim voters (or indeed others)—hence all the agitation around the vote in Parliament to begin with.
The disconnect between the Tories’ feverish accusations and the reality on the ground reveals an increasingly paranoid and conspiratorial mindset in the contemporary British right, which sees itself as slighted and obstructed. There is a deep distrust of, and disaffection from, established state institutions and a perception they’re controlled by a malign “enemy class”—often called “the Blob”—or even an actual elite conspiracy. Most prominent is a way of looking at public life, policy, and the actions of state agencies and seeing coordination, planning, and a coherent and conscious agenda, as opposed to muddle and incompetence.
Yet muddle and incompetence is actually the much more credible explanation. This includes the recent episode in Parliament. Simply put, the speaker of the Commons, under political stress and momentarily unnerved, made a rash procedural decision. He was roundly and correctly criticized for it, and he has apologized.
Indeed, the person who should be getting serious stick over the events in Parliament—but has not—is Starmer. The Labour Party leader pressured the speaker to tear up rules of procedure that had been in place since the 1880s, and he did so merely to avoid the embarrassment of watching many of his Labour MPs break with his party’s pro-Israel position to vote for a cease-fire in Gaza called for by the Scottish National Party, a small opposition party led by Humza Yousaf whose in-laws recently escaped Gaza. Starmer thus subverted the independence of the chair and damaged the credibility of Parliament to pursue short-term party management and manipulate the media narrative. Starmer, of course, has denied that he pressured the speaker (a former Labour member), but at the very least, he leaned on him by citing the Labour MPs’ fears for their safety. The general insider view at Westminster is that he cynically raised these concerns to put Hoyle in a very awkward position.
The Heavy Cost of a Wayward Political Class
The delusional and cynical games played out in this incident take public attention away from a real and serious set of issues. MPs are indeed facing increasing threats to their safety and a level of harassment and abuse that is genuinely novel and increasingly normalized. Two members of Parliament have been murdered in the last few years: Labour Party MP Jo Cox by a far-right activist in 2016, and Conservative MP Sir David Amess by an Islamist in 2021.
Currently, the threats and hostility leveled at MPs come mainly from Muslims and others who are exercised about the war in Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more broadly. But in recent years, threats and harassment have come from a range of groups from the radical right, such as Patriotic Alternative and Britain First, to the radical left, such as Just Stop Oil, with individual organizations likely to become more problematic as different events occupy the news agenda. Regardless of where it comes from at any given moment, the problem is serious and real.
Worse, the problem highlights the general debility and uselessness of the British police and criminal justice system (yet another failure of the U.K.’s public institutions). Threats and violence toward any individual are serious crimes and have been for centuries. The question should be why the police have not responded forcefully to actions of this kind.
A common view is that they do except in the case of Muslims or other ethnic minorities due to cultural sensitivities. This is simply untrue: Rather, there is a failure across the board. Take the highly publicized cases of several “grooming gangs” that were disproportionately composed of men of Pakistani origin and that exploited and sexually abused large numbers of working-class girls in many towns and cities. Police action and prosecution were indeed inexcusably slow and may have been delayed at times by cultural considerations, but this stands alongside the similar failure to prosecute cases where indigenous white British were the perpetrators. In fact, all this fecklessness is framed by a general failure of the system to deal effectively with any kind of serious crime. This breakdown can’t be blamed on immigration or multiculturalism.
The impotence of the British state is aided and abetted by the red herrings promulgated by the feverish claims of the British right. It isn’t helped by the irresponsibility of much of the rest of the U.K. political class, a group obsessed by media image, focused on the immediate, and unwilling or unable to think seriously about important questions. Playground politics of the kind following the debacle of the Gaza motion in Parliament only justifies Britons’ judgment that the concerns of most people are not reflected in what passes for political debate—and it adds to the concern that the violence and intimidation on Britain’s streets and in its democratic governance will only get worse.
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What the U.K. needs is a noble cause to rally around. I propose Man City's dynastic run as the overarching triumph the nation needs to collectively embrace. If Arsenal goes on to pip them to the title this year, I will come back and delete!
"... the contemporary British right, which sees itself as slighted and obstructed ..."
What a feckless and pathetic attitude from the people *who have run the country for the last 14 years* ... although of course, as the UK's flatlining economy stares down a second lost decade, I suppose it makes sense that the Tories don't want to claim a lot of credit for their governing record.