Britain’s Labour government is defining Islamophobia in law. Not, it rushes to assure everyone, that there will be the slightest risk to free speech. All it is doing is codifying guidelines.
Well, it took all of 45 minutes after the publication of the new definition for an MP to demand that it be used to silence his critics. Iqbal Mohamed, elected as a “pro-Gaza independent,” wanted “sanctions” against the “escalating hostility” of what MPs said about Muslims.
The Labour minister who responded to his intervention should have repeated the official line: No threat to free speech. Instead, he sonorously told the House of Commons that Mohamed had been “right to point to the huge concern we should all share about the unacceptable level of hostility and abuse directed at Muslims.”
That is the problem with these codes. Contrary to what is widely believed in the United States, hardly anyone in Britain is prosecuted, let alone convicted, for saying nasty things. The problem, rather, is that woke guidelines encourage local authorities, schools, police forces and the rest of Britain’s apparat to be aggressive. Hence, the clips you see of police feeling people’s collars because they have (perfectly legally) said something that upsets some serial complainant.
Frankly, though, I am less concerned with the free speech aspects of the proposal than with the continuing balkanisation of my country.
Religious classification — communalism as the Indians call it — does not just divide people. It encourages competitive grievance and victimhood. It thus makes its supposed beneficiaries less happy as well as less patriotic.
An under-explored phenomenon in Britain is the way that Muslims vote differently in the United Kingdom and in their countries of origin. Britain allows all Commonwealth citizens with a British address to vote, so we have plenty of examples of dual voting. While most British Muslims lean right in their countries of origin, they vote en bloc for leftist parties in the U.K.
For example, most Brits of Bangladeshi origin back the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is pro-market and patriotic. Yet around 90% vote in Britain for Labour, the Greens or the anti-Israel independents.
In Muslim-majority democracies, the more religious parties tend to be the ones that cut taxes and privatize industries. Islam has always emphasized the importance of property rights, secure contracts and trade. In Britain, by contrast, Muslim voters tend to be defined, not as followers of a religion founded by a businessman, but as an oppressed minority.
Where does this notion come from? Partly from schools, broadcast media, and grifting Muslim community groups that make a good living from it. Mainly, though, it comes from vote-chasing politicians, often themselves non-Muslims. For a long time, they were overwhelmingly Labour. Now they are as likely to be Green.
Hence, the obsession with Israel classed as the ultimate colonial state, an outpost of Western imperialism. It is, of course, legitimate to criticize Israel, and it would be inhuman not to feel for the civilians caught up in the destruction of Gaza. But the peculiar emphasis on a country 3,500 miles from Britain makes sense only when we understand the importance to the Left of conscripting Muslim voters to their “decolonize” view of the world.
Think, though, of what it is like for any group of people constantly to be told that they are victims, that the world is against them, that they need special legal protections. Psychologists conventionally try to improve our mental health by teaching us that we are in control of our own destiny. The essence of cognitive behavioral therapy is to stop a patient feeling helpless in the face of outside forces.
Yet, the heart of woke, of ethnic grievance, of the politics of victimhood, is to do precisely the opposite, to encourage people to think that the system is structurally tilted against them. Left-wing parties have long encouraged black people to think this way, and are now after the much larger Muslim constituency. If you were actively setting out to spread depression and anxiety, this is how you would go about it.
Instead of encouraging resentment, we should recover the spirit that led 1.5 million Muslims to volunteer (they were all volunteers) to fight for Britain in the two world wars.
IRAN STARTED THIS WAR A LONG TIME AGO
What made our system better than the enemy on those occasions was precisely our individualism, our dislike of caste and vendetta, our insistence on freedom, pluralism and the autonomy of every citizen. That, indeed, is what made the wealthy and successful society to which people wanted to migrate.
We should not jeopardize that heritage for anything — least of all the vote-grubbing of low and dishonest politicians.
