Earlier this year, the Labour government established a new working group to provide a working definition of Islamophobia. Now, however, Steve Reed, who replaced Angela Rayner as communities secretary last month, has hinted at a retreat of sorts. Next week he will be handed recommendations from the working group set up by his predecessor to define what constitutes discrimination and prejudice towards Muslims. Reed has said that people have the right to not only criticise but to mock other religions, adding that the protection of free speech will be a key consideration in the proposal.

Clearly, a shift is underway within Labour on the issue. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, the most senior Muslim in Government, this week expressed concerns over establishing an official definition of Islamophobia because of the risk that it would give Muslims preferential treatment. She also suggested that it could have the unintended consequence of “creating further conditions that increase hatred” by inhibiting freedom of speech in modern Britain. Reed has likewise warned against the reintroduction of blasphemy laws by the back door, with the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel having been abolished with the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act.

There are several possible factors behind this turn against Rayner’s proposals. Her resignation last month meant that the Labour Left was deprived of a key figure in an influential position, while Mahmood’s ascent to the Home Office is a sign of the rise of Blue Labour and socially conservative thinking within the party. What’s more, the new Home Secretary’s intervention in the Islamophobia debate carries serious weight because of her own Muslim faith.

Another possibility is that Labour has cottoned on to the reality that much of the anti-establishment sentiment across Britain — especially in the form of nationalist demonstrations such as the recent Unite the Kingdom rally — is rooted in concerns over the protection of freedom of speech.

This is not simply a domestic perception, and has drawn international attention at the highest level of global politics. In February, Prime Minister Keir Starmer clashed with US Vice President JD Vance in the White House, with the former batting away the latter’s claims that infringements on free speech in the UK were affecting American citizens. It would be a major contradiction if Labour committed to a new Islamophobia definition which risked clamping down on criticism of the impact of orthodox Islamic doctrines in modern British life, after Starmer has expressed pride in Britain’s record on freedom of speech.

Of course, electoral calculations may well be playing a part, too. It is entirely plausible that the Government created the new Islamophobia working group in an attempt to rebuild its British Muslim support — especially after the fraying of party-voter relations in the wake of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But the reality is that anti-Labour feelings among British Muslims run deeper than events in the Middle East, with there also being a sense of communities being economically left behind and culturally disconnected from the party’s liberal progressivism.

Perhaps Starmer’s Labour has decided that many British Muslim voters are gone for good and it is better to focus on “socially protectionist” white British communities, which are increasingly anxious over the influence of Islamism in the public sphere and want no stone left unturned in the national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs.

Labour’s apparent climbdown on Islamophobia, at surface level, may suggest a change in direction on freedom of speech. Really, though, the more likely reason is cold electoral mathematics.

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Dr Rakib Ehsan is a researcher specialising in British ethnic minority socio-political attitudes, with a particular focus on the effects of social integration and intergroup relations.

 

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