Authoritarian politics always entails chaotic politics. Reform is a case in point. Since "professionalising" his party and "democratising" it, Nigel Farage has retained a firm grip on his swelling operation via a constitution that confers absolutist powers on his appointee chair, Zia Yusuf. Or, rather, did. For Yusuf is gone - and all at a moment that Reform should still be basking in the glow of electoral triumph.
The precipitating factor for Yusuf's departure was Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions. Sarah Pochin, the newly-minted Reform MP for Runcorn asked Keir Starmer if he would consider banning the burqa for the interests of "public safety". A move that was calculated by her to bring some much-needed tabloid attention, it sparked off a public bout of disagreement among the party leadership. Lee Anderson happily endorsed the remarks, whereas Farage equivocated and said he was for a "debate". The official spox for Reform said it was not party policy, and Yusuf - a Muslim himself - took to social media and dubbed the question "dumb". Cue several hours of behind-the-scenes texts and phone calls, but the damage was done. Trotting out some ego-stroking figures, Yusuf wrote "I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office."
Farage greeted his announcement with "Politics can be a highly pressured and difficult game and Zia has clearly had enough. He is a loss to us and public life", but it's his fault it came to this. Since Farage "returned" to British politics, Reform has eschewed the crudities of outright racist culture wars. I.e. They did not overtly play anti-Muslim cards or go for the "culturalist" racism favoured by the BNP during its heyday, or flirted with by the Tories. Partly because Farage wanted to appeal to as many conservative-minded people as possible, including that layer of first and second generation migrants who are happy to pull the ladder up after them. And that Yusuf, a Muslim, was part-bankrolling the operation. For whatever reason, it appears this political strategy was not discussed explicitly among the Reform parliamentary grouping, otherwise Pochin might have selected another question for her PMQs debut and avoided today's fall out.
Just how damaging is this for Reform? It could hurt them. For Yusuf, after sinking money and his time into the project, he's got to be realising that he's been taken for a mug. No amount of anti-immigration right-wingery and cash can change the minds of a racist party. They will never accept you. And that means the thin following Reform has among Britain's minority ethnicities might take note as well, and wake up to the fact that, at best, all they'll ever be for Farage are useful idiots for hoodwinking the unwary.
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I suspect it will come to very little. The only reason this is even a thing is because it's tacitly acknowledged on all sides that Muslims, more than adherents of other major faiths, struggle to handle any criticism of their faith. It's probably half the reason why the new Reform MP did it, and also why people who would normally oppose the reactionary tendencies the burqa represents will jump to its defence (don't taunt people who don't know how to control themselves, it's undignified). There is a little bit of extra salience, and potentially opportunism involved, given recent shifts towards back door blasphemy protections for Muslims because of this unfortunate immaturity.
ReplyDeleteFrom a cynical realpolitik perspective, it's trivial. The burqa is not a headscarf, it's not a genuine religious requirement for Muslim women. It's a cultural artefact of particularly regressive, relatively minor subculture; one that is relatively new e.g. Wahhabi and other puritanical 'pseudo-revival' movements. Women in this subculture can't vote, many can't even leave the house without a chaperone, and the men who control their votes only have material influence in rotten boroughs where you find incumbent Labour MPs professing staunch support for women's rights whilst hiding under the table when anyone mentions grooming gangs.
Funny (but not at all surprising) that our current most vocal wannabe-respectable resident racist, Kamo, should mention hiding under the table from "grooming gangs".
DeleteSince the silence from the Stephen Yaxley-Lennon fanbase is routinely deafening whenever gangs of WHITE pedophiles have their mugshots in the news. An occurrence which is scarcely less frequent than it is with their darker-skinned equivalents.
Well Kamo, I've read your comment twice and still don't know if you favour the ban or not. I can see you like having a go at Muslims for intolerance, grooming and sectarianis. I presume you think all other religons are open to accepting criticisms and place no restraints on their women adherents.
ReplyDeleteSo should liberal democracies make women free by telling them what they can and can't wear? Any other items of women and men's clothing you think should be debated and banned? What about women wearing baseball caps that cover their hair or men wearing kilts/skirts?
Or nuns.
