London
Is Calling for its First Muslim Mayor
And
the campaign to stop him is getting ugly.
BY IAN DUNTMAY 1,
2016
The British weekly
tradition known as Prime Minister’s Questions (or more commonly
PMQs), in which the prime minister is subjected to aggressive
interrogation on camera from members of Parliament, is always a
brutal affair. British politicians usually see the half-hour session
as an opportunity to hurl abuse at one another; prime ministers have
been called everything from “dodgy” to a cross between “Stalin
and Mr. Bean.” But last week was the first time in memory that MPs
used it to publicly call David Cameron a racist.
The session started
ordinarily enough, with Cameron and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
trading arguments on the government’s education policy. But then,
the prime minister waded into a row over the alleged links between
Sadiq Khan, Labour’s Muslim candidate for London mayor, and Islamic
extremists. The Conservatives say Khan showed a lack of judgment when
he chose to speak at the same events as fundamentalists. “I have to
say,” Cameron started, looking up at the benches in front of him,
“I am concerned about Labour’s candidate.”
Opposition MPs
reacted with genuine fury. For some time now they’ve believed that
Conservatives are conducting a dog-whistle campaign in the mayoral
election — trying to link Khan with Islamic extremism in the minds
of those sections of the electorate they think might be wary of a
Muslim mayor — and saw Cameron’s comments as just the latest
salvo.
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Suddenly a shout
came from an MP on the Labour benches: “Racist!” Cameron ignored
it and pressed ahead. But then another Labour MP shouted it. And then
another. A flash of anxiety passed over the prime minister’s face.
He put on his glasses and waited a moment, but the shouting only grew
more intense. “They are shouting down this point because they don’t
want to hear the truth,” Cameron said at last, rather
unconvincingly. But it was too late. The ritual, theatrical mockery
that usually accompanies PMQs had turned into genuine moral
indignation.
Things are getting
ugly in the London election. What should have been a testament to the
diversity of London life — a race between the son of a Pakistani
bus driver and a wealthy white socialite — is descending into a
toxic campaign that has raised doubts about just how tolerant the
self-styled “world capital” really is.
U.S. President
Barack Obama was treated to a taste of this ugliness last week when
his trip to the United Kingdom to speak out against Brexit saw
London’s incumbent Conservative mayor Boris Johnson cite the
president’s “half-Kenyan” background as evidence of his
“ancestral dislike of the British empire.” That raised eyebrows
among members of the American delegation and sparked embarrassment
and outrage on the British left. But it hinted at the type of
unpleasant discourse London Conservatives have sunk to during this
election.
As a Muslim, Khan
was always likely to find himself on the receiving end of it. The
fifth of eight children, his parents came to the UK from Pakistan
shortly before he was born. He became a human rights lawyer, taking
on several cases in which he represented people who’d been victims
of police abuses. Once he went into politics, his rise was meteoric.
Within three years then-prime minister Gordon Brown had appointed him
communities minister, making him only the second British Pakistani to
ever serve in government. He was soon promoted to transport minister,
before taking the justice brief when Labour was thrown out of power
in 2010. But it has been clear for some time that his real aspiration
is to be London mayor.
The Tory attempt to
stop him involves a campaign targeted mainly at two groups: firstly,
the predominantly white voters in outer London, many of whom feel
alienated from, and resentful of, multicultural inner London; and
secondly, ethnic minority voters of south Asian origins who are seen
— questionably or not — as naturally wary of the prospect of a
Muslim mayor.
The tactics have
disappointed many Conservatives, who saw candidate Zac Goldsmith as
representative of the moderate wing of the party. Goldsmith is young,
soft-spoken, handsome, and very rich. He has a strong track record on
environmental issues and fought valiantly for a public right to
recall members of Parliament. Few expected him to ever be accused of
importing Donald Trump’s campaign tactics to the UK.
