UK elections 2024: How parties weaponised Islamophobia to court voters

If you had any doubt that a hierarchy of racism exists in Britain, then the events of the last month spoke loudly against you.

And the visceral reaction by Britain's right-wing media following the election of independent candidates in Muslim-majority areas shows that the status quo will persist.

A demonisation campaign against British Muslims that has gone into overdrive since 7 October 2023 has seen figures now in parliament, along with newspapers and broadcasters who support them, accuse Muslim voters of engaging in "sectarianism".

This is to say that Muslim voters are a breed apart, and their choices, as one prolific commentator writes, are "offering a glimpse into a horrifying future".

The Centre for Media Monitoring, where I work, has produced a dossier of evidence for this claim, with over 25 examples of media coverage during the election campaign showing how Muslim voters are framed.

Some of the claims are hysterical, others are little more than conspiracy theories, and all are very sinister.

The fact that Reform UK, whose immigration policies and attitude towards minorities would be considered far-right by many, gained a significant vote share in certain parts of the country makes Labour's landslides seem rather hollow.

Labour may have moved right relative to where they were under Jeremy Corbyn, in order to become electable, but significant parts of the electorate have gone even further.

How has this happened?

One theory is that a media ecosystem dominated by right-wing publishers like the Telegraph, now supported by the very right-wing news channels like GB News and Talk TV, has contributed to the shift.

Muslim vilification

The regular feast of Islamophobia available on the pages of the Telegraph and the screens of the GB News and Talk TV has its audience. And it is not limited to just those named.

Would the BBC or any other news outlet be as fence-sitting if any other religious or ethnic group was said to be disloyal to Britain?

Examples we found include an associate editor at The Sun saying that Tower Hamlets, a borough in London that the right-wing media has long vilified, is a "Muslim Ghetto" where imams are delivering postal votes to postal stations by the bagload.

The same editor at the British tabloid had just weeks earlier stated that "by the very definition of being a Muslim voter, you are going to be anti-Jewish". The message is that Muslim leaders are fraudsters and Muslim voters are antisemites.

The rise of Reform UK offers an example of this. Since Nigel Farage, the party leader and now MP for Clacton, was handed a barely justified megaphone by the British media, he has homed in on his new favourite target through a mixture of plain speaking and fear-mongering.

It was actually before he officially decided to stand as a candidate that the former GB News presenter began launching regular broadsides against Muslims.

One example is when the residents of Rochdale decided they liked another plain-speaking politician in George Galloway, and exercised their democratic right to vote for him, which Farage framed as "sectarian politics".

Farage's rhetoric was so blatant that even Sky News presented Trevor Philips, someone who has previously said that Muslims were a "nation within a nation", was taken aback.

Philips, in his own mind, might have been alluding to Muslims as some fifth column, but even his musings didn't go as far as suggesting they were disloyal as Farage did on Sky News.

Before long, he was repeating the same thing on the BBC while adding the fib that entire streets in Oldham were empty of anyone who spoke English.

During this election, GB News, the Telegraph, Jewish Chronicle & other news outlets have framed Muslims voting in the #GeneralElection2024 as “sectarian”, “extremists”, antisemites and constantly questioned their loyalty to Britain.

Evidence laid out in the thread below 🧵1/25 pic.twitter.com/TCd84kYnYe

— Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) (@cfmmuk) July 3, 2024

For the national broadcaster, such blatant rhetoric against Muslims only warranted the description that the backlash against Farage was mere "accusations of Islamophobia".

What exactly would he have to say or do for this to be deemed as actual Islamophobia?

And would the BBC or any other news outlet be as fence-sitting if any other religious or ethnic group was said to be disloyal to Britain?

'Sectarian' dog-whistling

For the casual observer, there is an interesting paradigm at play in Britain when it comes to acts of racism or what are considered hate crimes.

Late last month, Channel 4 News exposed supporters of Reform UK saying they would like to kick out all the Muslims and convert mosques into Weatherspoon pubs or carry out "target practice" by shooting at small boats bringing "illegal" migrants to the UK.

The comments were referred to Essex Police, who confirmed that no offences had been committed.

Meanwhile, metaphorical coconuts drawn on a placard during a pro-Palestine protest landed a pregnant Muslim teacher in trouble with the police and justice system. One rule for one, it seems.

Farage's initial claims gave the Conservative Party ammunition to accuse Keir Starmer of "pandering to sectarianism", a headline that made its way onto the front page of the Daily Mail.

Despite poll after poll showing that most of the British public want a ceasefire in Gaza, racist dog whistles of sectarianism both confine the issue to being exclusively Muslim and further attempt to give credence to claims that they, among UK religious groups, have separatist tendencies.

'Tidal wave of hate'

The two major parties have decided to ride along with this tidal wave of hate, which saw the then prime minister Rishi Sunak stand outside Downing Street calling the result of the Rochdale by-election held in February 2024 "beyond alarming".

Two newspapers decided to entertain the Muslim bashing by printing letters that demonised Muslims as extremists and anti-British

The electoral victory of Galloway, a leftist firebrand, clearly signified to the establishment that there was an appetite for candidates beyond the mainstream parties, and voters were prepared to use the ballot box to enact change.

Labour politicians, who had long known that they were heading for a landslide victory,  similarly facilitated Farage's rhetoric and did everything from de-selecting Muslim candidates such as Faiza Shaheen for liking anti-Israel posts on X to singling out Bangladeshis as the nationality that Starmer wants to see shipped back home.

Islamophobia has become one of the weapons that Labour has brandished as evidence of its fit-to-govern credentials. But no one bears as much responsibility in the shifting of the Overton window of politics to a place where Muslims can be openly demonised as the British media.

That's why "Islam is organising the Labour Party", "Labour is basically an Islamic Party now", and the now-Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner's "grovelling to Muslim voters" were all uttered by newspapermen on debate platforms across TV channels.

A former chaplain to the Queen said: "Islamic culture doesn't like democracy". At the same time, a GB News provocateur claimed Muslims wanting shariah-compliant pensions to safeguard their future is "one step away from [instituting] blasphemy laws".

Local newspapers, which often complain of being in a precarious financial state, are never slow to follow the lead of Fleet Street bigwigs. Two of them decided to entertain the Muslim bashing by printing letters that demonised Muslims as extremists and anti-British.

And it hasn't stopped there. As the dust settles and the new government gets to work, the mainstream media has platformed Labour's losers and those who were within a whisker of losing their seats and given them carte blanche to use race, gender and secularism as weapons with which to craft a discourse of sectarian voting.

The entitlement culture among Labour politicians is on full display as they'd rather blame Muslims and not their own incompetence for being rejected at the ballot box where that has been the result.

This is the atmosphere under which Muslims now exist in Britain and which a dominant Labour Party will govern and malign.

The story of Sunak's final week, in which he responded angrily to a Reform UK canvasser calling him a "fucking Paki", is a lesson for those who court anti-Muslim bigotry for electoral gain.

The insult thrown out by a supporter of the anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestine brigade came despite the Conservative Party under Sunak continuing with many of the nationalist overtones, a feature of 14 years of Tory rule.

It is an ironic ode to the appeasement of the bigots for whom anything less than a white utopia is not enough.

Over to you, Starmer.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.