 I don't really think I can film today, I'm going to have to be available for media slots. Massive Tory Islamophobia scandal breaking, going to be doing interviews back to back. Hi, is that news night? What? No, I wasn't missold PPI. So if you were looking at coverage of anti-Semitism and Labour in the news, you could be forgiven for thinking that racism in political parties is something which has taken very seriously in the British media. Well, as ever, I live to disappoint. This week, polling from YouGov and a documentary from Channel 4's Dispatches revealed the extent of Islamophobia amongst the Conservative Party membership. 60% of those surveyed think that Islam is generally a threat to Western civilisation. 54% believe that Islam is generally a threat to the British way of life. And in a previous poll, two-thirds of respondents said that they believe that there are areas of Britain which are currently under Shakira law. Sorry, that's Chariot law. Despite the fact that it's this very membership who are 97% white, 71% male and who represent just 0.2% of the British population, who will be choosing our next Prime Minister, British political media has been remarkably quiet on the matter of institutional Islamophobia in the Tory Party. There was no mention of Dispatches findings on the Next Morning's Today programme or on the usually excellent Politics Live, and I'm starting to wonder just why that is. So, I think part of the reason why this is is to do with media culture more generally. At the moment, everyone is obsessed with Brexit. It's like the love island of Westminster. No one can stop talking about it. Yeah, the world all wants that. 1964? No. Secondly, there is a matter of a simple law of physics, the left get a much harder time in establishment media than the right do. And the third reason, and I think this is something worth exploring, is that there is a clear difference between how the right wing respond to allegations of racism and how the left respond to allegations of racism. Take Boris Johnson, for instance. During this leadership campaign when he was called out for previous comments he'd made in a telegraph article describing Muslim women who wear niqab as bank robbers and letterboxes, he doubled down. He didn't shy away from his comments. Instead, he said that was an example of straight talking, honest politics that his voters would actually appreciate him for. Would you ever use that question again? Yes, of course I would. Whereas the left wing tend to have an anti-racist conscience. Now, if this can't be challenged in a meaningful sense, as in getting people to think carefully about what it is they've said or done or endorsed, it's a self-image which can be prickled. People get very defensive and suddenly it's an argument over who's the real anti-racist here. The right wing don't have a need to claim that territory. They're not as smart as them. But there's also a matter of institutional racism in the media itself. This week the Muslim Council of Britain launched their Centre for Media Monitoring, and in their debut report which analysed over 10,000 articles and clips, they found evidence of widespread and systemic bias against Muslims in media representations. 59% of articles analysed and 43% of all broadcasts found that Muslims were associated with negative behaviours, with terrorism being the most frequently associated theme. The most biased outlets tended to be from religious or right wing print publications and the worst TV programming tended to be topical news or investigations. Interestingly, national broadcast media tended to be much more negative about Muslims than regional broadcast media, leading the report's authors to suggest that while on the day-to-day and local level, Muslim communities aren't actually that different from their non-Muslim neighbours, in national representations their portrayalists skewed to suggest that their very presence in the country is some kind of existential threat. The report's authors suggest that in order to deal with this pervasive and systemic bias against Muslims in mainstream media, that there needs to be an overhaul in the culture of representation. So there needs to be more balance between positive and negative stories about Muslims. There needs to be more robust and rigorous fact-checking and more nuanced coverage of things like religious conflicts. And while I agree with all of these suggestions, I actually think that we need to go much further in thinking about what political solutions to the problem of racism look like. So it heads up, most of the ideas that I'm about to talk about come from this book, Aaron Kanani's The Muslims Are Coming. It's really good and if you're interested in this video, you should definitely read it. Way number one of thinking about Islamophobia is that it's the result of a centuries-long clash of civilisations. Aaron Kanani says that lots of people tend to think that Islamophobia is something which has always existed in European and or Christian culture. From the Crusades, moving on to conflict with the Ottoman Empire, then you've got the Cold War in Iran, through to the modern-day war on terror. And Kanani dismisses this pretty easily, he just says it's a historical bullshit and I tend to agree. The two in which most people think of Islamophobia is to think of it as a response to the war on terror. So 9-11 happens, the threat of Islamist-related terrorism grows and Islamophobia is a kind of backlash to that. And what Aaron Kanani says is that lots of people who understand Islamophobia in this way tend to defend Muslims by saying, well no, they're not all associated with terrorism. It's only a very small minority of Muslims who have misinterpreted scripture who take a violent view of a conflict between jihadists and the West. And what Kanani says is that both way number one and way number two get wrong is that they identify the prime mover of terrorist violence and also Islamophobia itself as something to do with religious ideology rather than political conflicts. I think he presents a really compelling argument because obviously jihadist movements use religious language and conceptual frameworks to justify their use of violence. But I think the fact that they exist at all has much more to do with the failures of anti-colonial movements, the distortion of anti-imperialist aims and language and indeed the failures of anti-racist movements domestically to really transform the lives of people of colour right here. I think that looking at the political origins of both jihadist violence shows us a way to think about the political causes of Islamophobia here. Islamophobia primarily isn't a matter of cultural aversion. What it's really about is the functioning of the nation state both domestically and in the international arena. Domestically anxieties around Muslims, the existential threat that they pose justify repressive state measures like surveillance, the erosion of civil liberties, like brutal policing practices or the presence of prevent in our schools. And in an international context, the dehumanisation of Muslims justifies expeditionary warfare of the kind that we saw in the early 21st century. It justified the repressive border regimes which led to the turning of the Mediterranean into a mass grave at the height of the migration crisis. And up until recently it could justify arms sales to repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia as they bombarded Yemen in a joint coalition with the United Arab Emirates. So what I'm saying is that when you look at the centrality of Islamophobia in the British policy agenda both domestically and internationally, you look at media complicity in perpetuating anti-Muslim tropes, it makes perfect sense that the membership of a traditionally authoritarian and nationalistic party like the Conservatives is itself deeply Islamophobic. As the media continues to hold Labour and the Conservative Party to unequal standards when it comes to the issue of racism, it's only right that we demand better coverage. But we should also demand a move away from this individualised analysis of racism, start taking it seriously as a cultural phenomenon, a social phenomenon and an economic one as well. And that's the terrain in which we must be seeking better answers. Oh. Hello, Newsnight. Oh. Oh no, if you liked the video you should subscribe to Navara Media on our YouTube and you should follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Oh, you really liked the video. Okay, go to support.navaramedia.com and give us a one-off donation or subscribe for the equivalent of one hour of your wage per month. And also can you get Newsnight to call me back I'm lonely.