British pro-EU political party Change UK slips into yet another racism row as one of its candidates was accused of peddling “anti-Muslim tropes” and “legitimising the far right”. Nora Mulready, its candidate for the coming European parliament elections, had compared Islam with terrorism, suggesting it was a “fallacy that Islamism is nothing to do with Islam” and that radical Islamism could be “Koranically justified”. In other comments, she said the concerns of far-right leader Tommy Robinson should be addressed because he had “hit (a) societal nerve and that needs to be acknowledged”.
The Muslim Council of Britain condemned the candidate, and was joined by anti-racism reporting service Tell Mama, which questioned why she was selected and said it was “a joke” for someone with her views to be put up as an MEP. A spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain said Mulready had failed to meet the anti-racist standards the party claimed to hold itself to and was “all too ready in othering people, in this case, conflating Islam with terrorism.” Last year, Mulready had drawn links between religious unrest in Pakistan and immigration to Britain, warning that riots in favour of blasphemy laws in the country showed that some “immigration brings with it some very regressive cultural values.”
Following the June 2017 London Bridge terror attack, she urged politicians to blame Islam. She had tweeted, “Will Cobra meeting have integrity to call threat by its name? We cannot deal with it if we can't even name it. Islamism, a strand of Islam.”
The recent-most row is the fourth racism scandal to hit the party since its inception. Just last week, Change UK's lead candidate in Scotland, Joseph Russo was forced to resign after some of comments from the past emerged. He had said, “Black women scare me. I put this down to be chased through Amsterdam by a crazy black wh***.” The comments emerged just hours after the party unveiled its slate of candidates, when another prospective Change UK MEP, former Tory Ali Sadjady, had to resign over offensive comments about EU citizens. He had said, “When I hear that 70 per cent of pick pockets caught on the London Underground are Romanian it kind makes me want Brexit.”
Meanwhile, in response to the criticism of her social media posts, Mulready said, “I have never, not once, expressed anti-Muslim hatred or bigotry. I have always been clear that I am talking about Islamism, and conservative Islamic cultures or beliefs, never Muslims. I am horrified, appalled and deeply upset to have been targeted by what appears to now be an active campaign of smears and lies from hard-left activists and the hard-line Muslim Council of Britain.”
Naz Shah, Labour’s shadow women and equalities minister, who was also suspended from her party in 2016 for comments about Jews and Israel she later admitted were “ignorant”, said, “It’s shocking that this Change UK candidate Nora Mulready tried to legitimise the far right. This kind of language serves to silence British Muslims from speaking out against the Islamophobia they face. Does she need reminding that Tommy Robinson was the leader of the English Defence League that targeted the Muslim community?"
She added, “While genuine criticisms of any religion can be made in a free society, to use that as a guise to attack its followers, and justify peddling anti-Muslim tropes or normalise hatred is wrong.”
