What is Sunak going to do about the dangerous extremism in the Tory ranks?
What is Sunak going to do about the dangerous extremism in the Tory ranks?
What is Rishi Sunak going to do about dangerous conspiratorial Islamophobic rants from Suella Braverman and Lee Anderson, and Liz Truss's disturbing embrace of the US extreme-right?
Rishi Sunak has a big problem. Two Tory MPs have been spouting profoundly Islamophobic rhetoric in the right-wing media, and another has jaunted off to the United States to chit chat about Islamophobic conspiracy theories with the American far-right.
These aren’t just obscure backbench Tory MPs either, they’re the former Tory Home Secretary, Rishi Sunak’s personal pick as Deputy Chair of the Tory party, and Sunak’s predecessor as Tory Prime Minister!
In the wake of Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle’s disgusting parliamentary sabotage, former Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman published an extraordinary Islamophobic rant in the Daily Telegraph claiming that "Islamists are in charge of Britain now" (not her Tory party that have been in power for 14 ruinous austerity-wracked years).
And let’s not forget how in November 2023 Braverman incited an extreme-right mob to attack the police.
Lee Anderson followed Braverman’s despicable lead with a vile Islamophobic rant on GB News, in which he invoked the extreme-right conspiracy that London has been lost to Muslim control, and accused Sadiq Khan of handing London over to his "Islamist mates".
Meanwhile disgraced former Prime Minister Liz Truss jaunted off to the United States to attend a gathering of the American extreme-right. Her conspiracy-laden speech was somehow diabolical and profoundly cringeworthy at the same time, but perhaps the worst moment came when she told Steve Bannon that a radical Islamist party could win the Rochdale by-election, and then said absolutely nothing when he described the extreme-right street thug and professional grifter Tommy Robinson as a "hero".
Those of us with political memories longer than the rolling news cycle know that this kind of extremism is nothing new for the Tory party.
⚪ Remember Theresa May’s dangerous anti-immigrant rabble rousing as Home Secretary, trolling multicultural areas with despicable "Go Home" vans, and her unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" that wrecked the lives of thousands of Windrush Brits?
⚪ Remember Zac Goldsmith’s shockingly Islamophobic BNP-style London Mayoral campaign against Sadiq Khan in 2015?
⚪ Remember all those Tory MPs (like Suella Braverman) invoking and popularising the profoundly antisemitic Nazi-derived conspiracy theory of "cultural Marxism" and getting away with it?
⚪ Remember David Cameron hiding behind parliamentary privilege to slander a British Muslim as an Islamist extremist?
⚪And who could forget Boris Johnson’s disgusting litany of deeply racist and profoundly bigoted comments?
It’s important not to forget that this latest tsunami of Islamophobic conspiracy-mongering that Suella Braverman and Lee Anderson have been pushing was cynically triggered by Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle in order to evade scrutiny of their farcical parliamentary stitch-up.
However Rishi Sunak is the one with the bigger problem (especially given the free pass Britain’s depraved media class have given to Starmer and Hoyle over their despicable behaviour).
Does Sunak discipline these high profile Tory MPs for their Islamophobic rabble-rousing and risk turning them into political martyrs for the extreme-right, or does he allow them to get away with it, and signal that the Tory party is a welcome home for even the most dangerous and deluded extreme-right Islamophobic conspiracy cranks?
Given his previous track record of cowardice when it comes to the obscene behaviour of his Tory MPs, it would be surprising to see Sunak remove the Tory whip from any of them.
In fact, he’s most likely to wager that the only way to prevent an absolute Tory massacre at the next general election will be to ramp up the Islamophobia and culture war rhetoric to max, and try to mobilise the extreme-right in service of the Tory party like never before (a pretty forlorn hope given how much the extreme-right hate having an Asian as Prime Minister).
Sad thing is when people like Braverman and Sunak start spouting this racist drivel they seem to forget their own heritage and the struggles of their forebares! It's all getting skewed; on the one hand you can't say anything about Israel without being branded a racist anti Semite but it's ok to blame everything on the Muslims AGAIN! The tories brought in the law denying access to the UK for anyone deemed to be an extremist or 'hate speaker' to try to get rid of certain high profile Muslims but were quite happy to allow the likes of Trump in to the country. Same with all these hate speakers in government and politics as a whole, kick em all out I say! As for Bannon, biggest s**t stirrer going and we allow our politicians to sit down and talk to him?
He won't do anything. He is engaged in a general election campaign in which his party will be chasing the votes of the far right potential Reform voters. Meanwhile all the other established parties in England are chasing the privileged uncaring comfortably off who find the new Tory party just a little too strident but don't actually want change. The only solution is for everyone to pull their fingers out and do more than just passively vote for what they see as the lesser of two evils and get involved with the many campaigns to stand candidates against the mainstream parties. We don't have to put up with this.