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Paul Birch
Paul Birch is a former police officer and counter-terrorism specialist.
Last week saw the launch of a national telephone helpline by the British Muslim Trust (BMT) to monitor and respond to “anti-Muslim hate” across the United Kingdom. High-profile attendees at the launch event included Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley and London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan. Appointed in the summer of 2025 by the Labour government to track anti-Muslim incidents, the BMT will be collecting and recording data on “Islamophobia” and offering support to those affected, while receiving significant government funding and vocal backing.
Certainly, the BMT’s mission statement bears all the hallmarks of public sector doublespeak. It states: “Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred are rooted in systemic socio-economic inequalities. These intersect to produce some of the worst outcomes in health, education, employment and poverty for British Muslims.” That’s quite the word salad. Unfortunately for the BMT, the worst outcomes for health in this country are those for Gypsies and Travellers, while the worst outcomes in education are those for white British pupils.
Continuing the received wisdom, Minister for Faith, Lord Khan, says:
The rise of anti-Muslim hatred in this county is alarming and deeply concerning… I look forward to working with the British Muslim Trust on our shared ambition to create a safer, more tolerant society for everyone as part of our Plan for Change.
A hate crime in English law is any offence perceived as motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a personal characteristic. Only such crimes required to be recorded by police and reported to the Home Office count as hate crimes, unlike hate ‘incidents’ which do not meet this threshold.
In the year ending March 2025, in England and Wales, there were 4,478 recorded anti-Muslim hate crimes (45 per cent of all religious hate crimes) and 2,873 antisemitic hate crimes (29 per cent of all religious hate crimes). With Muslims numbering 3.9 million and Jews 290,000, this translates as 12 religious hate crimes per 10,000 Muslims and 106 religious hate crimes per 10,000 Jews – nearly nine times as many.
But the government seems to be concentrating only on Islamophobia. Is this really a genuine initiative to ascertain the scale of anti-Muslim hostility in modern Britain? In recent years, and particularly since the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and the Gaza war that followed, Labour has faced sustained political pressure from within constituencies where Muslim voters form a significant share of the electorate. Internal rebellions by Labour councillors, parliamentary dissent over ceasefire votes and the rise of ‘Gaza independent’ challengers in elections have reinforced the sense that the party is attuning its strategies with an eye on holding vulnerable seats. This scheme with the BMT, along with an ongoing yearning to legally define “anti-Muslim hatred” could, alternatively, be seen as the Labour government desperately trying to shore up its once dependable Muslim vote.
The Labour Party once built its power on collective action and class solidarity. Now it just seems to build it on blocs. And few blocs matter more to the modern Labour machine than Britain’s Muslim electorate. It is concentrated in often impoverished urban seats, it is politically deployable and is increasingly courted through a sprawling ecosystem of state recognition, funded advocacy and grievance politics.
The funding and support of the BMT helpline isn’t mere casual outreach. The inevitable rise in reported ‘Islamophobic’ incidents as a consequence of the helpline will constitute a form of electoral engineering. Over the past two decades, Labour’s approach has followed a familiar pattern: identify a demographic, build representative structures around it, fund engagement bodies and position the party as that group’s political shield. They can label the structures as advisory boards or consultative councils. The branding is flexible but the function is constant – organise the Muslim vote.
Old Labour spoke about wages. New Labour and its ideological descendants speak about ‘communities’. This shift is not semantic: it is strategic. Traditional class politics unites voters across religion and ethnicity. Identity politics segments them, making them far easier to manage, message and mobilise. In this framework, British Muslims are no longer simply citizens who happen to share a faith. They are treated as a political constituency requiring bespoke institutions, funding channels and grievance recognition. This produces political compartmentalisation rather than integration.
Let’s be clear – anti-Muslim hostility exists. Mosques are vandalised and individuals are abused. Where crimes occur, they should of course be prosecuted. But the scale and framing of the problem have become fiercely contested. Under Labour-aligned advocacy networks, Islamophobia is rarely presented as one form of religious prejudice among many. Instead, it is framed as uniquely prevalent; embedded, structural and on the rise. The BMT initiative will merely accentuate that.
Labour’s messaging to Muslim voters is carefully calibrated: you are under threat; society is hostile; only we stand between you and that hostility. In turn, Labour desires political consolidation in key constituencies where even small shifts can determine parliamentary careers (current Labour leadership hopeful Wes Streeting will know this better than anyone). A cohesive religious vote mobilised around grievance and channelled through established leadership bodies is the dream of the campaign strategist.
However, British Muslims are among the most internally diverse populations in the country: ethnically, doctrinally and politically. In my experience in engaging with many of Britain’s Muslim communities, this is very apparent. Female representatives of some North African diasporas, for example, are vocal, engaged and empowered, whereas women from South Asian communities tend to be cowed, quiet and isolated. Moreover, many Muslims are secular with many rejecting clerical authority altogether.
Yet government engagement tends to revolve around a narrow band of professional activists, faith leaders and institutional spokesmen – some of whom are questionable to say the least. State recognition anoints groups such as the BMT as ‘community voices’. Funding and access entrench them. Dissenting Muslims (liberals, reformists, women challenging patriarchal structures, ex-Muslims) often find themselves sidelined by the very bodies claiming to represent them. The Labour government picks its partners, and those partners are politically convenient.
Labour’s posture is riddled with contradictions. While courting Muslim voters through identity politics, it has simultaneously presided over the expansion of Prevent and wider counter-extremism frameworks: policies which many Muslims still feel constitute intrusive surveillance, despite the recent emphasis on the ‘far right’. Are Muslims a vulnerable community needing protection or a risk category needing monitoring? It would appear Labour thinks they are both. When security issues dominate, Labour plays the security card. When elections loom, Labour empathises.
The ripple effect is, of course, that when one group receives state-endorsed outlets, funding streams and hate monitoring partnerships, others notice. The question inevitably follows: where is our recognition? The civic sphere fragments into competing victimhood markets, each lobbying for validation and precious resources. The much desired notion of social cohesion erodes through government-sanctioned division. Not of the right, as ministers would have us believe, but of the so-called progressive left.
This doesn’t mean that the BMT or the Labour government will need to literally fabricate anti-Muslim hate statistics. Selective emphasis will achieve similar ends. The worst incidents will be highlighted and activist datasets will be uncritically accepted. And the dominant narrative is clear: Muslims besieged – Labour protective.
The Labour Party hopes that such approaches will lock down urban seats, energise activist networks and reinforce partisan loyalty. But nations are not governed on electoral cycles alone, and the long-term consequences are corrosive. Religious identity will harden into political identity (which we are already seeing) and sectarian lobbying will be normalised. Equal citizenship and integration requires dissolving boundaries, not institutionalising them.
At its core, this is not about Muslims at all. It is about how a governing party chooses to organise society. Does it treat citizens as individuals under a shared civic contract, or as demographic blocs to be structured, managed and electorally harvested? Labour’s modern instinct leans unmistakably toward the latter. And Britain becomes a little less united each time the state chooses such architecture over common nationhood.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
