There’s a Joel Petit cartoon that I’m rather fond of: in the foreground, a man in a lab coat presents his plan for dealing with climate change: sustainable growth, preserving rainforests, public transport, clean energy and so forth. “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” demands another man in the audience.
I’m reminded of it when I speak to senior Conservative party politicians and officials at Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) about accusations that their party has an institutional problem with Islamophobia.
What they will tell you is that the party rapidly expels any activist found to have shared or made Islamophobic comments, but they have yet to encounter any evidence the problem is institutional. Yes, they say, there is a problem online with Twitter accounts and Facebook users who describe themselves as Conservative supporters, but most of them are not Tory members and some of them are not even real people.
On the problem online, they have a point. As with Labour supporters who peddle anti-Semitic tropes on the Internet, not all of the people posting virulently racist material are members, and some are either bots or the work of people who post as multiple accounts.
But the Conservatives have rather less to say about why Bob Blackman, the Conservative MP for Harrow East, has not been disciplined or even faced investigation for his social media activity, or about the dog-whistle campaigns deployed by various politicians against Sadiq Khan, or Boris Johnson likening niqab-wearing women to letterboxes.
They do have a point that some of the criticism of their behaviour is deployed largely to deflect about the genuine questions that the Labour Party has to answer about anti-Semitism. Equally, it is true to say that some of Jeremy Corbyn’s critics on the question of anti-Semitism don’t seem to have the same concern for anti-racist principles when it comes to demonising George Soros or making insinuations about British Muslims. There is a common response here, which is that if you get your house in order, it will end the criticism against you from the sincere and the opportunistic alike.
But it comes back to that cartoon I like. Let’s say that the Conservative Party did opt to set up a no-holds-barred inquiry into Islamophobia in its ranks. They could put the Conservative Muslim Forum – the official body representing Muslim members of the Conservative Party, which has called for a full investigation into the issue – in charge of it, rather than finding a respected barrister who is sympathetic to Theresa May’s political project.
If they did successfully root out a real problem, so much better. But even in setting up a genuinely independent inquiry, they would set the gold standard for managing internal divisions and holding racists within their own ranks to account. In doing so, they would immediately signal to a bunch of socially liberal voters and affluent ethnic minority voters who abandoned or moved further away from the party in 2017 that the party had heeded their message. They would turn their attacks on Labour’s anti-Semitism problem from an ineffective round of pot-kettle-black into a very powerful dividing line.
And that’s the problem with the Tory response to being asked about Islamophobia: what they are really saying is “what if there is no institutional Islamophobia in the Conservative Party, and they create an effective dividing line with the Labour Party for nothing?”
Content from our partners
Related