ReplyDelete> And that means the thin following Reform has among Britain's minority ethnicities might take note as well
ReplyDeleteSadly, you're far too optimistic. You need to have actually encountered people of this kind - and they occur at regular frequency in the population of ANY country which has an immigrant minority, of any skin colour, and a streak of racist politics - to understand just how dense they are.
Not too put too fine a point on it, they're committed to their "fawn" strategy on a very basic biological level.
Well, predictions that even Yusuf himself might realise that he's being taken for a mug seem to have been over optimistic...
ReplyDelete@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteI think people should be free to criticise any religion including my own. I'm critical of the moral and cultural relativism useful idiots show towards backwardsness within some Muslim communities because either they're afraid of their reactionary tendencies or they implicitly view them as modern day noble savages who can't be judged by modern, liberal, western standards (perhaps this is a more more palatable, fashionable or enlightened form of racism?).
As for the burqa, it is not a religious requirement, it's a cultural one, and one that is deeply misogynistic and sinister, but it's legitimate to ask whether banning it is more illiberal than accepting the illiberalism it is an artefact of.
I find Muslim history fascinating, I've read several books about it, which is why I reject acceptably racist implication that Muslims are incapable of being judged by modern, liberal, western standards when they've deliberately chosen to live in modern, liberal, western countries for the benefits of the latter.
In a previous comment I noted that it's no longer effective to call people racist for noticing these problems. So I was intrigued to hear that the discredited 'Prevent' strategy is allegedly pushing the line that noticing these problems is now a form of extremism (there is more than a whiff of satire about this, so it might be a hoax).
We have plenty of indigenous backwardsness in the UK, it's not a good reason for importing more of it from elsewhere, and it's counterintuitive to tolerate people seeking to escape the consequences of backwardsness in other places only to accomodate their desire to bring that backwardsness with them!
Kamo, if you want us to believe that you're capable of reading serious books, then for fuck's sake start reading news that doesn't come through the filter of the Telegraph, or whatever right-wing hate-peddling cultural tumour it is that gives you your warped and squalid world view. Your comments are riddled with statements that you apparently think are accepted "facts", but which to the rest of us are allegations requiring some level of relevant proof to be believable.
DeleteWhat is most striking about @Kamo is that he mistakes his carefully constructed rationalisation for his ingroup gut-feel hatred of another group. He has built an edifice of argument based on half-understood ideas he filched from his carefully selected (no surprises, no challenges, pure confirmation) sources and then tries to pass them off as the reason he feels, what seems to the rest of us as, this basic bitch racism.
ReplyDeleteWhat's both amusing (to us) and sad (for him) is that he is only kidding himself. Not a single other person reading his spillage will put hand to chin and say, "Now I am convinced - well spoken Kamo" - which in his fevered dreamworld he fondly imagines happens with frequency.
We should really feel sorry for this level of self delusion, but when it manifests as such loathsome, hateful pseudointellectual attempt at justifiying racism, it moves even the most transcendental to contempt.
I find the history of prejudice fascinating. I've read several books about it (OK, one, well, more of a pamphlet to be honest)(scratch that, it was a comic, satisfied?). Anyway, it confirmed me in my view that people look for lots of justifications for why they resent people who are different, when it all comes down to because their dads' used to beat them and their mums' didn't really love them. Sad? Not really, I mean, have you met any of them? It's the parents I feel sorry for...
ReplyDeleteTry this explanation instead.
DeleteThe human brain costs a lot of biochemical energy to run, and it tries to save energy wherever possible. It hasn't yet gotten accustomed to having plenty of energy available.
Social interactions are particularly expensive things to process; and they cost more, the more "different" the backgrounds of the other humans involved.
A very common strategy is to try and dwell in an area where the chances of having to interact with such people are lower. And so people will tend to cluster together with others who they believe are more similar to themselves... And many of them will also try to achieve the same result without having to move, by attempting to drive away anyone who they feel is not sufficiently similar to themselves.
You and I are scarcely different! We just have a more rarefied in-group. We'll shun or attack anyone who we think that we see deploying such a strategy, without having (in our estimation) the capability to analyse what it is that they are doing and why they are doing it.