THE TORY BIGOTRY SCANDAL
Labour’s vile anti-Semitism goes right to the top of the party. But as this damning investigation shows, a handful of Tories face their own charges of Islamophobia. And those, like this would-be MP, who dare to complain face a shameful wall of silence
AJAy Jagota’s long and tireless record of service to the Tory cause made his resignation letter in January especially painful to write. yet given everything that had happened, or, more to the point, not happened, since he’d first complained of experiencing appalling racism at a party event, the 49-year-old Asian businessman felt he had little choice.
Jagota was once a poster-boy for modern Conservativism: the son of Indian immigrants, and whose father worked as a miner, he managed through talent and hard work to progress from the proverbial shop-floor to a senior managerial role in a national advertising firm. After
leaving the blue-chip world in the late-1990s, the father-of-two became an entrepreneur in the North East, making his fortune from property and technology companies.
Jagota’s belief in the virtues of ambition and enterprise led him to become an eager Tory activist. By early 2017, he was elected chairman of his local party in South Shields, Tyneside, and even wondered about one day signing up as a prospective Parliamentary candidate.
But that was then. Today, Ajay Jagota is no longer a local Tory chairman, and the ambition this highly-driven man once harboured regarding a career in politics now hangs by a thread.
The reason? A toxic dispute over Islamophobic abuse that he claims to have personally experienced at the hands of a Tory councillor.
It’s perhaps one of the most unedifying among a slew of such incidents to have made headlines in recent months, culminating in news last week that the Conservative Party has been reported to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
The commission is considering whether to investigate the fact that dozens of Tory councillors were reported to party chiefs for allegedly making racist remarks — in person and online — and sharing discriminatory material about Muslims and other minorities on social media.
Some have called Arabs ‘sand peasants’ or referred to Muslims as ‘parasites’, ‘cavemen’, ‘ragheads’ and ‘cockroaches’. Others have described Asian colleagues as ‘ Pakis’ and ‘invaders’, or posted doctored photos comparing women in Islamic clothing to black bags filled with rubbish.
It also emerged last week that 15 culprits had been quietly reinstated as Tory councillors, after serving short suspensions. It was further reported that at least 25 party members were kicked out after uploading similarly vile material to an unofficial Facebook group for supporters of the Brexiteer MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.
This week, Theresa May refused to apologise to Sadiq Khan, the Muslim Mayor of London, for what he called ‘the openly Islamophobic campaign’ run against him in 2016. The mayor also referred to an incident in September in which the current Conservative London mayoral candidate, Shaun Bailey, called him ‘mad mullah Khan of Londonistan’.
Little wonder that Baroness Warsi, a Muslim peer and former Conservative chairman, has claimed her party is riddled with ‘institutional Islamophobia’ and called for a public inquiry into the issue, saying that the party’s procedures for dealing with the scourge are utterly unfit for purpose. ‘The party line is to deny [Islamophobia], ignore it and bury one’s head in the sand,’ she said this week.
To which end, Ajay Jagota provides a deeply depressing case study.
For what is perhaps most worrying about his experience is the shocking (and, he argues, insulting) indifference shown by officials at every level of the party.
Last September, he attended a meeting at which his South Shields party branch discussed a possible merger with their neighbouring association in Jarrow.
During a social function afterwards, he and Gerard Leake, the chairman of Jarrow Tories, were approached at the bar by a man called Jeff Milburn, who is one of the party’s local councillors.
Milburn declared that he was vehemently opposed to the merger. They claimed that he was then heard to say, with regard to Jagota: ‘I tell you another f****** thing, I’m not working for that Muslim c***.’ Shocked by what they say they heard, Jagota and Leake (who had immediately told Milburn it was unacceptable) filed separate complaints with the party’s regional office.
‘I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties, when racism was pretty rife, but when you hear it like that, it still stops you in your tracks,’ Jagota told me. ‘It still has the power to shock. I’m not even Muslim, I’m a Hindu, so it’s just the worst sort of offensive bigotry, based purely on the colour of my skin.’
A week passed, but they received no response. Concerned that he was being ‘fobbed off’, Jagota decided to raise the incident with Tory chairman Brandon Lewis, who he was introduced to at the party’s conference in Birmingham a week later.
‘Brandon’s response was that it sounded totally unacceptable, so he asked his deputy chief of staff, Toby Wilmer, to follow things up,’ he recalls. ‘Councillor Milburn denied that he’d made the remark, though we’d both very clearly heard it, so obviously there needed to be a proper investigation.’
Jagota duly emailed both Wilmer and Lewis with details of his experience. When he again didn’t receive a reply, he tried two further times to ask them to ensure his complaint was being properly looked into.
Eventually, he got a message saying the party’s complaints team were looking into things ‘and would be in touch’ to hear his version of events.
That didn’t happen, though. Instead, Jagota was incensed to see Brandon Lewis issue a statement on Twitter seeking to downplay the growing controversy over the party’s handling of several other complaints about Islamophobia.
It read: ‘We deal with all complaints, none outstanding.’
Mr Lewis did not respond to a request for comment, however, sources close to the Tory chairman insisted that the party’s complaints process is fit for purpose.
Given that Jagota’s complaint about Islamophobia was at that stage very much outstanding, he believed those remarks were at best misleading, and at worst untrue.
So he emailed Lewis the following day to ask for an explanation. Once more, there was no reply. Christmas came and went, and on January 6, having still never been contacted by anyone in the Conservative Party or its complaints department, he decided he could no longer remain a party official.
