The UK election will be about more than just policy

The misogyny of certain right-wing parties in the UK is impossible for polite society to ignore, writes Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

The United Kingdom’s Independence Party this week announced its manifesto for the upcoming British general election with a huge section on integration, clearly targeting Muslims. Niklas Halle’n / AFP

The far-right parties of Europe are experiencing a resurgence. And one of their cornerstones is to scapegoat Muslims. The United Kingdom’s Independence Party, known as Ukip, this week announced its manifesto for the upcoming British general election with a huge section on integration that was – even for those who want to wilfully deny the anti-Muslim ticket on which Ukip stands – clearly targeting Muslims specifically to treat them as lesser subjects of the realm.

Their concerns, they said, were integration and security. Predictably, they want to ban Sharia. Although of course no such thing exists in the UK, only non-binding arbitration proceedings that Muslims can choose to take part in. Jewish communities have something similar but Ukip are not interested in those. Also, predictably, they talked of banning the full face veil. To get the blood pumping they call it the “Burqa Ban”.

Laughably, for a party that wants to ban Sharia, they found themselves pontificating on national media – as though they were Muslim clerics –about the religious validity and obligation to cover the face. Were they now the arbiters of religious law?

Of course, blaming integration or security on Muslim women is nothing new. Muslim women are both victim and criminal and if Ukip can win some votes at the expense of demonising some women then they don’t care.

And here’s the rub of it. Bullying women is the last hope of a party that has nothing to say.

But it gets worse. They want to implement mandatory checks on Muslim girls “at risk” of female genital mutilation. This is a new manifesto policy to encourage integration.

The check would be every year and after any travel abroad. You have to let that sink in – forcing intimate checks on children. To “protect” them.

That’s abuse.

That’s full fat misogyny and racism, and a complete absence of self-awareness and irony. Ukip want to force children to have mandatory sexual checks every year or after coming back from holiday. FGM is disgusting, yes, but forcing female children to be examined is a form of abuse too. I don’t think we’d have this discussion about upper-class boys from Eton being forced to undergo intimate investigation. My stomach churns at the thought. It shows disrespect for female bodies and dehumanising of those of other backgrounds.

Yet Muslim children can be discussed in this disgusting and abusive fashion. I look at my six-year-old daughter and dread what might happen to her. For no other reason than she is Muslim.

Would they extend this to other Muslims too when they enter the UK? Current laws would not permit it. But I cannot sit by and watch the climate change from hostile to downright life threatening.

Ukip is hopefully in voting terms an irrelevance (the leader is currently not even standing for election although that might change) but it’s the fact that such ideas and the predisposition towards seeing Muslim women as objects that means that such manifesto proposals need to be tackled head on. Otherwise I’d give them no airtime at all.

Apart from the very idea of forcing such examinations on girls, the policy has practical problems too.

Who decides which children are deemed at risk and by what parameters is that decision made? If the child refuses to be tested, do we force them, and if so by what legal authority? Can the child be prosecuted for refusing? Who will be responsible for enforcement, monitoring and collecting data?

This isn’t a discussion about whether FGM is acceptable or not, because it’s not. It’s wrong. This is about Ukip, a right-wing racist party standing on an Islamaphobia ticket with their major policies being the policing of Muslim women’s bodies for their own good. I think the mental pictures it creates of women being forced to remove face veils or little girls and women having their intimate areas examined, on the basis this will improve integration, is sick to say the least.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of the books Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World and Love in a Headscarf

On Twitter: @loveinheadscarf