Exposed: The dirty campaign to paint Muslim MPs as anti-British

From time to time in politics a word or phrase suddenly becomes fashionable. One famous example concerns the term “weapons of mass destruction”, which became ubiquitous in early 2003. 

This pseudo-scientific formulation sounded impressive. The media bought into it. It gave credibility to the false claims made by George W Bush and Tony Blair to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In the aftermath of the invasion the world learnt that there had been no weapons of mass destruction. Blair and Bush had deployed the term to give a spurious legitimacy to an illegal war.

There’s a lesson here.

We need to pay attention when a novel word or phrase enters the national conversation.

To ask who put it there, and why, and whether the term means what it claims.

In this article we examine one such term that has recently emerged in the British political lexicon: the word “sectarian”.

It is not a new word – but it has been directed towards a new target. It’s being used to stigmatise British Muslim politicians.

New discourse about Islam in Britain

According to the Oxford English Dictionary sectarianism is a “narrow‐minded adherence to a particular sect (political, ethnic, or religious), often leading to conflict with those of different sects or possessing different beliefs.”

Synonyms for sectarian include “bigot”, “separatist”, “extremist”, “narrow-minded”, “fanatic” and “intolerant”.

In the past in the UK, the word has been applied to rival sides in the Northern Irish conflict.

But over the last 18 months, as deployed by prominent journalists and politicians, it has become central to a new and hostile discourse about Islam in Britain.

It has been turned into a weapon to categorise political opponents who are Muslim as separatist, illegitimate – and dangerous.

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Not as normal participants in British public life, but a frightening and alien presence.

The principal targets are the four Muslim independents who entered parliament at the last election.

But who is responsible for introducing this new usage? 

To find out we employed the search machine for Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debates.

Hansard shows that the first example of the new application of the term inside Parliament dates back to a speech by the Tory peer Lord Godson in July 2024.

In the debate that followed the King’s Speech, Godson raised the alarm about “rising extremism” and “the rise of explicitly communalist appeals”.

Godson warned that “too many candidates in this month’s general election have sought to ride this sectarian tiger”.

Increasing use of the sectarian label

Tory politicians were quick to follow Godson’s adaptation of the term to create a discourse which paints Muslim participation in democratic politics as a threat.

Within weeks Robert Jenrick, an early challenger in the Tory leadership contest, was attacking “sectarian gangs who have been causing disruption, violence and intimidation”.

His rival for the leadership, Kemi Badenoch, followed suit, condemning MPs “elected on the back of sectarian Islamist politics; alien ideas that have no place here”.

The future Tory leader was making a direct attack on the four Muslim independents elected two months earlier.

Since then, senior Tories have deployed this attack line with increasing ferocity. In October Jenrick claimed that the “House of Commons is being despoiled by these sectarian MPs”.

In a column for the Sun he said “sectarian MPs” have “polluted our politics”.

Likewise Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, has repeatedly decried “sectarian politics” and warned against “those of the Islamic faith that want to push and push and push – and in some cases overtake the existing culture”.

Journalists have since echoed this language. In a recent column for The Spectator, Douglas Murray wrote that the notoriously racist Tory politician Enoch Powell had “understated our current problems”.

Murray told readers that if Powell had “predicted that by the 2020s, significant numbers of Birmingham voters would vote in a Pakistani-born Muslim [a reference to the MP Ayoub Khan] on specifically sectarian, racial, religious lines… he would most likely have been deemed certifiable”.

He claimed that “Khan is one of a number of MPs voted in at the last election solely because of their appeal to the sectarian Muslim vote and specifically its obsession with Israel and Gaza”.

Are the claims accurate?

It is all too easy to see what is going on here: a campaign is underway to paint Muslim MPs as bigoted, extremist, intolerant and anti-British.

The enemy within – to employ the phrase disgracefully used by Margaret Thatcher against striking miners.

This is reckless and inflammatory.

Let’s pause a moment and ask a question.

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Are the claims made by Badenoch, Godson, Jenrick and Murray accurate?

Or are they another example of the racism and prejudice that have become commonplace on the British right?

Middle East Eye has closely followed the careers of the four Muslim independent MPs since before they entered parliament.

