Tories aren’t institutionally anti-muslim, but the singh inquiry requires action | thearticle

Does the Tory party have a problem with Muslims? No, definitely not. But quite a few Muslims, it seems, have a problem with some Tories. This, in a nutshell, is the conclusion of an inquiry

into anti-Muslim sentiment in the Conservative Party by Swaran Singh, an academic psychiatrist and former member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The inquiry has acquitted

the party of systematic or institutional discrimination against Muslims, but found plenty of evidence that individual Muslims had encountered prejudice among individual party members. Boris

Johnson immediately promised to implement all Professor Singh’s recommendations.  What are we to make of all this? The first thing to be clear about is that comparisons with the Labour

Party’s deep-seated problem with anti-Semitism are wide of the mark. It is worth recalling that in 2018, the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn commissioned an inquiry into anti-Semitism by

Shami Chakrabarti which let the party off lightly and was widely condemned as a whitewash. When a far more thorough investigation by the EHRC reported last year, its conclusions were

damning. Nobody has suggested that the Singh inquiry is anything other than fair and exhaustive. Demands for the EHRC to investigate the Tories are inappropriate — indeed, mischievous. There

is simply no comparison in either scale or gravity between the two parties and these two very different kinds of prejudice. None of this is to suggest that the Conservatives should not take

their problem seriously. It was Sajid Javid, the former Chancellor, who demanded on live television two years ago that all five candidates for the party leadership commit themselves to an

inquiry. The Singh report makes for uncomfortable reading. Javid himself says that he was told by a constituency chairman that he could not be their candidate because the electorate in their

area would not vote for a Muslim. He was right to feel insulted by this claim and justified in seeing it as “sugar-coating” prejudice among the local party membership. The fact that such

attitudes still exist does not, however, mean that the Conservative Party is “Islamophobic”. The concept of Islamophobia is itself problematic, because it implies that any criticism of Islam

is irrational and equivalent to racism. But religions are not above criticism in a free society. Blasphemy was decriminalised a long time ago and there are no grounds for reintroducing

blasphemy laws by the back door to protect Islam or its prophet. What is clear, however, is that criticism of Islam can easily shade into prejudice against Muslims. It is the latter which is

unacceptable, especially in a political party. Tories should be concerned that so many of their Muslim colleagues are still dissatisfied, even if graver accusations of institutional

Islamophobia made by the former chairman Baroness Warsi and others ere not upheld. It is reassuring to hear that Sajid Javid, who is a secular Muslim, is confident that the party which he is

proud to represent is moving in the right direction. But though it has been cleared of systematic hostility to Muslims, the complaints procedure is defective and the team that deals with

such allegations is weak, underfunded and badly trained. “It’s time to get our house in order,” the former Chancellor declares. He is surely right. The best way for the Tories to

differentiate themselves from Labour’s flawed approach to the problem of prejudice is to continue to be transparent and to ensure that Government policy does not provide cover for hatred.

The anti-Semitism that has reduced the Labour Party to such a shameful state would not have taken root if the party leadership, beginning with Ed Miliband, had not endorsed the anti-Zionist

agenda — an agenda that is itself anti-Semitic because it denies Israel’s right to defend itself or even exist. By contrast, the Conservative Party should defend the rights of Muslims in

parts of the world where they suffer persecution, such as China and Burma. It should champion moderate states against the Islamists who are responsible for the worst outrages in the Muslim

world. And here in the UK, the party should listen to ordinary Muslims, rather than the hardliners at the Muslim Council of Britain.  It is, as Javid says, remarkable that the Conservatives

should have selected a Muslim candidate, Saqib Bhatti, to fight the safe seat of Meriden at the 2019 general election, in preference to Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former Downing Street

adviser and now a _Daily Telegraph _columnist. Such examples demonstrate that the great majority of local Tories, even in rural constituencies, don’t have a “Muslim problem”. Muslims ought

to be natural Conservatives. As long as many still have a problem with the party, though, it will have to redouble its efforts to be seen to be as open to mosquegoers as to churchgoers. It’s

not good enough for Tories to say: “Some of my best friends are Muslims.” They must prove it. So: action this day on the Singh report. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication

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