Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Let’s start from first principles.
Number one, free speech means you can say whatever you like up to the point of incitement. We have no blasphemy law in this country. If you want to say that Catholicism is child abuse, that the Holocaust never happened, or that the Prophet was a paedophile, that’s up to you. Why you would want to make these idiotic claims is beside the point. We don’t use the law to punish idiocy.
Number two, that you can say something without breaking the law does not mean that we suspend all our norms of decency, civility, and restraint. There is nothing brave about mouthing off purely to épater la bourgeoisie. You may not be subject to legal sanction, but you can hardly complain if others exercise their freedom and ostracise you as a boor.
Number three, the right to free speech does not cancel out the right of free association. The authorities might not be able to feel your collar, but a political party can demand whatever conditions it likes from its members. For example, the Conservative Party reserves the right to kick you out if you urge people to vote for someone else. That is not a violation of your freedom of speech; it is a voluntary association demanding certain conditions from those who choose to belong.
Number four, political parties are free to do things for bad as well as good reasons. As this column is forever lamenting, we live in an illiberal age, in which fewer and fewer people care about process when they happen to favour a particular outcome. In a democracy, parties can hardly be blamed for reflecting some of these illiberal tendencies.
I wish we lived in a country where no one sought collective victimhood. I wish there were no need for agreed definitions of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. I wish the Blair government had not altered the basis of our common law system by introducing the concept of a hate crime. I wish it were enough to say “harassment, incitement, and intimidation are covered by our existing laws, regardless of who the victim is”.
That, though, is not the country we live in. We have been moving since at least the 1990s to a public discourse defined by group rights and identity politics. For whatever reason, many people actively want to have what the 2010 Equality Act calls “protected characteristics”. For those who insist on seeing the world as a pyramid of privilege there is, paradoxically, no higher virtue than being oppressed.
What happens when we apply these broad principles to a specific case, such as l’affaire Anderson? To remind you, the now independent MP for Ashfield was suspended after accusing Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, of being a pawn of Islamic radicals:
“I don’t actually believe that these 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 said on GB News. “He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.”
God knows I am no fan of Khan, who has been a terrible mayor – profligate, inept, and divisive. But there has never been any suggestion that he supports theocracy, the core Islamist belief.
It is hard to believe that Anderson would have made this claim of a non-Muslim politician. He was, in other words, conflating Islam (a religion founded in Mecca by the Prophet Mohammed in 610) with Islamism (a political movement founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in 1928).
The Conservative Party was right to deselect him. Not because it is pandering to Muslim voters, only six per cent of whom currently say they support it (a bizarrely low number given the inherently conservative and market-oriented nature of their faith, but that is for another column). Rather, because it must uphold its own standards. Attacking politicians on the grounds of their religion is not something decent people do.
Anderson, whom I have always rather liked, could have apologised. He could have made clear that he did not think Khan had any truck with jihadi extremists. He could have said that his criticism had to do solely with Khan’s readiness to bring central London to a close, Saturday after Saturday, over the same issue. But Anderson preferred suspension to an apology.
Labour, which has seen its support among British Muslims halve since the Gaza invasion, is determinedly punching the bruise. But it is not working. The claim that the Tories are anti-Muslim because Lee Anderson was a Tory does not stack up when he was kicked out precisely because his views were incompatible with the party’s principles.
So Labour has switched to arguing that the Conservatives must adopt a particular form of words on Islamophobia. But the Conservatives, for both principled and partisan reasons, should not play that game. They should invite all British citizens to support their values: personal freedom, low taxes, strong families, limited government, patriotism, tradition, common sense, and enterprise.
They might add if pushed, that British Muslims should be especially drawn to these values. Theirs, after all, is the only great religion founded by a businessman who used his last sermon on earth to proclaim the sanctity of property.
Conservatism must be a national rather than a sectarian cause. It should not be in the business of making foreign policy based on local demography. It should not need to.
When, for example, David Cameron condemned election-rigging in Pakistan, he was not sucking up to Brits of Pakistani origin (though they overwhelmingly share his concerns about the political incarceration of Imran Khan). He was standing up for Tory principles. The same is true of the Conservatives’ support for the Rohingya and the Uighur.
And the same applies, I’m afraid, to Anderson. The problem was not that his comments were offensive to Muslims; it was that they were offensive to Conservatives.