During the general election we joined Adnan Hussain as he campaigned against Labour in the northern industrial town of Blackburn.

“I was raised in this community,” he told us when we visited him at his legal practice.

“I talk their language. I know their struggles.”

He stressed that “Gaza is important and it’s the reason why I stood”.

But he added that “poverty is a massive issue too, and so is healthcare”.

This wider vision helps explain why he won a seat held by Labour since 1955.

Hussain would never have been able to appeal to a wide group of voters – only one third of the constituency are Muslim – had he run a “sectarian” campaign.

‘Representing the working class’

We interviewed Hussain again once he became an MP. He gave us an insight into the agenda of the Independent Alliance – the four MPs formed with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Speaking in his Commons office he told us: “We have been at the centre of pushing for traditionally Labour policies, representing a demographic, the working class, that the Labour party no longer does.”

The Independent Alliance, now crucial to the formation of a new left-wing political party, has campaigned on a range of policy issues, including opposing the government’s two-child benefits cap and its welfare reform bill.

For the new party to succeed it will need to draw together voters of different backgrounds and political priorities – precisely the opposite of sectarian politics.

Since winning his seat Hussain’s own politics have been hard to classify.

Again and again he has defied expectations and stereotypes.

He responded to January’s furore over grooming gangs by backing a public inquiry into the crisis – then opposed by the Starmer government.

He called for the perpetrators to be “made an example of as a strong deterrence and warning to others”.

In December 2024, he took to social media to announce that “I chose a photograph inside Blackburn Cathedral for my Christmas card this year as it reflects the heart of everything that Blackburn is and can be”.

Recently Hussain criticised Muslims in East London who protested against a planned far-right demonstration wearing balaclavas and chanting Islamic slogans, warning it was “exacerbating a situation which was already extremely volatile”.

Perhaps Kemi Badenoch is right to say that Hussain and his colleagues represent alien ideas.

Or more likely she doesn’t know what she is talking about.

Representing diverse communities

We also followed Shockat Adam, the independent MP for Leicester South who unseated Labour’s shadow cabinet minister, Jonathan Ashworth, during the general election.

We watched him campaign in a popular Portuguese cafe in his constituency.

“We are living in a world now where people sometimes try to divide us,” he told a crowd, adding: “That’s why it’s so important that we all work together to make sure we all stay united.”

Sift through Shockat Adam’s X account since he became MP and photos of him appear at events hosted by every religious community in Leicester.

‘Prayers in the House of Commons are part of our Christian heritage and parliament’s traditions’

– Shockat Adam MP

In one post he marked Rosh Hashanah by wishing “renewal, joy and peace” for the city’s Jewish community, posting an Instagram reminder of the “rich Jewish culture within Leicester”.

Earlier this year, Adam defended the traditional Christian prayers that are read at the start of Commons sittings, after Labour MPs called for the practice to end.

“Prayers in the House of Commons are part of our Christian heritage and parliament’s traditions,” he insisted.

When we spoke to him in August he told us he was “proud” to advocate for “the removal of VAT on the refurbishment of our historic churches”.

Ayoub Khan, who unseated Labour’s Khalid Mahmood in Birmingham Perry Barr, has been photographed as MP in churches and other places of worship.

Iqbal Mohamed, MP for Dewsbury and Batley, told the North Kirklees Interfaith annual general meeting in June that he was “honoured to represent a diverse constituency like Dewsbury and Batley”.

He urged the assembled faith leaders to focus on more than religion, saying “we need to focus our interfaith activities firstly on humanity, and to then move onto issues affecting the environment and the climate”.

Yet Hussain, Adam, Khan and Mohamed are regularly smeared as sectarian.

They were depicted on the front cover of a recent Spectator issue as part of an “islamo-socialist alliance”.

These incendiary claims don’t stand up.

In step with public opinion

Use of the term sectarianism implies the existence of a coordinated bloc of Muslim voters driven by separatist concerns.

The 2024 election actually saw the collapse of the Muslim bloc vote, which had long been exploited by Labour.

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Last year, Muslims voted for a diverse range of parties and candidates.

