Religion as a fig leaf for racism

The BNP is now riding a broader wave of respectable Islamophobia

Jeremy Seabrook

When a BBC reporter infiltrated the British National Party by posing as a football hooligan, he caught on camera several activists admitting to violent assaults on Asians and repeatedly putting excrement through the letterbox of an Asian family's home. Six of the people he secretly filmed were arrested this week. This appears to confirm the effectiveness of this hard-hitting demolition of a party desperately seeking respectability.

But however clear its exposure of repelling beliefs and values, the documentary did not seek to address the reasons why 800,000 or so people voted for the BNP in the European elections. What has made so many people ready to support the myth-makers of "Britishness" under threat?

Part of the answer is obvious. Many of those unable to escape poor, white communities have seen their status decline from working class to underclass in one generation. The devastation of the industrial base was scarcely less traumatic than its imposition upon a wasting peasantry 200 years ago; and those left behind are indeed victims of global forces over which they have no control. The hatred of the stranger appears to give substance to the existence of these forces: xenophobia readily sees enemies in fellow-victims. And far from having been crushed by the BBC programme, the BNP was permitted to achieve the rarest of political breakthroughs: it was able to express what many other people are thinking.

The Islamophobia embraced by the BNP as a surrogate for its formally disavowed racism is by no means confined to the wasted landscapes of former working-class communities. It is deeply rooted and widespread.

Indeed, Islamophobia is the only form of prejudice to which the middle class can readily admit: a religion which is perceived as advocating repression of women and hatred of gays renders acceptable forms of prejudice that would be unthinkable if directed against any other social group.

Officially, all "right-thinking" people have forsworn racism, now believed to fester principally among the no-hopers on rough estates. But Islamophobia is the half-open door through which it makes its triumphal re-entry into respectable society. In recent articles in the Sunday Telegraph, Will Cummins has urged the Conservative party to espouse a more aggressive stand against Islam. "Do the Tories not sense the enormous popular groundswell against Islam? Charges of 'racism' would inevitably be made, but they would never stick. It is the black heart of Islam, not the black face, to which millions object."

Perhaps this accounts for the extraordinarily easy time Newsnight's Gavin Esler gave Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, after the documentary was screened. Esler appeared stupefied by Griffin. He failed to challenge him when he stated that one of the "angry young men" in the documentary had been "ethnically cleansed by elements of the young Muslim community". Nor did he contest the demented assertion that Islam spread through "the rape of non-Muslim women". He let pass, too, remarks on "the progressive Islamification of the west. The total destruction of our civilisation within the next few decades" - a conspiracy theory that is emerging out of the shadows of the far right into an increasingly turbid mainstream: only this week the Spectator's cover story was headlined The Muslims are Coming.

David Blunkett's desire to protect people from the incitement of hatred on the basis of religious belief is a recognition that Islamophobia has become a refuge for racists. As Griffin was quick to point out, even secular liberals increasingly define "Britishness" in opposition to "medieval" Islamic values. They feel comfortable condemning Muslims because Islam is a religion, an adventitious rather than an ineradicable attribute. Ignoring the shift in self-identification that has taken place in recent years, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are non-white, liberals argue that being Muslim is quite unlike ethnicity because people are free to embrace religion or set it aside.

The threat we now face is not simply the brutal behaviour of a minority of poor white men, but the creeping acceptability of the view that Islam itself represents a retrograde and "primitive" kind of faith, which "we" in our wisdom have outgrown.

Secularism, which liberals are so proud of, is not the opposite of the archaic superstition which they attribute to Islam. If we want to compare civilisational flaws, we are looking for our own in the wrong place. These occur in a quite different arena from the repression of women and gays, and are located among the injuries of excess that we have come to regard as normal; and that includes the impoverishment visited upon millions of people who thought they were working class, and woke up one day to discover that they were only white trash after all.

Jeremy Seabrook 's latest book is A World Growing Old. This article was first published in The Guardian.