Institutions can promise to tackle their problems because they grasp that there really is a problem. Or they can promise to do so because they begin to discern – often very tardily – that others, including their own members and supporters, believe there is a problem. On the surface, at least, the difference between these approaches cannot always be easily defined. Yet people usually have a gut sense of which has been adopted. They also know which will lead to real solutions.
Sayeeda Warsi, formerly the chair of the Conservative party, has demanded that it launch a full and independent inquiry into Islamophobia (or, as she put it, a “fuck the Muslims” tendency) within the party, echoing a call from the Muslim Council of Britain. Lady Warsi, the MCB and other critics point to cases including the Conservative councillor suspended after sharing an article calling Muslims “parasites” and Tory MP Bob Blackman, who retweeted a message from the founder of the English Defence League (by mistake, he says) and was a member of an Islamophobic Facebook group (to which he says he was added without his knowledge). Most damaging of all – because it was a matter of party strategy, not just the action or words of an individual – was the London mayoral campaign of Zac Goldsmith, which sought to tar Sadiq Khan as an extremist, and the subsequent attempts to justify those tactics.
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