Identity politics has conquered the Westminster bubble

Aug 18, 2018 by

by Frank Furedi, spiked:

Something strange has happened to British politics: more and more social and political grievances are being aired and conducted through accusations and counter-accusations of Islamophobia or anti-Semitism or some other form of prejudice. This ‘racism’ game seems to be the only one in town at the moment.

Even before the media were finished with putting Labour’s problem with anti-Semitism under the microscope, you could already hear voices of outraged Labour supporters yelling: ‘What about Islamophobia?!’ According to these people, the focus on expressions of Judeophobia in certain Labour circles was simply a distraction from the allegedly far larger problem of Islamophobia afflicting British society.

Many of these crusaders against Islamophobia were actually delighted when Boris Johnson expressed his dislike of the niqab and burqa. His remarks were seized upon as proof not only that he himself is a racist, but also that the Tories have a serious problem with Islamophobia. In the blink of an eye, the Muslim Council of Britain was demanding an inquiry into Tory Party Islamophobia. The MCB went so far as to claim that Boris’s comments ‘highlighted the underbelly of Islamophobia’ in Tory circles.

With one party overwhelmed by its inability to deal with anti-Semitism and the other accused of embracing an Islamophobic worldview, a symmetrical relationship of prejudice and victimisation has developed between two camps of competing victimhoods. Sadly, we seem to be moving into a territory in which politics is increasingly reduced to a zero-sum conflict between alleged anti-Semites and alleged Islamophobes.

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