Independent Alliance MP Shockat Adam understands the darkness of the far right. He has experienced it first-hand. But he has also received the “overwhelming kindness” of Britain. And that’s what he’d like to see drive the resistance to rising fascism today. With that in mind, he has appealed to Keir Starmer’s government to stop its “logically incoherent” attempt ‘to outflank fascists from the right’.

Shockat Adam: Muslims are ‘under siege’

As a child, Shockat Adam recalls:

being chased out of a park with my late mother, holding a Snakes and Ladders board game in one hand and a football in the other, dodging dog excrement so that it missed my new jacket. Although the excrement missed, no matter how hard I tried, the verbal insults hit the intended target.

Back then, he said, you could ‘spot racists from miles away’. But today:

racists wear sharp suits and sit on couches discussing their views on breakfast shows and our airwaves. And they are hitting their intended targets.

He added:

I struggle to recall a time when Muslims in Britain seemed so besieged.

The incitement of hatred against Muslims at the recent march in London was not an isolated event, he stressed, highlighting also the targeting of asylum seekers and mosques and the domination of the political climate “by the far-right, race-baiting and Islamophobic Reform UK, supported by their friends at GB News”.

Far-right agitators, he stressed, are dangerously diverting attention from the issues that most affect ordinary people:

Austerity, lack of government infrastructure investment, mismanagement (HS2 anyone?) and corporate greed

We need to “build a broad anti-racist coalition”

Shockat Adam insisted in a column in the Leicester Gazette:

What our country needs is principled leadership offering a home to minorities and refusing to dance to the dark and divisive mood music being set by the far-right. We need a leader who can rise to this challenge and build a broad anti-racist coalition across political and civil society. Dispiritingly, we haven’t seen such leadership from the Prime Minister and his cabinet. In fact, the government, fearful that Reform continues to gain popularity, is trying to outflank them from the right.

From Keir’s “island of strangers” speech, to dehumanising immigration policies and draconian crackdowns on Gaza solidarity campaigners, Labour have embraced ‘Reform-lite’ politics.

With Starmer’s approach, he said:

Labour mainstreams Reform’s socially destructive ideas and pushes away those communities – ethnic and religious minorities, Leftists and trade unionists – who once saw the party as their political home.

He added that:

today the left is a politically and ethnically diverse bunch, especially in big cities and increasingly our Northern towns. More broadly, research shows working-class voters are primarily concerned about bread-and-butter economic issues, such as the cost of living and job security. Many feel the social contract—the idea that hard work will be rewarded with a higher standard of living—has broken down, generating frustration and a vacuum that Reform is now filling. It is these frustrations the government must attend to, while exposing the idea that migrants and minorities are to blame as nothing but cheap demagoguery.

And he asserted:

we desperately need to see the Prime Minister and his cabinet staunchly defending the minority groups being targeted by Reform – especially Muslims who are attacked with the most consistency, but also black and LGBTQ+ communities.

End the toxic capitulation to far-right talking points

Shockat Adam emphasised “the massive economic, social and cultural contributions Muslims make to this great country”, adding that:

Muslims are not calling for special privileges. We are not calling for Islam to be immunised from critique, as the right often likes to pretend. We are not calling for protections for Islam as a religion, but for Muslims as people, as established human rights law is supposed to guarantee. We are simply asking for equity.

Reform and the far right in general can impact Britain’s future without even winning a general election, simply by achieving the absorption of “their talking points around immigration and multiculturalism” into mainstream political parties. And that’s why Adam calls Labour’s current approach “capitulating to the politics of Reform”. This, he stressed, “legitimises them” and normalises their ideas.

As Adam insisted:

It is logically incoherent to think you can pander to the far-right while hoping to defeat them at the same time.

Along with other members of the Independent Alliance, Adam has been participating in Your Party’s efforts to create a new mass party of the left.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

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