Muslims in Britain are treated as “convenient electoral campaign fodder” by the Conservatives, a former party chairwoman has said.
Baroness Warsi said the Tories’ response to comments by Lee Anderson showed that “anti-Muslim racism is tolerated” by the party.
She criticised as “mealy mouthed” deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden’s defence of the party’s handling of the incident.
Anderson had the Conservative whip suspended on Saturday for claiming that Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, was under the control of “Islamists”.
Anderson did not intend for his comments to be Islamophobic and would have avoided suspension if he had apologised for making them, Dowden said on Sunday.
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His comments on Anderson were branded “disturbing”, “mealy mouthed” and “evasive” by Warsi.
She said they were a “clear display that anti-Muslim racism is tolerated” within the Conservatives and that the party viewed Muslims as “not just fair game, but convenient electoral campaign fodder”.
Writing on Twitter/X, Warsi said: “When we can’t even call out the obvious, when it’s so blatant, and can’t find the words to condemn, we have lost all authority on being antiracist.
“No ifs, no buts, no caveats — we rightly don’t allow Labour to acquiesce in antisemitism, why do we think we can on Islamophobia? We must end this hierarchy of racism and stop the hypocrisy.”
Concerns about Islamophobia within the Conservative Party were also raised by the Muslim Council of Britain.
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The group wrote to Richard Holden, the Tory chairman, calling for an investigation based on fears that anti-Muslim hatred was “institutional, tolerated by the leadership and seen as acceptable by great swathes of the party membership”.
The letter came after police closed Tower Bridge for an hour on Saturday evening as protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza blocked traffic and let off flares.
Tensions were high as demonstrators marched the streets to the sound of drums, chanting “free, free Palestine”.
Many waved the Palestinian flag or held umbrellas in its colours. Others had placards accusing Israel of genocide, and one banner read: “Save Gaza, Ceasefire Now.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism described the placards as antisemitic and responded to the event online, saying: “On Wednesday, they hijacked Big Ben and turned it into a billboard for their genocidal slogan. Tonight they shut down Tower Bridge.”
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The protest in central London followed the suspension of Anderson after he told GB News that Khan had “given our capital city away to his mates”.
In a statement, a spokesman for Simon Hart, the chief whip, said: “Following his refusal to apologise for comments made yesterday, the chief whip has suspended the Conservative whip from Lee Anderson MP.”
Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, said the comments “could be taken” to be Islamophobic but that he did not think that was Anderson’s intention.
“The prime minister and the chief whip have acted — they have removed the whip because Lee Anderson failed to apologise,” Dowden told Times Radio.
He said Anderson “didn’t choose his words correctly”, adding: “I don’t believe that Islamists are in charge of the Labour Party.”
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Dowden suggested that if the MP said sorry, he could regain the Conservative whip in parliament and be allowed to stand for the party at the general election.
“If he apologised, we’d look at the nature of that and and make a determination at that point, but that’s a matter for the chief whip,” he said.
Later, Dowden told the BBC that Anderson was not “intending to be Islamophobic” but the comments “could be taken that way”.
Dowden added that MPs had been threatened before the Gaza ceasefire vote in parliament, including by “Islamist extremists”, and said it was “right to call that out”.
“We cannot be in a situation where we allow freedom of expression — the hard-fought freedoms of our parliament and our democracy — to be put at risk by people that masquerade as having legitimate protests but actually are using violence,” he added.
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Anderson said after his suspension: “Following a call with the chief whip, I understand the difficult position that I have put both he and the prime minister in with regard to my comments.
“I fully accept that they had no option but to suspend the whip in these circumstances. However, I will continue to support the government’s efforts to call out extremism in all its forms — be that antisemitism or Islamophobia.”
Within minutes, Nigel Farage, Reform’s honorary president, urged Anderson to defect to his party.
Anderson faced a furious backlash against his comments. Khan accused him of racism, and added that there had been a “deafening silence” from the prime minister in the wake of the remarks.
