On 6 August, after an extraordinary night in the Olympic Stadium, the Sun‘s Oliver Harvey was moved to write: “A ginger bloke from Milton Keynes, a mixed race beauty from Sheffield, an ethnic Somali given shelter on these shores from his war-ravaged homeland. This is what Britain looks like today. Three Britons from wildly different backgrounds that gave this generation its 1966 moment.” His colleague Anila Baig added: ” We’ve heard a lot about belonging and loyalty and allegiance, Muslim first or British first. On Saturday Mo Farah gave us the answer: British Muslim and proud proud proud.”
What a difference four months make. As summer sun gives way to winter snow, Sun Political Editor Trevor Kavanagh has posted an editorial painting a rather different picture: “Yes Africa is a terror hotbed, but fanatics are here too.” There is no evidence of any British Muslim involvement in, or support for, the atrocities taking place in Algeria, but Kavanagh isn’t going to let that inconvenient fact stand in the way of a broadside against the British Muslim community whose most prominent athletics representative his paper was recently lionising.
Out come the usual myths and misrepresentations. We are told Britain is home to hundreds of thousands of Muslims from all over the world, but warned “not all are grateful. Indeed, some are outspokenly defiant”. We are not told what they are supposed to be grateful for, or what they are defiant of , which complicates any effort to analyze this bizarre claim, but how about this for starters: Do Muslims identify with Britain? Are they proud of British democracy and institutions? Are they integrated into British political and social life? Yes, yes, and yes.
As my colleagues and I have shown in a report for the government’s Migration Advisory Committee, Britain’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage populations (the bulk of the British Muslim population) are more likely than white native born Britons to say they belong in Britain, and more likely to express trust in the British Parliament. Other research has shown that British Muslims rate being British as central to their identities, and are more likely to express pride in Britain than other groups, something Kavanagh’s own newspaper noted “shatter[s] the myth that Muslims are not patriotic”. In Kavanagh’s world, British Muslims are resentful and defiant. Out in the real world of evidence, a world reported by his own news desk, Muslims are proud British citizens, often more attached to British culture and institutions than other groups.
Then there is the vexed issue of integration. Kavanagh, echoing the notorious comments of Trevor Phillips, raises the spectre of segregated, Muslim-dominated inner city districts: “One London borough is so staunchly Muslim it has become known as the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets.” Really? I don’t know who refers to Tower Hamlets this way (and Kavanagh doesn’t enlighten us) but it strikes me as an odd way to characterise a borough which the most recent census recorded was 32 per cent Bangladeshi, 31 per cent white British, 12 per cent white other, and 25 per cent from a host of other heritages including African, Caribbean, and Chinese. Tower Hamlets is not an “Islamic Republic”. In fact, Muslims constitute just over a third of the population, and are massively outnumbered by those who are either Christian or state no religion at all, as Kavanagh would have known had he bothered to visit the Tower Hamlets website before smearing a whole London borough. The community Kavanagh demonizes as a ghetto of Muslim fanatics is in fact a proud melting pot of multiple ethnicities and faiths, where no group dominates. It is (to quote the Olympics-era Sun) “what Britain looks like today”.
Even if segregation were a problem (which it generally is not), it is not clear what would satisfy Kavanagh as a solution. Maybe Muslims could integrate by moving away from areas where they are concentrated towards more homogenously white areas, something University of Manchester census analysts have shown all ethnic minority groups have been doing? This won’t do for Kavanagh, who attacks it as Muslims “colonising the suburbs”. Leaving aside the absurd labelling of people often born and raised in Britain as “colonisers”, it is not obvious what Muslims caught in Kavanagh’s Islamophobic catch-22 are supposed to do. If they stay in the inner city areas to which their families first migrated, they are attacked as setting up segregated “Islamic Republics”. If they set out for the suburbs they are attacked as “colonisers” looking to impose their values on others. No matter that neither bears any resemblance to the everyday truth of ordinary, hard working Muslim families looking for decent, affordable homes, good schools and regular contact with friends and relatives, just like everyone else.
This kind of evidence-free, stereotype-laden assault on the British Muslim community has got to stop. In an era when all the relevant evidence is available at the click of a mouse, it is not acceptable for a senior journalist at the nation’s most read paper to make demonstrably false claims about one of its largest minority communities. Kavanagh’s article is irresponsible rabble-rousing of the worst kind. What a shame he didn’t think to talk to his more informed colleagues from the Olympics press-pack before launching into this ugly tirade.
Rob Ford is a lecturer at the University of Manchester politics department
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