Labour’s attack ads bang the Tory drum of hatred and division

By Claudia Webbe MP 

When politicians are demonising Asian men, the rest of us must stand strong against dogwhistle politics, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP

LAST week saw the shameful scene of Labour publishing an attack ad that claimed that Rishi Sunak does not care about protecting children or jailing paedophiles. The ad appalled many, including Labour supporters — such behaviour is expected from the Tories but Labour is meant to be better. The ad was rightly and heavily criticised as dirty politics that exploited abused children.

It was also inaccurate and misleading. The Tories are an appalling party of government, but sentences are decided by the courts, not by Sunak — and the sentencing guidelines were not written in the short period since he took over as Prime Minister. As former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal put it: “There are a thousand reasons to attack the Tories on a broken criminal justice system better than one that Rishi Sunak doesn’t control.”

The Labour campaign tweet was also hypocritical, as Keir Starmer as director of public prosecutions had played a central role in setting sentencing recommendations.

For Labour to use this issue to launch its attack campaign on Sunak was grossly ill-judged and cynical. But to make matters worse, the way in which the ad was put together showed that Labour is just as eager as the Tories to fan the flames of hate and exploit the politics of division.

By putting a picture of a British Asian man next to text claiming he doesn’t care about protecting children feeds into racist stereotypes that degrade our society and our public discourse.

This followed hot on the heels of Suella Braverman’s claim that there was a “predominance of certain ethnic groups — and I say British Pakistani males — who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values, who see women in a demeaned and illegitimate way and pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach in terms of the way they behave.”

Labour’s leadership and advisers might think that this is a convenient way to win votes, but there can surely be no doubt that it echoes and reinforces white supremacist ideology and the racist trope that Asian men are groomers and paedophiles.

Ironically, the falsity of that stereotype had just been graphically demonstrated in the conviction last week of 21 paedophiles at Wolverhampton Crown Court. All were white.

Despite this, Labour’s campaign triggered an avalanche of racist comments attacking the many who criticised it. Divide and conquer politics is brutal — and effective if we allow it to work; but that is no excuse for the party that is supposed to stand for equality and justice to sink so low.

But of course, the Tories are neither different nor better, as we’ve seen amply in the last 13 years. The so-called hostile environment has demonstrated the racism that lies at the heart of Tory politics, resulting in the detention and deportation of people who have never known life in any other country than Britain, based on their ethnic origin.

The racist dog-whistle politics did not begin or end with the hostile environment. The Tories have never hesitated to inflame racial hatred to win votes or to distract from other scandals and unpopular policies.

David Cameron was rightly criticised for talking about asylum-seekers as a “horde” when he sought to win votes by appealing to the worst instincts of small-minded and fearful people.

More recently, then home secretary Priti Patel and the Johnson government were taken to task by the campaign group Freedom from Torture and other human rights campaigners for fanning far-right hate and violence by their “inflammatory” language about refugees around their Sovereign Borders Bill.

And last week current Home Secretary Suella Braverman and her department were forced to admit they have no evidence whatsoever to support one of their central excuses for the current racist Illegal Migration Bill: that most refugees arriving by boat are in fact, economic migrants.

Tory use of divide-and-rule dog-whistles is not just generic. Earlier this month, Sunak was forced to distance himself from Braverman’s persistent focus on Asian men as the perpetrators of “grooming.”

Sunak said instead that the government would take a strictly evidence-based approach – and research has shown no link.

In late 2020, even the Home Office’s own report concluded that there was “no credible evidence” for any link between Asian ethnicity and grooming gangs. Instead, the evidence showed that “group-based offenders” are “most commonly white.”

Patel described her own department’s factual findings as “disappointing.” In her analysis of the Home Office report, Dr Ellen Cockbain of University College London attributed this disappointment to the prospect of losing a “politically useful trope.”

“This looks like a last-ditch attempt to keep a politically useful trope alive. Concerns with ‘cultural factors’ seemingly do not extend to understanding what motivates white British abusers.”

The evidence has not been allowed to interfere with the eagerness of sections of the media to amplify far-right smears against Asian communities to the point that those looking at headlines could very easily – and completely wrongly – conclude that “grooming gangs” in the UK are predominantly Asian men.

The Labour right’s hands are not clean in this longer-term regard. Then-front bench MP Phil Woolas was ejected from Parliament for lying about his opponent during the 2010 general election, claiming the other candidate was “wooing” Islamic extremists, again making Asians the bogeymen to scare up votes.

The common thread in all these instances is cynical political expediency. Right-wing politicians have always assumed that demonising the “other” and whipping up fear and hatred are both vote-winners and useful distractions from political embarrassments or unpopular decisions and have been quick to point fingers. Tragically, it now seems that the Labour Party has climbed aboard that bandwagon.

The tripartite propagation of this racial smear is deeply hurtful to my community in Leicester East. It hurts our community to claim British Asian men are apologists for rapists, paedophiles and child sexual abuse.

It is also deeply damaging to our wider society, weakening the ties that pull us together and green-housing hatred, suspicion and fear.

These smears are counterfactual, flying in the face of actual evidence in the pursuit of cheap points and votes.

And they damage our democracy and our politics, making it all too easy to claim that, in many cases, “they’re all the same,” destroying faith in our democratic and legal systems and discouraging engagement – in effect disenfranchising communities and thoughtful voters while amplifying those who foster hate out of all proportion to their real numbers.

These cynical manoeuvres put UK politics even deeper into the sewer in which too many politicians have swum for far too long.

We should be challenging xenophobia, hate and racism. Demonising a whole race, community or religion is wrong and must be resisted.

Every politician has a duty to stand up for understanding, tolerance and respect for facts. It will come as no surprise to readers that the Tories disregard this obligation, but for Labour’s leadership to not only do the same but double down on it and refuse to acknowledge it was wrong is, many would argue, unforgivable.

Faced with this void of political integrity between Parliament’s two biggest parties, everyone who wants and believes in a better future for this country must stand up all the more firmly against the forces of hate and division and shout all the more loudly that this will not be accepted.

Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe