Oh no, Lee Anderson MP has offended that noted delicate flower, the London Mayor Sadiq Khan! As you may have seen – largely because mainstream media and politicians just won’t stop going on and on and on about it – Mr. Anderson has drawn flak over the last few days after going on GB News and purportedly implying Mayor Khan was under the “control” of Islamists. Anderson’s statement supposedly had the innate potential to rip apart the community fabric of Great Britain, implied his many caterwauling critics. A bit late for that! I think it’s already happened.
As relatively few people would originally have seen Anderson’s GB News interview, which in truth was pretty unexceptional and unmemorable, it could easily be argued that the ones truly responsible for transforming Lee’s words into deadly weapons to set Muslims and non-Muslims against one another were those who began decrying them in a rather hysterical manner, thereby giving them far more publicity than they perhaps deserved.
What did Anderson actually say? Chatting to GB News about a recent Telegraph article by Suella Braverman in which the former Home Secretary argued that (to use her piece’s headline) ‘Islamists are bullying Britain into submission’, Lee opined as follows:
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 and they’ve got control of Starmer as well. We have seen the shocking scenes played out in Parliament just a few nights back, where Starmer crumbled. He put pressure on the Speaker to alter the rules… People are just turning up in their thousands and doing anything they want and they are laughing at the police. And I feel absolutely disgusted. This stems with [sic] Khan. He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.
How shocking! But was this assessment really so very wrong?
Puppet Government
After he had the Tory whip removed due to his stubborn refusal to compliantly admit he was a big, thick, fat, meat-pie-headed northern racist and apologise immediately, Anderson told ITV News that, actually, the majority of messages he had since received from the general public (and, in private, from some more cowardly Conservative MPs, so he claimed) said they thought he was right to say what he did. It all depends, I suppose, on what you interpret that phrase “got control of” means.
If you interpret it in childishly literal terms, to mean that, somewhere behind the scenes, shadowy Islamist puppet-masters are pulling Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer’s Thunderbirds strings to make them do their every bidding, in a sort of Protocols of the Elders of Mecca-style scenario, then this is indeed surely untrue. Neither man is the bought-and-paid-for tool of a gigantic, behind-the-scenes, Islamo-fascist conspiracy being run from Tehran or Islamabad. But if you interpret the phrase “got control of” simply to mean that, thanks to a dire combination of violent intimidation, death-threats and sheer electoral force of numbers, Islamists have indeed exercised some form of malign partisan influence over the Labour Party and its politicians of late, then this sad assessment is actually perfectly true.
It doesn’t mean Khan or Starmer are Islamists themselves – Islamists actually believe in something, after all – but both men are still under the influence of the Islamists to a certain degree, albeit in a purely negative fashion, as opposed to being their direct, enthusiastic supporters or advocates. When Sir Keir approached the Speaker last week begging for special Parliamentary procedures to be (ab)used due to the perceived threat towards certain of his MPs emanating from local Palestine-obsessed extremists, this was a clear example of Starmer being under the influence of violent Islamists or their allies like those who (presumably) firebombed the office of the pro-Israel MP for Finchley and Golders Green, Mike Freer, last December.
Likewise, in many ways, Khan’s London, with its endless avenues of rainbow flags and absurd, nannyist banning of ‘harmful’ fattening cake adverts on the Tube, is often more Wokeistan than Islamistan. Nonetheless, while usually being oh-so-keen to condemn any kind of ‘hate-crime’, real or imagined, against most minority groups – gays, transsexuals, blacks, Muslims, blind Rastafarian lesbians in Ulez-compliant motorised wheelchairs – Mayor Khan has been curiously quiet about the weekly scheduled orgy of anti-Jewish hatred scarring the streets of the capital city he is supposed to be in charge of since Hamas’s October 7th attacks.
I don’t say this is because Khan actively supports such antisemitism himself personally (to be fair to Sadiq, he has occasionally condemned outright vandalisation of Jewish property and suchlike, at least when specifically asked to by interviewers and it would be awkward to do otherwise), but a substantial proportion of his core vote is clearly made up of both London’s Muslims and its assorted other identitarian Leftists, many of whom self-evidently are antisemitic – British Muslims have been shown to be more likely to believe in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories than non-Muslim citizens, for example.
