ANALYSIS The Islamization of the British Labour Party
by Dr Paul Stott, Lapido Media:
EXPLANATIONS for the disillusionment of working-class voters with the Labour Party are fashionable and numerous: the development of an increasingly post-industrial Britain since the 1980s; the abandonment of working-class concerns within the Labour Party under Blair; through to mass immigration post-1997 and an increasingly atomized society. There is a further explanation: that the left has embraced an Islam whose worldview is anathema to many working-class people in Britain, of any religion or none.
If this shift has a defining image, it is one of two pictures from Labour’s campaign in the 2015 Oldham West and Royton by-election. At the Labour Friends of Bangladesh event, men are placed on one side of the room, women segregated in the other. In the second image, no women are present at all, and the candidate, Jim McMahon, sits awkwardly, the only white person in a room full of Muslim elders.
In its embrace of organized British Muslims, the left has shown a tendency to abandon once-cherished values: the rejection of sexism or Jew hatred, or a disdain for religion, to take just three examples. The accusations of anti-Semitism which have dogged Corbyn’s leadership are the latest in a series of broader clashes around accommodating secular and Islamic values which other parts of the left and indeed many constituency Labour parties settled in favour of the Islamists years ago.
For this analysis, ‘the left’ is taken to include the Labour party, trades unions, left-orientated academics and political parties to the left of Labour. Islamism is taken to mean an ideological view of Islam which seeks to establish norms of Muslim conduct in the affairs of British society.
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