‘No one bothered to contact me to properly investigate the incident, or ask for my version of events, he said. ‘So I decided it was time to give this up.’ His colleague Gerard Leake, who’d also complained about the incident to no avail, quit too, saying: ‘It seems the management of the party are not interested in sorting this out.’
Jagota’s letter of resignation was sent to Brandon Lewis and to Theresa May in Downing Street. While the party chairman yet again did not
‘The party line is to bury one’s head in the sand’
respond, a No 10 adviser named David Beckingham wrote to him in mid- February saying: ‘ Your complaint is being investigated and you will receive an update shortly.’ But no update came.
Indeed, it wasn’t until after a third, entirely separate complaint was made about Councillor Milburn’s behaviour — involving abusive remarks he allegedly made (within earshot of a Labour MP) about Kenyan athletes taking part in the Great North Run — that party bosses finally expelled him.
News of that move became public last month. But the saga isn’t yet over. Milburn, who denies ever making racist comments and has described the claims against him as ‘heresay’ and ‘tittle-tattle’, has vowed to appeal.
However things end, this particular shambles couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Tories. For in recent months, they have sought to make political capital from the appalling levels of anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
Tories were particularly gleeful when the Equalities and Human Rights Commission launched an inquiry into Labour’s practices.
However, the Tories now face a similar probe. Last Thursday, the commission said it had ‘received a complaint’ about Islamophobia in Tory circles and will ‘consider the issues raised’. This follows several incidents in which Tory councillors have shared questionable material via social media, only to be allowed to remain members of the party after serving short suspensions.
Take, for example, Mick Murphy, who sits on Ashfield Disctict Coucil in Nottinghamshire. Last summer, he shared on Facebook an image of a Muslim woman and her child, wearing burkhas, flanked by two black rubbish bags. The caption read: ‘I saw her standing there and I told her she had three beautiful children ... It was an honest mistake.’
Having served a brief suspension, he’s now once more a Conservative member of the council.
Then there is Jeff Potts, a Solihull borough councillor suspended by the party in September for sharing a Twitter post saying Muslims should be deported to avoid the risk that terrorists would ‘kill innocent people for generations to come.’ In November, it emerged he had been readmitted to the party (though he is still sitting as an independent on the council).
Then there’s Andrew Bowles, the Tory leader of Swale borough council, who described far-right activist Tommy Robinson as a patriot; Rosemary Carroll, a Pendle borough councillor, who shared a ‘joke’ on Facebook that compared an Asian person to a dog; Mike Payne, a Calderdale councillor, who posted an article on Facebook that described Muslims who claim welfare benefits as ‘parasites.’
And Ron McKail, an Aberdeenshire councillor, who treated his social media contacts to the image of three folded black patio umbrellas, with the caption: ‘I spent half an hour talking to them, wanting to learn about their culture until the bartender cut me off and told me they were patio umbrellas.’ All are now elected Tory councillors.
Perhaps the ugliest example centres on a Facebook group created by self-styled ‘supporters’ of Jacob Rees-Mogg, large numbers of whom are Conservative Party members, which has become a veritable sewer of Islamophobia.
Muslims are described as ‘cavemen’ and ‘Muzzies’ and the Prime Minister as ‘Sharia May’, owing to her alleged support for minorities.
On the day of the recent New Zealand terror attacks, it was used by a contributor purporting to be a party member to say: ‘I was going through a few magazines the other day down at the local Mosque. I was really enjoying myself. Then the rifle jammed.’
Last October, a Conservative Party official was alerted to racist material being published on the site, and they emailed both Brandon Lewis and the party’s complaints department to bring it to their attention.
In keeping with a worrying trend, the official received no reply.
A month later, they again emailed to ask if ‘any action is being taken’. They again received no reply.
It wasn’t until last month, when the site came to the attention of the online news outlet Buzzfeed
‘No one bothered to ask for my version of events’
The PM was described as ‘Sharia May’
that it was properly investigated. Around 25 members who used the site have now been suspended.
The baffling failure to adequately respond to complaints of Islamophobia isn’t just immoral, it is also bad politics. For in recent times, this lax complaints procedure has led to the Tories’ share of the Muslim vote fall to historic lows.
Mohammed Amin, chair of the Conservative Muslim Forum, says the party’s support among his community rose from 14-25pc when led by David Cameron, only to drop to 11pc at the 2017 election.
While Muslim votes have historically been concentrated in a few mostly safe Labour, inner- city seats, the growing prosperity of British Muslims means that’s no longer the case. But there is also another trend.
Amin cites Ilford North. ‘It was a rock- solid Tory seat for decades, but now has swung to Labour. One reason is that there are more Muslim voters there, who have moved out of the East End. We narrowly lost the seat in 2015, then in 2017 were beaten by far more.
‘If we want to win back seats like this, the party has to do far more.’
Amin adds: ‘There are many reasons for the rise in bigotry. But we need to take steps to stop it, and that means being open and honest about our disciplinary process.
However, until such reforms are implemented, Tory Party policy appears the opposite of openness.
On March 18, for example, the anti-racist group Hope Not Hate wrote to Brandon Lewis, asking for ‘an explanation’ for what it called his ‘untrue’ claim in October that no complaints about the matter were ‘outstanding’.
Like so many others who have sought to bring the scourge of Tory Islamophobia to light, they are still waiting to receive an answer.