Imran Shah of MPACUK says that the new Tory government is possibly the most right-wing in history and cannot be appeased. Rather, it must be unequivocally opposed by Muslims and overthrown.
In his triumphal speech as Tory leader and Prime Minister, Boris Johnson declared it was time to unite the country. But you can be forgiven if you thought he wasn’t speaking to you. All his racist, Islamophobic and generally discriminatory rhetoric is certainly not forgotten. Nor forgiven.
The fact of the matter, Johnson has a public record of being a compulsive liar. We know he tailors his words towards what a certain demographic of people want to hear. And we know his actions show he is duplicitous to say the least. So we cannot trust a single word he says, at the dispatch box and beyond. And we will have to watch his actions vigilantly.
However, despite his self-serving chameleon nature, some things are for certain. He has always been on the side of Israel; he has expressed or utilised racist rhetoric from time to time; and he has enjoyed the company of White Supremacist power players such as Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.
Right-wing cabinet
His choice of cabinet ministers reflects this wider political and global view too.
Sajid Javid as Chancellor – a man that has sold out his own Muslim community and pledged to repair the damage done by Windrush by going on to cause more damage and destroy more lives of the Windrush generation. Not to mention the stripping of citizenship from Shamima Begum and her child. The charity aid worker Tauqir Sharif’s citizenship has been stripped at the hands of Javid too.
Subscribe to our newsletter and stay updated on the latest news and updates from around the Muslim world!
Dominic Raab as Foreign Secretary: the man who stated that food bank users are just people with simple cashflow problems and are not suffering crushing poverty manufactured by this government’s policies.
Priti Patel as Home Secretary: a woman who has consistently voted against basic human rights protections. As a former minister, she was made to resign for operating an independent behind-the-scenes foreign policy without telling her own Prime Minister, getting caught meeting Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. She has also suggested a policy of UK taxpayers funding the Israeli military, which is treasonous to say the least.
Michael Gove: a man who wrote about Trojan Horse in his book Celsius 7/7many years before instigating and leading a witch-hunt against Muslim headteachers (which he also called Trojan Horse) as Education Secretary, only later to be proved a complete hoax by the Home Affairs Select Committee after all the damage had been done.
All of them oversaw and worked in tandem with David Cameron and Theresa May to introduce the Hostile Environment, Prevent and create Muslim organisations they preferred, thereby sidelining existing Muslim organisations that were critical of their policies.
They all have a public record of subverting national interests and they will do so again at the expense of the country and people at large.
In short, these and other Cabinet members make up the most hard-right British government we have ever seen. Even the Tory party itself is worried. So much for unity then.
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur
Appeasement
So why are Muslim figures and organisations trying to make moves to appeal to the moral side of this government when their morality is completely and utterly bankrupt? If civil servants cannot reason with these individuals, what makes these Muslim organisations think they can?
Over the past 20 years, the massive escalation of anti-Muslim violence has been substantial. Everytime there is a terrorist attack, even when Muslim are the victims, anti-Muslim hate crimes soar into triple figures. Way back in 2014, it was reported that half of all UK masjids have been attacked. It’s now 2019 and things have only gotten a lot worse.
I want people to know that this escalation has been manufactured by a racist right-wing press. The only piece that is missing from making it truly systematic and organised, is the “right government” which holds those views and has the political will to enforce them through legislation and policy.
And each one of the key ministers mentioned above has vested political, business and possibly personal self-interest in promoting Islamophobia and normalising it even more in the fabric of our society and the world.
Therefore, the only rational plan is to work and organise Muslims (and non-Muslims) to campaign and vote for alternative parties in every Tory marginal seat, whether it be Lib Dem, SNP, Labour, Green or Plaid Cymru. We need to kick them out of power. There is no other solution.
Anything less is risking the very lives of those currently in poverty, people of colour and of course Muslims.
The worry of Islamophobia and the impact it’s happening on our children’s future is increasingly starting to occupy the minds and living rooms of our families. I bet it is also occupying duas of tens of thousands of Muslims across the UK, asking Allah SWT to help us against this tide of hate.
The thing is, Allah has already given us the rizq. We have the money and the volume of votes in the right seats. What we lack is the will to actually organise and take action. As a result, our duas have becomes our own test. Are we willing to do what’s necessary beyond just dua? Afterall, Allah SWT is not going to change our condition unless we change ourselves.
Just from the Muslim vote alone, we can swing 40+ seats across England, Scotland and Wales. That is enough to decide a government. By our vote alone we can kick out five Cabinet ministers: Amber Rudd, Ian Duncan Smith, Theresa Villers, Alok Sharma and the Prime Minister himself, Boris Johnson. We have just got to be organised.
The next General Election will be held at the very latest by 2022, but it can be triggered any time between now and then. So we have got no time to lose.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will…”. ~ Frederick Douglass
We can send a message to them, to ourselves, to our children and the rest of society: that we will no longer be kicked around as a political football. Our dignity and equality are worth fighting for and we will fight for it, but we need to be organised. With every political action, we should demand our equality and freedom to be Muslim.
MPACUK is getting ready. Is your community too?
The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone. You can follow Imran Shah on Twitter here.
