The British Guardian newspaper said that the British right is undoubtedly guilty of spreading bigotry against Muslims, but the Labour Party must answer its deep questions as well. As the ruling party, it has a responsibility to cleanse society of the clearly dangerous cancer of hatred against Muslims, and it will not succeed in doing so until it looks within its ranks.
The newspaper explained – in an article by Owen Jones – that the party sowed division during the years of former Prime Minister Tony Blair's rule, and that the stigma of bias still exists in it according to its Muslim members.
A leaflet in the campaign of Phil Woolas, Labour's immigration minister under Gordon Brown in 2010, asked voters to stand with their candidate and warned of a victory for “extremists”, accompanied by pictures of angry Islamist protesters holding signs such as “Behead those who insult Islam”.
intolerance
Today, the newspaper adds, after days of attempted acts of hostility against Muslims on English streets, the question that must be asked is: How did anti-Muslim bigotry become so widespread, accepted and popular in Britain?
The writer responded that there were clear culprits: the fierce right-wing press portrays Muslims as a dangerous enemy within, and Muslim immigrants and refugees as hostile invaders, and the Conservatives have thus created an Islamophobic swamp that, says Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservative Party’s most senior Muslim politician, “exists from the grassroots right up to the top.”
But to ignore the role that the Labour Party has played in the past and present in stigmatising and demonising Muslims and viewing them as a feared minority is an assault on the truth, especially since it is the party that has implicated Britain in the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan, where Western violence has slaughtered thousands of Muslims.
The resulting extremism was framed as a problem inherent in Islam itself, with Tony Blair even stating that “many millions” of Muslims simply had a viewpoint that was “fundamentally incompatible with the modern world.”
Attacks on Muslims
When former Labour foreign secretary Jack Straw declared in 2006 that he felt uncomfortable talking to Muslim women wearing the niqab, calling it a “clear statement of separation and difference,” it sparked days of anti-Islamic hate in the right-wing press.
Under Keir Starmer, many Muslims felt they had received a negative message when broadcaster Trevor Phillips was readmitted after being suspended by the party under Jeremy Corbyn for describing Muslims as a “nation within a nation”. In 2022, nearly half said they thought Starmer had handled Islamophobia “very badly”.
Recently, when mostly Muslim local councillors resigned from Labour over their categorical rejection of the party's position on Israel's genocide in Gaza, one official told the party he had “got rid of the fleas”.
Some Labour members have also been involved in demonising the Gaza protesters as a dangerous crowd.