To more easily stay in power, Candidate Khan does want and need the Muslim vote: as of the 2021 census, Greater London is now 15% Muslim, with 1,318,755 such inhabitants residing in the capital in a wonderfully diverse and vibrant fashion. Various U.K. Muslim groups now openly boast of their collective bloc-voting power. But while traditionally overwhelmingly more likely to vote for Labour than for any other British political party (unless George Galloway and his magic hat are in town), the number of Muslims showing support for Labour has recently been dropping significantly, due to the Shadow Cabinet’s vacillating failure to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The next vote to decide who will become London Mayor comes as soon as May 2nd; undoubtedly, therefore, Khan will not wish to alienate the substantial local Muslim and Leftist voter-base at the moment by doing anything so ridiculous as defending Israel or condemning all those pesky hate-marches. In January and February, Survation carried out a poll for the Labour Muslim Network, finding that 85% of British Muslims said the specific position of political parties on the Israel-Hamas conflict would help decide the destination of their vote, i.e., they won’t vote for those who explicitly support the Israelis.
It is an unpalatable electoral fact, therefore – maybe even unpalatable to Khan himself in private, I have no idea – that he does have to pander to this audience to some degree, or at least not actively offend them by, for example, condemning the many manifest excesses of the marches, or putting public pressure on the Metropolitan Police to rein them all in. Therefore, in that limited sense, Khan’s “mates” – as Anderson sarcastically put it, presumably actually meaning a substantial proportion of his voter client-base, rather than his secret handlers from ISIS or the Muslim Brotherhood – do indeed possess a certain amount of “control” over him, if by “control”, you simply mean “direct electoral influence”.
Careless Talk Costs Votes
Is this what Anderson really meant, then? According to Lee’s own account, it would appear so. Although Anderson has steadfastly refused to apologise, on the currently unfashionable grounds that he didn’t really have anything much to apologise for, he did admit the specific phrasing he used was “clumsy” and his words could have been misinterpreted in the negative way his various critics chose to view them, whether sincerely or otherwise.
In a subsequently released statement, recalling the disturbing mob-rule scenes outside Parliament last week, Anderson was quite happy to clarify his comments as follows (I’ve highlighted the key phrases here backing up my own interpretation of Lee’s words in bold):
I made some comments yesterday that some people thought were divisive. Politics is divisive and I am just incredibly frustrated about the abject failures of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. Khan called for an immediate ceasefire weeks ago with no conditions while the [Israeli] hostages are still there being held at gunpoint by a terrorist organisation [i.e., Hamas]. Hundreds of people had been arrested for racist [antisemitic] abuse on these marches and we barely hear a peep from the mayor. If these marches were about something less fashionable Sadiq Khan would have been the first to call for them to be cancelled. It’s double standards for political benefit… Seeing the words “From the river to the sea” on Elizabeth Tower made me feel sick to the pit of my stomach… Khan has stood by and allowed our police to turn a blind eye to the disgusting scenes around Parliament… My words may have been clumsy but my words were borne out of sheer frustration at what is happening to our beautiful capital city.
If Anderson’s explanation here is sincere, then perhaps he deserves the benefit of the doubt for his self-admittedly “clumsy” words. After all, when speaking off-the-cuff, just like Anderson was in his regular slot on GB News, Khan himself has made some rather “clumsy” statements himself in the past too.
Damage Control to Uncle Tom
Back in 2009, in his then-capacity as Minister for Community Cohesion, Khan did his best to help communities cohere by giving an interview to Press TV, a now-banned propaganda outlet for the demonstrably Islamist and Jew-hating Shia regime in Iran. Here, he was asked why the Labour Government of the day – of which he was a frontbench member – focused largely upon liaising with moderate Muslim groups like the now-defunct Quilliam Foundation as part of its counter-extremism strategy rather than, for example, phoning up Osama bin Laden or Abu Hamza for a quick chat about where they each might have been going a little wrong in life lately.
“I wish we only spoke to people who agree with us [like the Quilliam Foundation],” Khan replied, but “it’s about engaging with all stakeholders… you can’t just speak to Uncle Toms.” ‘Uncle Toms’, eh? Isn’t that a classic racially discriminatory term, indicating a ‘house-negro’, or racial sell-out, in terms of a biddable black man willing to do the bidding of his perceived white race-enemies?