One poll before the election found that an unprecedented 29 percent of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage voters intended to vote for Green Party candidates, with 44 percent opting for Labour.

The two most salient issues for British Muslims in the election were the cost of living and the NHS – like British voters in general. 

There’s no doubt that Gaza was also important. The media has widely painted this issue as a sectarian, niche and purely Muslim concern.

This claim has always been nonsense.

From the early weeks of the Israeli assault on Gaza, the majority of British public opinion has supported a ceasefire. 

In London’s regular pro-ceasefire marches, the most visibly distinctive group was always the large Jewish bloc. 

Defending the rules-based order

It is the two main British political parties which have been out of step with public opinion on Gaza.

A majority of ordinary voters are on the same side as the independent Muslim MPs.

For example, the Green Party campaigned heavily for the suspension of arms sales to Israel. Carla Denyer, then the party’s co-leader, won in Bristol Central on a pro-Palestinian platform.

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Keir Starmer, even as he was elected into Downing Street as Labour leader, saw his vote share slashed in his Holborn and St Pancras constituency, where Jewish South African independent and former Nelson Mandela ally Andrew Feinstein campaigned heavily on Gaza.

Neither Denyer nor Feinstein are Muslim.

While it is certainly true that independents have consistently opposed Israeli actions in Gaza, they have done so on the same basis – support for international law and human rights – as non-Muslim politicians.

This means they have been standing up for the rules-based order promoted by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt when they agreed to the Atlantic Charter in 1941.

Perversely it is the Tories and Reform, for whom support for Israel has entailed hostility to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, which have failed to do so.

In a bleak irony, the four Muslim independent MPs are being denounced as sectarian for standing up for the institutions enshrined in Churchill’s vision of a post-war international order.

Ayoub Khan told MEE: “We are being singled out only because we are Muslims.”

He has a point.

Echoes of the Trojan Horse affair

It comes as no surprise that Dean Godson should have been the first to use the term sectarian in parliament.

He is director of the neoconservative Policy Exchange think tank, which has sought to frame the official narrative about British Muslims to create a new relationship between the British state and Muslims.

Crucially, Policy Exchange was a significant promoter of the so-called “Trojan Horse” plot of 2014 – the now discredited narrative that a tightly knit group of Muslim teachers and governors with an Islamist agenda plotted the takeover of Birmingham schools.

Then-education secretary Michael Gove, now the editor of The Spectator, was privately told by officials that counterterror police had decided the letter claiming there was a takeover plot was a hoax.

But Gove reportedly “used the letter to sanction numerous high-level investigations into potential extremism in Birmingham schools anyway”.

A number of successful Muslim teachers were wrongly targeted and smeared, with misconduct cases brought against them collapsing in 2017.

There has been no inquiry into the handling of the Trojan Horse affair and those behind the false narrative – including Policy Exchange – have doubled down on the claim that “hard-line activists Islamised state schools in Birmingham”.

There are clear echoes of Trojan Horse in the demonisation of the independent MPs.

Both cases have seen Muslims participating in British life as normal democratic citizens falsely smeared as threatening and un-British.

The real bigots

Many of those who deploy the term sectarian are the real bigots. Look at the chilling parallels.

In Germany, the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party rails against the “Islamisation of the West” and claims “Islam does not belong to Germany”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban declared in 2018 that the West had “opened the way for the decline of Christian culture and … Islamic expansion” while his government had “prevented the Islamic world from flooding us from the south”. He describes Muslim refugees as “Muslim invaders”.

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In India, known as the world’s largest democracy, Muslims are lynched on a regular basis and see their homes bulldozed arbitrarily.

Researchers estimate that tens of thousands of Muslim homes, businesses and places of worship have been destroyed in the past several years.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Narendra Modi denounces the country’s 200 million Muslims as “infiltrators”. Hindu nationalism frames Muslims as a foreign intrusion and demographic threat.

The attack on British parliamentarians, while far less extreme, nonetheless fits within the same bigoted paradigm.

It’s approaching 25 years since Blair and Bush deployed the term weapons of mass destruction to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.

That led to catastrophe.

Now the term sectarian is being used as part of a culture war in Britain.

This attack on minorities is un-British and wrong.