Britain’s political class holds Muslims in contempt
JVL Introduction
In Batley and Spen Is Not a Victory for Keir Starmer we linked to a few other articles on the by-election, including one by Daniel Finn.
Many readers have urged us to repost Finn’s article in full in its own right and we do so here.
It gives the clearest account of why Muslim members and voters have become increasingly distrustful of Labour for its failure to tackle grievances they have been expressing for a long time.
The Party’s perceived double-dealing on Kashmir and Palestine has only added to their discontent.
But the last straw was when some unnamed Labour official briefed Dan Hodges of the Daily Mail that “We’re haemorrhaging votes among Muslim voters, and the reason for that is what Keir has been doing on antisemitism.”
The vilification of the Muslim community in this by-election – a community that has been disproportionately loyal to the party over time – is a watershed.
Many British Muslims will not easily forget it, says Finn, “just as they have remembered other moments that showed the contempt in which the political mainstream holds them. Even with the best will in the world, it would take a long time to repair the damage that has been done over the past few years, and there is no sign yet of that will manifesting itself among those in positions of responsibility.”
This article was originally published by Jacobin on Fri 2 Jul 2021. Read the original here.
The Batley and Spen by-election showed Britain’s political class holds Muslims in contempt
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party narrowly avoided a second successive by-election defeat to the Tories yesterday. But the most important story of the campaign was the alienation of British Muslims from a political mainstream that openly despises them.
Loading article text…
Insufficient attention has been to deliberate stirring from the out on the so-called ‘muslims are anti-semitic’ issue. Early on in campaign the Labour candidate tweeted her photo opportunity with a group from the Indian Muslim Welfare Society who were raising money for Palestinian relief. It was the sort of connected local politics you would see anywhere. The group’s journal suggest people with mainstream Labour values although their history shapes their priorities eg not very keen on Modi. Orchastrated complaints followed that the T-shirt was anti-semitic because the design suggest a Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’. The theme was featured in the ‘reporting’ in the JC. Nothing to do with the noisy visitor from Birmingham.
On a different tack, when considering GG’s intervention, it is important to note that that has been a similar anti-brexit/protest etc vote, only marginally smaller than GG’s vote, in every election since Ed Miliband in 2015 except for the Corbyn 2017 election when Labour was the sensible ‘brexit’ Party. The Labour share did fall as compared to 2019 and 2015 by around 7 points.
Galloway was removed from the LP by Blair’s creatures, otherwise there is much to recommend in the article.
Your intro mentions the party’s ‘perceived double-dealing on India and Kashmir’. ‘Perceptions’ talk is almost always a way of alluding to while evading a problem. But this bit of such talk is worse: Muslims are as capable as anyone else of seeing a party (any party, all parties) struggling with issues of nations and nationalities, and all the more so as the politics of identity and of taking offense increases especially, though far from solely, on the ‘Left(s)’ – in any sense. Politically serious people in all communities understand that. They know that ‘double-dealing’, equivocation etc are part and parcel of bourgeois politics.
The anti-Palestinian sentiments of successive Labour leading and middle cadres are a matter of historical record and it is plain that the party is a site of struggle between upholders of Palestinian rights and advocates of settler-colonialism. That struggle is chronic.
Kashmir is a different kettle of fish: Starmer moved like lightning to appease the monster Modi, to trample on international agreements dating back to 1947, to appease Modi’s trashing of the Indian constitution, and to take British supporters of the BJP and indeed of the RSS as representatives of all Indian British residents. He compounded this reactionary posturing by a still more ridiculous, if slightly less offensive de’marche, claiming to sunder the links between millions of British residents and their heritages – and their relatives, often their nearest and dearest, by posing as a man who ‘would not permit’ divisions within GB.
Even before the Amersham and Chesham by-election, word was that Kashmir and Palestine would feature strongly in Labour’s two by-election campaigns. We must deduce that Hindu chauvinism was to play a strong role in Labour propaganda, and maybe policy. This was the theme of the notorious ‘senior Labour official’, operating under plausible deniability as so often, and stating emphatically that British Muslims are anti-semites.
Your introduction is thus mealy-mouthed to the point of pandering to such Islamophobic reaction.
The (secretive) ending of Trevor Phillips’ suspension from Labour for alleged Islamophobia and his re-admission before his case was put to the NEC SHRIEKS of procedural double standards.
Yes Ive just read about Phillips reinstatement from Skwawkbox. The Muslim on the staff who was investigating has been completely bypassed.
This is completely against Labour Party rules .. apparently the
Leader of the Party has no respect for them and I am wondering
what he does respect?
This is the best article on the Barley and Spen election that I have read