But this is politics
and his team is seemingly banking on balancing out his weakness in
inner London — whose ethnically diverse and liberal population
typically votes Labour — by piling up votes in outer London. These
predominantly white and generally well-to-do areas voted strongly for
the Conservatives in the last mayoral election in 2012, although they
are experiencing considerable change, as low-income Londoners of all
ethnicities move outward due to spiraling rents in the inner city,
and the white working-class votes in those outer communities have
found themselves being pushed out of the city altogether.
To win over this
audience, Goldsmith’s team has gone to work linking Khan to
extremists wherever possible.Goldsmith’s team has gone to work
linking Khan to extremists wherever possible. Cameron’s PMQs
attack, for instance, highlighted his past relationship with a
radical imam named Suliman Gani (although it rather backfired when it
transpired that the imam actually had backed the Conservative
candidate against Khan in parliamentary elections last year).
The Conservative
team even went so far as to raise Khan’s record acting as a lawyer
for alleged extremists, including the Nation of Islam’s Louis
Farrakhan. These tactics are ridiculous, of course. Khan no more
became an extremist by representing them in court than a barrister
would become a burglar by taking one on as a client. Khan’s record
is impeccably moderate — whether it’s on gay marriage or
terrorism. But the Goldsmith strategy is not intended to be
intellectually valid. It’s intended to be effective.
At the same time as
he caters to outer London’s anxieties about Muslims, Goldsmith and
the Tories are targeting the inner city’s ethnic minorities. They
seem to be hoping that historic tensions between Hindus and Muslims
in their countries of origin could make Indian voters susceptible to
the same message he is aiming at white voters in outer London.
Last month, the Tory
campaign machine started churning out leaflets highlighting how Khan
had failed to attend a rally in London by Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi last year. It also warned that Khan supported a wealth
tax “on family jewelry.” The wealth tax does not actually exist
and, if it did, there’s no reason to believe it would apply to
family jewelry. But Goldsmith’s team, playing off stereotypes,
clearly believed South Asian voters would find it an evocative
threat.
A similar, but
slightly altered leaflet was simultaneously sent out to Tamils and
Sikhs. “Sadiq Khan did not use his position to speak out about Sri
Lanka or the concerns of the Tamil community in Parliament,” the
Tamil variant of the leaflet read. “His party [is] beginning to
adopt policies which will mean higher taxes on your family and your
family’s heirlooms and belongings. We cannot let him experiment
with these radical policies in London.”
The word “radical”
just hangs there. Is this a reference to the radical left policies of
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn? Or another attempt to subtly link Khan
with extremism in the public’s mind?
Either way, the
leaflets raised eyebrows across the political spectrum. Ethnic
minorities had been singled out and targeted by election leaflets
before, but these efforts had always been positive, aimed at showing
what a candidate had done for a particular community. This was the
first time campaign tactics set out to capitalize on a particular
group’s fears.
“I don’t think
there’s anything very surprising in a city as large and complex as
London in candidates sending messages to particular subgroups,”
said Tony Travers, director of a London research group at the London
School of Economics. “What we haven’t seen is: ‘I know what
your concerns are, my competitor will do things to your particular
community which you won’t like.’”
It’s plainly a
divisive tactic, but it’s not clear if it’s an effective one.
There is some evidence that racial prejudice is on the rise in
Britain, but not in London. If anything the capital is moving in the
opposite direction, with neighborhoods becoming less segregated as
time goes on. Certainly, these sorts of tactics were not used by
Johnson, who famously cast himself as pro-immigration during his two
successful runs at City Hall. But then, Johnson’s opponent was
never a Muslim.
Is there really an
underlying groundswell of Islamophobia among London’s seemingly
tolerant inhabitants? It’s not clear — and it’s hard to find
out. People are unlikely to tell pollsters that they harbor
prejudiced views. Even so, a YouGov survey last year found one in
three Londoners feels “uncomfortable” about the prospect of a
Muslim mayor. If that’s the result among those who’ll admit it,
maybe there really is something bigger going on beneath the surface.
