Labour’s conspiracy of silence on rape gangs is social gathering’s worst enemy of its personal making | Politics | News | EUROtoday

Sectarianism corrodes the soul of each society it infects. Its lethal poison undermines democracy, promotes discord, spreads mistrust, and fuels dysfunction. Having grown up in Northern Ireland within the Seventies, I recognise that darkish fact solely too effectively. My homeland was scarred by communal hatreds that descended into a number of the worst violence, and terrorism seen in Europe because the finish of the Second World War. Fortunately, the historic Good Friday Agreement of 1998 heralded a brand new period of peace.

But with tragic irony, simply when sectarian politics started to lose their efficiency in Northern Ireland, in order that they put down new roots in Great Britain, via the rise of militant, politically engaged Islam, fed by unprecedented ranges of mass immigration and officialdom’s attachment to id politics. Against the backdrop of a revolutionary transformation in our social cloth, civic life in trendy Britain, with its ideological emphasis on hierarchies of victimhood and ever extra beautiful calibrations of racial variations, is the perfect setting through which this type of separatism thrives.

Labour, which till just lately had the overwhelming assist of Muslim voters, is the social gathering most threatened by this alteration. That explains why it resorts to ever extra determined acts of appeasement to shore up such assist, like this week’s shameful dealing with of the Pakistani rape gang scandal, the place teams of Muslim males groomed and abused susceptible white ladies on an industrial scale. Back in January, the Labour Government had promised a collection of native investigations as a substitute for a full nationwide, statutory enquiry, which Ministers had refused.

At the time, Labour was accused of a cynical cover-up pushed by its want to keep away from alienating the Muslim voters and to forestall scrutiny of the failure by its personal native authorities to sort out the abusers. The critics had been proper. In a complicated assertion to the Commons on Tuesday, the Home Office Minister Jess Phillips appeared to suggest that even the restricted pledge of native opinions has been downgraded.

This conspiracy of silence over the scandal reveals Labour’s epic hypocrisy. The pose of compassion is a sham. Its anti-racist credentials are bogus. This is a motion so missing in humanity or morality that it’s keen to hide mass exploitation merely to uphold its personal political place and the narrative of its propaganda in regards to the success of range. Imagine if this scandal had concerned systematic assaults on Muslim ladies by aggressive gangs of skinheads. Labour would have exploded with righteous fury.

But on this case, the victims’ ethnicity meant that almost all Labour representatives regarded them with indifference and even contempt. As campaigner and abuse survivor Sammy Woodhouse put it this week: “Labour won’t push for the truth because they fear the perpetrators’ race and religion. The children of the UK have been sacrificed for votes.”The social gathering’s pandering for electoral assist may be seen on different fronts, just like the tacit acceptance of Sharia legal guidelines and tribunals, or the tolerance of maximum Islamic gown codes in public locations.

The Government can also be planning to dump the rules of equality and free speech by criminalizing expressions of Islamophobia, together with criticism of the Koran. The sense that Islam is uniquely privileged is additional highlighted within the suspicions of a two-tier justice system, the place pro-Palestinian demonstrators, for example, are stated to handled extra leniently than different teams.

Yet Labour’s disgraceful opportunism shouldn’t be working. In truth, the trouble appears to be like more and more counter-productive, because it reveals the political energy of Muslims in Britain and thereby encourages sectarian breakaways. At final 12 months’s normal election, 4 unbiased Muslim candidates had been elected in conventional Labour heartlands, and that advance is prone to be bolstered on the native elections subsequent month. Only final week, at a council by-election within the East London borough of Redbridge, Noor Jahan Begum stormed to victory as an Independent whereas the Labour vote plummeted by 45% place.

The Labour Party was the chief architect of open door immigration, believing that the huge, unceasing inflow of latest arrivals would strengthen their voter base. But it now appears to be like as if the revolution may devour its personal.