“I am unclear why Rishi Sunak, why members of his cabinet, aren’t calling this out and aren’t condemning this,” Khan said before the suspension was announced. “It’s like they are complicit in this sort of racism. The message it sends is Muslims are fair game when it comes to racism and anti-Muslim hatred.”
Nus Ghani, a business minister, was the first minister to publicly rebuke Anderson on Saturday. Confirming on Twitter/X that she had confronted him over his remarks, she wrote: “I don’t for one moment believe that Sadiq Khan is controlled by Islamists. To say so is both foolish and dangerous. Frankly this is all so tiring.”
Sir Robert Buckland, the former justice secretary, said that Anderson’s “repugnant views” needed to be challenged, while Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said: “I’ve worked with Sadiq Khan and the idea that ‘Islamists have got control of him’ is offensive bollocks. It also wouldn’t have been said if he wasn’t Muslim. It’s a dog whistle and we should be better than this.”
Anderson, who was elected in 2019, was speaking after controversy this week over parliamentary votes on a Gaza ceasefire, as well as pro-Palestinian protests in which the anti-Israel slogan “from the river to the sea” was projected on to the Houses of Parliament.
He told GB News on Friday: “I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London. He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.”
Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, wrote in an article in The Daily Telegraph that “the Islamists, the extremists and the antisemites are in charge now”.
Before his parliamentary career, Anderson was a coal miner, and worked for Citizens Advice Bureau, before serving as a Labour Party councillor in Ashfield from 2015. He defected to the Conservative Party in 2018 and served as a ward councillor in Mansfield for the party from 2019 to 2021.
He is known as “30p Lee” after saying that food bank users did not understand how to budget, and that entire, nutritious meals could be cooked for 30p a time. He was appointed deputy chairman of the Conservatives by Sunak shortly after he became prime minister, in an attempt to appeal to the red wall constituencies.
• Profile: Who is ‘30p Lee’ Anderson?
Anderson achieved notoriety even before entering parliament with a Facebook video diatribe about nuisance tenants on a local housing estate. He claimed they should be made to live “in a tent in the middle of a field” and pick vegetables for 12 hours a day before a cold shower.
He resigned as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in January to rebel against Sunak’s Rwanda bill although he eventually voted with the government.
Labour had called for Sunak to remove the whip from Anderson for his “outright racism and Islamophobia”. Sir Sajid Javid, the Tory former chancellor, described the comments as “ridiculous”, while Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, attempted to distance himself from the claims by saying that any decision on the whip was a matter for the party.
• Matt Chorley: Seriously, stop gigging at serious Lee Anderson. It’s no laughing matter
Shapps told BBC Breakfast that Anderson had the right to “speak his mind”, but added: “It’s certainly not the way I would put things. I think there are more concerns about the way that some of these protests have been taking place, in particular what we saw projected on to parliament this week.”
Lord Barwell, who was made a peer after serving as chief of staff at No 10 under Theresa May, said it was a “despicable slur on Sadiq Khan and Londoners”.
Rory Stewart, a former Tory cabinet minister who ran for mayor of London as an independent, said that “no Conservative MP should ever be spouting this stuff”. He posted on Twitter/X: “This idea that London is in the grip of Islamists is deluded and it’s awful — an obsession that thrives among a bizarre and dangerous coalition.”
Alistair Burt, a former Tory MP who was himself stripped of the whip in 2019 after rebelling over Brexit, called on the party to take action against Anderson. He asked in a post on Twitter/X: “Did a senior Conservative really say this, in the febrile atmosphere of early 2024? What action is the party going to take?”
Neil Garratt, leader of the Conservative group at the London assembly, also rejected the comments. He said: “I have no shortage of criticisms of mayor Khan … but he is not an Islamist, he is not in the pockets of Islamists, and I completely disagree with anyone who says otherwise.”
Labour has also called on the prime minister to remove the whip from Liz Truss, the former prime minister, after she claimed at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington that she had been sabotaged by the “deep state”.
Anderson has been contacted for comment.
