Six weeks have passed since Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and strategic guru, stepped aside in the wake of the Mandelson debacle. Already the air smells fresher in Downing Street.
Had McSweeney and Mandelson remained in situ, it is hard to imagine the Prime Minister keeping even a partial distance from Donald Trump over the criminal and catastrophic Israeli-US war on Iran. Yet Wednesday’s PMQs seemed to signal a change of tone. Up to then, Starmer had bought into the poisonous and divisive rhetoric of the far right about Muslims — most notoriously when he used the appalling phrase ‘island of strangers’, echoing the language of the racist Enoch Powell. This reflected McSweeney’s primary mission: try to win back traditional Labour ‘hero’ voters who had defected to Reform by copying the tropes of the far right.
On Wednesday something changed. Instead of echoing the bigotry of the right, Starmer kicked back against it. Just a few months ago, the PM would have been too afraid to challenge the disgusting conduct of shadow Lord Chancellor Nick Timothy, who lashed out at Muslims praying at an interfaith event in Trafalgar Square — describing it as an ‘act of domination’.
But this time Starmer replied in no uncertain terms that the Tories have a ‘problem with Muslims’.
What explains this apparent shift? Many factors lie behind it, besides the departure of McSweeney and Mandelson from the stage. One of them is the belated recognition that Islamophobia, indulged by every establishment party across the spectrum, has now reached intolerable levels. This growing awareness is thanks in part to the painstaking work of the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), which for years has documented and publicised the false narratives about Islam and Muslims promoted in an increasingly pernicious press and media.
Overseen by Rizwana Hamid and Faisal Hanif, the CfMM has published a series of substantial, deeply researched reports, exposing the prejudice which characterises mainstream reporting of British Islam. Its ‘GB News: A Snapshot of Anti-Muslim Hate’, published in late December 2024, was far ahead of its time, documenting the bias, misinformation, and far-right tropes perpetuated by the broadcaster, including its invocation of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory and its conspiracist claims of an impending Muslim ‘takeover’.
Hamid and Hanif’s pioneering survey was recently vindicated when the New World published a massively consequential investigation by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger into GB News, alleging that ‘one political party in Britain’ — Reform UK —‘has effectively ended up with its own television station’. The New World also raised questions about the inability of regulator OFCOM to prevent the hijacking of British media-political culture by the far right.
The CfMM also published a devastating report last year proving that the BBC has been systematically biased against Palestinians in its coverage of the Gaza war. It produced analysis proving that the BBC gives Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage than Palestinian deaths, and describes them in significantly more emotive language: the term ‘massacre’, for example, was applied to Israeli casualties seventeen times more frequently than to Palestinian casualties.
Even more troubling, the report showed that the BBC suppressed genocide allegations, with BBC presenters shutting down genocide claims in over 100 documented cases. The national broadcaster made zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements — and simply ignored Netanyahu’s notorious biblical references to Amalek. This was pathbreaking work of fundamental importance, and an invaluable starting point for any attempt to understand how the BBC has provided cover for the Israeli slaughter in Gaza.
This week, Hamid and Hanif have struck again with a deeply disturbing survey proving that rancid anti-Muslim sentiment is not simply a feature of GB News, but endemic across much of the mainstream British media landscape. Analysing more than 40,000 articles across thirty major news outlets, the CfMM analysis scrupulously exempts many publications from its claim of serious bias, including the BBC, Prospect, the Guardian, the Morning Star and, surprisingly, the Daily Star. But it finds that nearly half of all articles displayed a ‘high degree of bias’ towards Muslims, while an astonishing 70 percent associated Muslims with ‘negative behaviours or themes’.
Many of the most famous British titles are identified as repeat offenders. Few will be surprised to learn that the Spectator — now edited by Michael Gove, former cabinet minister and commander-in-chief of British Islamophobes — leads the premiership table of anti-Muslim bias. The magazine is even more Islamophobic, the CfMM records, than GB News! The Telegraph and Mail are shown to engage in constant anti-Muslim reporting, with the Times, the Express and the Sun also high up the list.
‘When entire communities are repeatedly framed through lenses of suspicion or threat’, noted Hamid in his reflections on the data, ‘it inevitably shapes public attitudes, political debate and the everyday lives of British Muslims.’ Indeed, the report observes that there is a clear correlation between negative portrayals of Muslims in the media and rising anti-Muslim hate crime.
A pattern emerges from the CfMM’s findings. The worst culprits are the Murdoch press, established outlets like the Telegraph and newer upstarts like GB News. These news organisations no longer report on Islam: they campaign against it. It’s clear who’s whipping up hatred and division in Britain today, and it’s not ordinary Muslims. It’s the oligarchic media.
Source: Tribune