Maybe so, because, once old footage of this embarrassing verbal slip re-emerged in the run-up to the 2016 Mayoral election, Khan’s spokesman immediately admitted that: “This was a bad choice of phrase and Sadiq regrets using it.” Khan’s excuse-spewing PR-wallah continued: “As Communities Minister at the time, Sadiq was talking about the need to engage with all parts of the community to tackle extremism and radicalisation – as he has pledged to do as Mayor.”
Khan then went on LBC radio to further explain how, when using the particular words he did, he really meant something completely different, as if he was a full-blown aphasia patient or something. Asked if the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’ was a racial slur, Sadiq agreed that “it is… and I regret using that phrase. The context was me trying to encourage everyone to get involved in Government consultations.” Ah, so context has to be taken into account when considering a person’s ex tempore verbal comments now, does it? Apparently so, at least when it is virtuous woke Left-winger Mr. Khan himself, rather than evil gammon Right-winger Mr. Anderson. Khan further wriggled that “I regret using the phrase and I am sorry. The point I was trying to make was that I wanted to talk to anyone.”
Yes, such a minor verbal infelicity is very easily done. I’m sure if Lee Anderson had given an old and newly-unearthed interview himself in which it turned out he had told leading 1980s South African television news outlet ApartheidTV that: “The white South African Government should be willing to talk with any opponents, not just complete sell-out peacenik cuck coconuts like Nelson Mandela,” he would have been immediately forgiven.
Double Standards
In other words, during a live interview, Khan once ill-advisedly and unthinkingly used some “clumsy” language – rather more clumsy and offensive-sounding, it must be said, than dumbo, bigoted old Lee Anderson. Back in 2016, Khan went on to condemn his Conservative electoral opponents of the day for trying to wrongly smear him as a racist or extremist on account of such easily-done mistakes, when in fact he had just been innocently misinterpreted. Such attacks were baseless smears, he complained.
Baseless smears against Sadiq Khan and Labour are wrong, you see. But baseless smears against Lee Anderson and the Tories are morally virtuous. Writing in the Evening Standard in the wake of the recent controversy, Khan was quite happy to condemn Lee and his higher-up Conservative Party bosses in the following terms:
More than two days on from Lee Anderson’s vile, racist, anti-Muslim and Islamophobic remarks, we have yet to hear the Prime Minister call it what it is: Islamophobic, anti-Muslim hate and racist. … This speaks volumes. It shouldn’t be hard to call out comments that are so unambiguously ignorant, prejudiced and racist. Yet those at the top of the Conservative Government are stubbornly refusing to do so. It’s a tacit endorsement of anti-Muslim hatred and can only lead to the conclusion that anti-Muslim bigotry and racism are not taken seriously. Racism is racism and should always be called out, whichever minority it is targeted against. There can be no hierarchy.
Except there is now a racial hierarchy of oppression in such matters, isn’t there, at least according to contemporary woke identitarian dogma of the kinds Khan himself continually panders to these days? And Jews are right down at the bottom of the pile in such respects, as the eternal white-skinned ‘oppressors’ of the terrorists who valiantly keep on trying to rape, mutilate, kidnap and kill them in the name of ‘justice’.
If Lee Anderson really wants to annoy Sadiq Khan, he should photocopy Khan’s cynical, self-pitying and self-serving article, cross out and replace a few words, and then re-release it to the London media as follows:
More than five months on from the start of the pro-Palestine marchers’ vile, racist, antisemitic and Jewphobic antics, we have yet to hear the Mayor of London call the movement what it is: Jewphobic, antisemitic hatred and racist. … This speaks volumes. It shouldn’t be hard to call out behaviour that is so unambiguously ignorant, prejudiced and racist. Yet those at the top of the Labour Party in London are stubbornly refusing to do so. It’s a tacit endorsement of antisemitic hatred and can only lead to the conclusion that anti-Jewish bigotry and racism are not taken seriously. Racism is racism and should always be called out, whichever minority it is targeted against. There can be no hierarchy.
Or, then again, Lee could just save his ink, and reduce the above paragraph down to a single concise sentence, if he prefers: “Sadiq Khan isn’t an Islamist at all – he’s just an opportunistic, slippery, amoral, vote-hungry hypocrite.” Those would not be “clumsy” words at all. Just true ones.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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