THE long-awaited Singh report into Islamophobia in the Conservative Party has failed to satisfy Muslims inside or outside the party.
Former Tory MEP Sajjad Karim calls it a “whitewash” while Muslim Council of Britain secretary-general Zara Mohammed accuses it of prioritising “form over substance” and calls for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate possible breaches of the law.
Evidence of Islamophobia in the Tory Party is rife — Hope Not Hate found last year that 60 per cent of party members believe myths about no-go areas in Britain where sharia law applies, while 57 per cent expressed negative views about Muslims.
Despite such statistics, we will not see the wall-to-wall media coverage over weeks and months, the interviews with embittered staff or the derailing of every Tory policy announcement with questions about the party’s racism problem that we witnessed when it came to allegations of anti-semitism in Labour, which affected a far smaller proportion of members (the comprehensive study Bad News for Labour estimated that 0.3 per cent of Labour members were accused of anti-semitism at some point).
The incidents highlighted by the Singh report go right to the top: the Prime Minister himself compared women who wear the burqa to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers.”
Some Muslims conclude that there is a hierarchy of racisms: that the British Establishment take anti-semitism more seriously than Islamophobia.
But this is not the real reason the report’s verdict of an Islamophobic Tory Party will struggle to make headlines.
That lies in the political priorities of the Establishment-controlled media. These do not include challenging Islamophobia (which many national dailies have a grim record of encouraging). But nor do they include challenging anti-semitism.
If they did, we would have seen the Tories grilled long and hard about their links to anti-semitic parties in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group when they sat in the European Parliament.
We would see Sir Keir Starmer questioned about his decision to promote Rachel Reeves to shadow chancellor, given her previous calls for a statue to Nazi sympathiser and anti-semite Lady Astor.
We do not because Britain’s ruling class is uninterested in the fight against either form of racism. It is very interested, however, in the fight against socialism and anti-imperialism.
That is why Establishment papers like the Times and Telegraph were full of disgraceful insinuations that the hundreds of thousands who protested in solidarity with Palestine during Israel’s recent assault on Gaza were motivated by anti-semitism.
It is why the only Labour leader ever with a record of anti-racist political activity has been subjected to a ferocious character assassination campaign, and why he was suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party for making the entirely accurate observation that the scale of anti-semitism in Labour was exaggerated by his political enemies.
That suspension remains in place nearly seven months later, in defiance of the ruling of the NEC panel on his case.
Starmer’s bid to isolate Corbyn at Westminster has not diminished his influence outside it: from his enthusiastic reception at the mass Palestine demos to the huge audiences attracted when he speaks online, he continues to play a leading role on the left, especially in anti-racist work, as last weekend’s Voices of Refugees event organised by his Peace and Justice Project demonstrates.
His politics of grassroots mobilisation and community engagement is where real anti-racist work is done and has greater potential for combatting Islamophobia and anti-semitism than any number of Establishment reports.
The continued denial of the whip is nothing more than a petty act of revenge by MPs furious that their cosy Westminster bubble was burst for five years by a mass democratic movement for real change. Solidarity with Wednesday’s cycle ride, Twitter storm and Restore the Whip online rally.
