Lee Anderson and the Conservative 'Hate Mob' Targeting Sadiq Khan

The Conservative party's repeated attempts to play into racist tropes about London's Muslim mayor are deeply dangerous

Anyone seeking evidence of the racism still experienced by Muslims in the UK only needs to look at how Sadiq Khan has been treated by the Conservative party.

Khan’s actual record as Britain’s most well-known practicing Muslim politician would be hard for the party to criticise honestly. Since entering City Hall he has repeatedly criticised his own party’s handling of antisemitism allegations, while being praised by Jewish groups for standing up for their safety.

Yet despite this record of unifying Londoners of all backgrounds, the Conservative party has instead tried to paint Khan as a “radical” Muslim who will put Jews and other ethnic minority groups at risk.

Beginning with their 2016 campaign for City Hall, the Conservative party repeatedly sought to tie Khan to Islamic extremists, through his former work as a human rights lawyer. Culminating in a disgraceful Mail on Sunday article written by his Conservative opponent Zac Goldsmith, which was illustrated with a blown-up bus, the party’s so-called “dog whistle” campaign was in reality more of an Islamophobic foghorn.

Such treatment has only continued in the intervening years. Politicians on the right, up to and including Donald Trump himself, have relentlessly sought to smear Khan as a radical Islamist who is somehow turning London into a “third world” city.

This treatment has been reinforced by a right-wing press and broadcast channels, whose focus on Khan has been massively out of proportion with his actual status as a regional politician in the UK.

The Conservative party has shown little sign of distancing itself from this strategy, with their latest candidate to replace him telling their party conference last year that Jewish Londoners should be scared of Khan.

Such false claims have had a direct impact on the London Mayor, who now requires 24 hour security for both himself and his family due to the constant abuse and threats that he faces from actual extremists in the UK and around the world.

---

Double Standards

Now you might expect that such a situation would give the Conservative party pause for thought after a period in which multiple politicians have already been murdered on the street in the UK.

Yet rather than dial their rhetoric down, the party has instead sought to increase the temperature of their attacks on Khan. Just last week the Conservative party’s official account published a deliberately edited clip which sought to suggest that Khan was in favour of increased antisemitism in the UK, when he had in fact immediately corrected his slip of the tongue.

Such dangerous misinformation has real-world consequences, and yet far from being dissuaded by the criticism they received for their Tweet last week, the party appears to have decided to go even further.

Beginning with a suggestion by the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman that “the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge [of the Labour party]” and a separate suggestion by former Prime Minister Liz Truss that a “radical Islamic party” could soon win seats in Parliament, they then decided to go one better by directly laying the charge at the feet of Khan himself.

Speaking about Braverman’s comments, the former Deputy Chair of the party Lee Anderson told GB News that London had been “given” to Islamists by the Mayor.

“I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London” he said, adding that, “He’s given our capital city away to his mates.”

His comments led to immediate condemnation from senior Labour figures as well as some former and more junior Conservative politicians.

You might expect that his comments would have led to Anderson’s immediate suspension as a Conservative MP. After a period in which the Labour party has been accused of taking far too long to deal with antisemites in their ranks, you might expect that the Conservatives would seek to take a zero tolerance approach to bigotry within their own party.

If so you would be wrong. Responding to Anderson’s comments, a party spinner instead told Huffington Post that their former Deputy Chair was actually speaking the truth.

“Lee was simply making the point that the mayor, in his capacity as police and crime commissioner for London, has abjectly failed to get a grip on the appalling Islamist marches we have seen in London recently,” a Conservative source told the site.

You also might expect that, given the huge coverage given to the antisemitic comments made by Labour’s former by-election candidate in Rochdale, that such comments made by a senior Conservative MP would be widely covered by the press.

Again you would be wrong. Despite going viral online and drawing condemnation from across the political spectrum, Anderson’s comments are not judged worthy of making a single newspaper front page this morning.

---

Second Class Citizens

As I wrote here last week, the treatment of Khan and other Muslim politicians reveals an alarming double standards to how racism is treated in the UK. While claiming to be opposed to bigotry of all forms, the Conservative party and their supporters in the press are instead highly selective about which incidents of racism they are willing to condemn and which they are not.

In Khan’s case this involves not just ignoring the abuse and intimidation he receives on a daily basis, but actively participating in the misinformation that drives it.

This double standard means that Muslim Brits are treated as effectively second class citizens. While their own actions and words are held to close scrutiny, those targeting them over many years with such bigotry are not.

And after a period in which outright racism has thankfully become progressively less acceptable in mainstream Britain, the Conservative party’s apparent refusal to act against the likes of Lee Anderson, Braverman and Truss, shows that we still have a very long way to go.