The Islamic State of Batley & Spen

Batley & Spen did not exist until around a month ago, then it exploded onto the public consciousness like an Al Qaeda-inspired IED. I acknowledge this may not be the case; however, I am a southerner ensconced in Sadiq Khan’s London, with its excellent public transport, knife crime and Shariah Law, just relying on the media’s reporting of the Batley & Spen by-election. But I digress. The reason Batley & Spen is having a moment, is that a primarily middle-class white and Oxbridge-educated commentariat has waded into Batley & Spen political discourse, doing safaris there with the gusto of a gap year student discovering Goa for the first time and letting their followers know.

With a few notable exceptions, this expeditionary “nobody tells us what to write” regiment, comprising journalists and content creators, has somehow managed to write and film exactly the same narrative while covering the by-election.

The consensus being that Batley is just full of antisemitism, homophobia and an obsession with what is happening in foreign countries far away from this part of England — so if Labour loses this seat then good riddance to the rubbish voters of Batley. Aiding and abetting in this myth-making are Labour sources who, sensing disaster, have decided to blame this funny-tinged electorate.

There is none of the usual talk of Labour being perilously close to losing another seat in its heartlands, no analysis of what it needs to do in order to win this seat back at the next general election if it does lose the seat, or if it’s gone forever like Scotland.

To the commentariat and Labour Right, Batley is not a traditional Labour Red Wall seat, but something entirely foreign; Batley is ESOL and Jihadism, not the solid traditional white northern working-class town that they’ve tried and failed to win back with more flags and dog whistles. You won’t hear much about how Batley, like other places in the North and elsewhere, has long been neglected and hit hard by a further ten years of austerity, forcing council cuts. No, it’s simply Mordor — or worse, it’s the Islamic State Of Batley & Spen.

Never mind that statistically it’s 76% White British with a deep-rooted far right nationalism problem. This is a place inhabited by people who occupy the fevered nightmares of Daily Mail readers and its below-the-line commentators. It is a place full of Islamists, Jihadists, chai places that Owen Jones frequents and mosque-shaped potholes.

What makes the whole sordid affair so lamentable is that the very journalists who are doing their Batley vox pops or gotchas — “Please loudly and clearly share your prejudices into my non-suspicious lapel” — do not respect the Muslims-only no-go zones.

Another trespasser in the Muslim-only no-go area is the fedora-festooned carpetbagger. A friend to British Muslims in the same way as a bacon sandwich, Galloway has spent the last few years consorting with the likes of Nigel Farage and others of a similar ilk, all with the same outlook towards British Muslims — hostile and Islamophobic.

So this piece is not intended as a defence of George Galloway’s candidacy for Batley & Spen. However, the rhetoric coming out of Labour and its outriders, online and in the media, is that if Labour loses then it’s an acceptable defeat because we don’t want that kind of voter. Yet they’ve been actively trying to sway towards Labour voters who have voted BNP, UKIP or for other far right candidates — in a constituency which saw a former Labour MP murdered by a far right white Britain First sympathiser. So why is one set of former Labour voters who have voted for far right parties in the past to be courted, with their concerns filed under “legitimate concerns,” while another set of soon-to-be former loyal Labour voters to be treated with derision and contempt, with the only policy offering being “Do you want the Tories to win?” Now, you may think that is a very compelling policy offer for the people of Batley, but 47% of British Muslims live in 10% of the most impoverished places in the UK. Have you tried offering anything to change their material circumstances, or at the very least offered to fill in the ISIS-inspired potholes with your own hands like George Galloway has?

Furthermore, do you think maybe it’s a good idea to have a look at why Batley & Spen was retained in 2017 and 2019 and do more of that, rather than potentially tarring undecided voters as homophobic, antisemitic, and “too preoccupied with foreign places like Kashmir and Palestine, Yemen and Syria”? Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Dan Hodges and David Aaronvich, but the diaspora is over here complaining about Labour’s foreign policy under Starmer because you were over there in those foreign countries in the first place.

During this toxic by-election campaign, Galloway has become a proxy for British Muslims in the eyes of the commentariat and the Labour right. Because whatever you say about him is, by extension, what you want to say about Muslim communities. Never mind that Muslims are not a monolith and actually comprise many communities from all racial backgrounds, speaking myriad languages, hailing from all across the globe..

British Muslims are feeling increasingly unwanted within the Labour Party. Their material concerns are considered suspicious, treated as some kind of Islamist-Jihadist plot that SIr Keir Starmer must ignore if he wants to win back the people who refused to vote for him in the Hartlepool by-elections — or, as pol profs would put it, the right kind of red wall. In the past week alone we have had Times columists and Lords questioning why British Muslim voters in Batley feel so strongly about Palestine, after the same commentariat and Labour outriders told us that Palestine is a fringe issue and of no concern to voters in the red wall.

The only conclusion to draw from this is that Muslim voters are simply the wrong type of voter, even if they’re within the red wall and have been solid Labour voters for decades. Their vote is only valid if they shut up about the issues they care about.

You know who would have countered the division Galloway is causing? Jeremy Corbyn. Because, as every British Muslim knows, Jeremy Corbyn is a non-Muslim who has experienced Islamophobia himself — from actually being attacked at a Mosque, to being on the Finsbury Park Mosque killer’s hit list. Yes, this would entail the people currently in charge of Labour — who never fail to tell anyone who listens that Labour have to win first — to be actually serious about winning, and not, say, wage a year-long battle against wokeism, bury allegations of Islamophobia within the party, and generally dismiss Palestine as a fringe issue which only concerns the hard left.