Let us talk about one of the great political con jobs of our time. It is not about Brexit, though that was part of it. It is not about the culture wars, though they provided the soundtrack. It is about the systematic, decades-long project to convince a significant chunk of the British working class that Muslims are the problem. That the mosque down the road is a threat. That the family who moved in next door, the ones with the kids who play football in the street and the mum who bakes the best baklava you have ever tasted, are somehow incompatible with British life. It is a con job, pure and simple. And the media, from the tabloids to the rolling news channels, has been the willing accomplice every step of the way.
Think about it. When did you first hear that Muslims were a problem? For many, it was the coverage of the Rushdie affair in the late 1980s, when headlines screamed about book burning and death threats. Then came the 9/11 attacks, followed by 7/7, and suddenly the word “Muslim” became inseparable from the word “terrorist” in the pages of Britain’s newspapers. The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Express—they all discovered a new kind of villain, one that came with ready-made visuals of angry protesters, black flags and women in headscarves. It was a gift. A story that could be told over and over, with slight variations, guaranteed to generate outrage and sell copies. And sell copies it did.
But it was never really about terrorism, was it? If it were, the coverage would have been proportionate. Terror attacks carried out by far right extremists would have received the same saturation coverage. They did not. Instead, what we got was a slow, steady drip feed of stories designed to create a single impression: that Muslims are different, that they do not share our values, that they are taking over. Every story about a Muslim majority town was framed as a tale of loss. Every planning application for a mosque was reported as an invasion. Every cultural difference, no matter how small, was magnified into a fundamental clash of civilisations. By the time the grooming gangs scandal broke in the 2010s, the groundwork had already been laid. The fact that the victims were overwhelmingly white working-class girls and the perpetrators a tiny minority of men who happened to be of Pakistani heritage was all the confirmation many readers needed. Never mind that the vast majority of Muslim men are not abusers. Never mind that the authorities had failed because of a toxic mix of institutional racism and political cowardice. The media had its narrative, and it stuck.
The genius of this operation, if you can call it that, was its simplicity. Take a complex, diverse community of over three million people, strip away all nuance, and present them as a monolithic threat. Pair that with decades of economic decline, deindustrialisation, and the hollowing out of working-class communities, and you have a recipe for disaster. When a factory closes and the jobs disappear, it is much easier to blame the people down the road than the economic system that shipped the jobs overseas. When social housing is scarce, it is easier to rage about immigrants getting priority than to ask why successive governments stopped building homes. The media did not create those economic grievances, but it provided a target for them. It gave people someone to hate. And that is the oldest trick in the political book.
The right-wing press understood this instinctively. The Sun, under Kelvin MacKenzie, had done the same thing with Liverpool after Hillsborough. The Daily Mail had a long history of anti-immigrant hysteria stretching back to the Windrush generation. The Express had found its niche in Diana-obsessed mourning and, later, in climate change denial. But Muslims were different. Muslims were a permanent fixture, a story that would never run dry. Every Eid brought pictures of crowded streets and complaints about noise. Every terror attack, anywhere in the world, was an excuse to ask British Muslims where their loyalty lay. Every elected Muslim official was subject to scrutiny that would never be applied to a white Christian politician. It was a never-ending cycle of suspicion and resentment.
And the broadcast media went along with it. For years, the BBC and ITV framed immigration and Islam as “controversial” subjects, giving equal weight to bigots and imams as though they were two sides of a legitimate debate. The result was that views once confined to the far right were normalised. People like Tommy Robinson, a convicted fraudster with a history of violence, were given platforms and treated as legitimate voices of working-class concern. The phrase “legitimate concerns” became a weasel word, a way to dress up prejudice as political disagreement. By the time the Brexit referendum came around, the damage was done. The image of the Muslim as an outsider, as a threat, as the enemy within, was firmly embedded in a significant part of the electorate.
What is tragic, and what rarely gets said, is that the working-class communities that were most targeted by this propaganda had far more in common with their Muslim neighbours than they were led to believe. Shared experiences of poverty, insecure housing, underfunded schools, and a healthcare system that treats you differently depending on your postcode. Shared grievances against a political class that has spent forty years dismantling the post-war settlement. Shared hopes for their children, for a decent life, for respect. But those commonalities were never reported. They did not fit the narrative. It is much harder to sell newspapers with a story about solidarity than with a story about fear.
Now we are living with the consequences. Hate crimes against Muslims are at record levels. Mosques require armed guards. Muslim women in hijab are spat at in the street. And the same newspapers that spent decades stoking the flames are now wringing their hands about community cohesion, as though they played no part in destroying it. It is the political equivalent of an arsonist complaining about the fire brigade.
None of this is to say that the working class is uniquely gullible or that the concerns of white working-class communities are illegitimate. They are not. The anger is real. The sense of abandonment is real. But it has been weaponised, diverted, and exploited by a media and political class that had no intention of fixing any of the underlying problems. The point of the anti-Muslim campaign was never to make working-class lives better. It was to keep them angry, keep them voting, keep them blaming the wrong people. That is what the con looks like. And until we recognise it for what it is, until we stop letting the media tell us who our enemies are, we will keep falling for it. The Muslims were never the problem. They were always the distraction.