It certainly feels
as if something ugly is in the air. The Goldsmith tactics are playing
out against the background of an increasingly volatile debate over
refugees arriving in Europe from North Africa and the Middle East.
Just this week, Conservatives in Parliament defeated plans to accept
3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Europe.
The tactics
Goldsmith is deploying were prepared months before the election. They
bear an uncanny resemblance to those used in Australian and
Westminster elections by Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, whose
firm, CTF Partners, is working with Goldsmith. Crosby typically
relies on highly emotive right-wing topics — usually immigration
and welfare — to win elections. When he was running Australian
right-winger John Howard’s re-election campaign for prime minister,
for instance, his candidate falsely claimed that refugees trying to
reach Australia by boat were threatening to throw their own children
overboard if they were not allowed into the country.
Crosby’s team
doesn’t do things on a hunch. Their messaging will have been
stress-tested to within an inch of its life with internal polling and
focus groups. They don’t commit to a campaign strategy unless they
think it’s going to work.
And yet London has
long prided itself as the most supremely tolerant and mixed community
in the UK, if not the world. For years, an astonishing mix of races
and religions have lived side-by-side, largely without tensions. The
informal racial segregation of other major cities, like New York and
Paris, tends to shock Londoners when they visit. But the Goldsmith
campaign is making people ask questions about whether this tolerance
may be more superficial than they’d previously imagined. If even
London can’t have a Muslim candidate without the election
descending into race-baiting, what hope is there for the rest of the
world?
One good sign is
that Goldsmith’s election strategy does not, in fact, seem to be
working — for now at least. Despite eight years of Johnson, London
remains a city that leans Labour and poll after poll shows Khan in
the lead. The site Betfair puts his current odds of winning at 90
percent.
According to Matthew
Goodwin — author of Revolt on the Right, a book on the hard right
in Britain — this may be because the demographics of London have
shifted considerably even in just the past few years. “The old,
white working-class vote that might otherwise be responding in much
larger numbers to Goldsmith’s campaign just isn’t there in the
way it was in 2008,” he says.
That isn’t because
they have suddenly turned into liberal multiculturalists, however.
They’ve simply been pushed even farther out of London to places
like Essex and Kent, where support for anti-immigration parties like
UKIP has consequently gone up. Where they’ve stayed, they’ve been
politically crowded out by voters from different ethnic and religious
backgrounds. “The demographic change has been such that a campaign
seen as exclusionary and Islamophobic is not going to connect with
the modern London electorate in the way it might have done 10 or 15
years ago,” says Goodwin.
So far as moral
victories go, it’s not a very reassuring one. Goldsmith’s
campaign is failing not because voters are immune to it, but because
the type that might be have mostly left London. If London seems to be
expanding and consolidating its reputation as the most diverse and
tolerant place in the country, this still doesn’t bode well for
Britain as a whole.
But Khan is
ultimately a canny politician, and he’s managing to turn this
seemingly toxic debate to his advantage. His election leaflets now
feature the slogan: “The British Muslim who’ll take on the
extremists.”
His response to an
ongoing row over anti-Semitism in his own party has also been
revealing. Several Labour figures have come under fire either for
making anti-Semitic comments or seeming to excuse them. One of them
was Ken Livingstone, a former Labour mayor of London, who sparked
outrage by saying Adolf Hitler was a Zionist because his initial
policy upon winning power was that “Jews should be moved to
Israel.”
Khan was first out
the gate demanding Livingstone’s suspension. “Ken Livingstone’s
comments are appalling and inexcusable,” he tweeted. “There must
be no place for this in our party.” It was firm, prompt, and
principled.
If this is the
standard of moral decision-making and political judgment we can
expect from Khan as mayor, it could have a real effect on public
attitudes toward Muslims — not just in London, but the country as a
whole. Assuming he survives another couple of weeks of these Tory
attacks, he can show the public outside of London that Muslim
politicians aren’t so scary after all. And maybe that, more than
changing demographics, will lead to less toxic elections in the
future.
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