Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer said that if elected, his government would take a hardline approach in policing “Islamophobia” as he looks to sure up Muslim support before the July 4th general election in Britain.
The government needs to take a “zero tolerance” approach to supposed anti-Islam statements not only made in real life but online as well, Sir Keir Starmer said in a video with London Mayor Sadiq Khan marking the of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr.
The Labour leader said that Islamophobia in Britain has been “far too high for far too long,” adding: “We need to say over and over again, Islamophobia is intolerable, it can never ever be justified and we have to continue with a zero-tolerance approach.”
“I think there’s more we can do in government, certainly stuff online, which I think needs tackling much more robustly than it is at the moment,” Starmer said.
Agreeing with his party’s leader Mayor Sadiq Khan, a practising Muslim of Pakistani heritage, said: “What I’m hoping Kier is your experience as a prosecutor means you’ll be thinking about the strategy we can use to make sure we take action against those who break the law.”
The comments from Starmer, who is widely predicted to become Britain’s next prime minister in a little over two weeks time, suggest that his potential government would look to build upon his party’s history of undermining free speech in the UK.
For example, under former Prime Minister Tony Blair — whom Starmer appears to be modelling his persona and policies after — the Labour government introduced the draconian Communications Act of 2003, which criminalised statements deemed to be “grossly offensive” or intentionally causing “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”. The legislation has been used to arrest thousands of Britons for posts online.
Despite being in power for the past 14 years, the so-called Conservative Party not only refused to roll back Blair-era laws on speech — or his radical constitutional reforms for that matter — but instead decided to double down on censorious actions, such as the Online Safety law, which threatens to punish social media companies with fines of up to 10 per cent of their global income for falling afoul of the government’s speech standards.
However, the Labour Party seems to look to go further, particularly on so-called Islamophobia. The increasingly urban woke left-wing party has adopted the widely contested All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) definition of Islamophobia as being “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”.
The adoption of the definition suggests that the party may seek to enshrine it into law once in power, which critics such as Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch have warned will act as a “back door” blasphemy law in Britain.
“In this country, we have a proud tradition of religious freedom AND the freedom to criticise religion,” Badenoch said in February.
While the Labour Party is expected to secure a large victory in next month’s general election, the party has been facing some issues with Muslim voters, who have come to represent a key voting bloc for the party. With Starmer attempting to distance himself and the party from the antisemitism scandals that hounded his socialist predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, there has been a swath of leftist and Muslim Labour politicians resigning from the party for not taking a hard enough line on Israel.
In May’s local elections, dozens of single-issue pro-Gaza independent candidates won council votes and Labour’s Muslim vote share radically declined in heavily Islamic areas of the country. The move by Starmer to virtue signal on the issue of Islamophobia alongside the party’s most prominent Muslim politician, may therefore be an attempt to sure up support within the community before they head to the polls on July 4th.
In addition to vowing to crack down on Islamophobia, Starmer told Khan that as prime minister, he would seek to negotiate with the government of Saudi Arabia to increase the number of visas granted each year for Muslims to travel there for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
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