BY STEWART SLATER

Britain’s politics have become the living proof that if you have a hammer, everything is a nail.

For no sooner had Lee Anderson once more treated the country to his “insights” than the cry went up that they were racist. And the reaction was as swift as might have been expected by any Mediaeval woman accused of witchcraft, if rather less painful. Less than 24 hours later, the whip was suspended. It is interesting, if not surprising, to note that, having taken twice as long to suspend their own candidate in the Rochdale by-election, Labour appears to believe that the Conservatives were unconscionably dilatory.

But before lighting the torches and preparing the kindling around the stake, it would be useful to consider what Anderson actually said. Standards of evidence may have been low in witch-burning times but we are, as we like to tell ourselves, better than that.

                        “I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London, and they’ve got control of Starmer as well …People are just turning up in their thousands, and doing anything they want, and they are laughing at our police. This stems with Khan, he’s actually given our capital city away to his mates”

There is, I think we can all agree, no overt racism here. There are no ethnic slurs, nor any biologically-essentialist suggestion that Sadiq Khan behaves in the way he does because of his origins. It is less-reported, but important, that he attacks Keir Starmer in the same terms that he attacks the mayor. Criticising two people of two different races for the same thing in the same terms cannot reasonably be described as treating them differently due to their ethnic origins. Some day Sadiq Khan may come to realise that attacking his narcissistic incompetence and Macavity-like sense of personal responsibility is not, ipso facto, evidence of racism but, on the evidence of his subsequent comments, that dawn has not yet risen.

However, if there is no clear instance of racism in Anderson’s quote, that does not, of course, let him off scot-free. The argument, as far as I can tell, is that “Islamists” are Muslims, Muslims tend to be of a different race to “native” Westerners, therefore, because the “victims” of “anti-Islamism” will, in all likelihood, be overwhelmingly non-caucasian, condemning “Islamism” is condemning those of other races due to their race.

Let us, as therapists would say, “unpack” that a little.

Many years ago, my normally mild-mannered Latin tutor gave me a bollocking for describing the rather dour Roman hero, Aeneas as “chivalrous”. This was, he pointed out, a word with a specific meaning relating to a code of conduct developed in a specific place and time and, having only arisen about a millennium and a half after Virgil’s death, it was, he said, completely unacceptable to apply it to the Roman world. From this I took the important, if I think, generally forgotten lesson that words mean what they say. Nothing more and nothing less.

Anderson was clear to use the word “Islamist”. Islamism is the belief that the world should be organised along certain Muslim principles (specifically, in practice, those from the Wahhabi branch of the Sunni version of the faith) and, this is the important bit, that action should be taken to bring this about. All Islamists may be Muslim, but not all Muslims are Islamist. Indeed, the vast majority such as the clean-shaven, whiskey-swilling descendant of the prophet Muhammad with whom I once worked, are not. In a similar way, devout Catholics who are actively trying to return Britain to the loving embrace of the Holy Mother Church of Rome are rather less numerous than those parishioners who would, on balance, prefer that the country was Catholic but are willing to accept it as it is. Attacking a political belief derived by some from a religion is not the same as attacking the religion itself or its adherents. We do, of course, know this. Every November we celebrate Guy Fawkes’ failure but we do not use it to justify a pogrom on Catholics. And, as many of those who attack Mr Anderson are keen to point out in another context, anti-Zionism is not evidence of anti-Semitism.

But, even if we accept that an attack on Islamism is an attack on Islam and Muslims, does it necessarily follow that it is racist? For there are Western Muslims as there have been Western Islamists such as Sally-Anne Jones, the ISIL recruiter nicknamed the “white widow”. The world’s most populous Muslim country is Indonesia whose residents are of a different ethnic origin to, say, Tunisians. There is no single ethnicity to which Islam maps. Indeed, were there one, to Islam, this would be a sign of failure since, as a proselytising religion like Christianity but unlike, say, Hinduism and Judaism, its aim is to bring all the world’s peoples under its sway.

Let us, however, be generous and grant that an attack on Islamism is an attack on Islam and due to the minority origins (in this country) of the majority of its adherents, this can reasonably be called racist and should therefore be banned. What next? The obvious implication is that attacks on any form of belief primarily practised by an ethnic minority should be outlawed. Which means no criticism of Hinduism. Of Confucianism. Of Sikhism. Etc. Etc. Under such an understanding, those who chose to practise the religion of the Aztecs (which majored on human sacrifice) could not be criticised if it was their ancestral belief. It may be that this is a position one may wish to reach, but there is a certain irony in seeing, as we do, Muslim commentators, whose faith teaches that polytheists should be made outlaws with no rights, adopt it.

This is not, however, to let Mr Anderson off the hook. If his comments were not racist, they were certainly crass and had an air of conspiracism about them. Shadowy groups of “Islamists” may or may not exist but the notion that they have “control” over Sadiq Khan is, let us say, unevidenced. Any brief consideration of his track record would suggest that his failing is at least as likely to be down to cock-up as to conspiracy. If Mr Anderson truly cared about London as a place rather than the punchline for his vice-signalling “plain-speaking Northerner speaks truth to effete Southern posh boys” schtick, he perhaps would be less keen to give the mayor yet another excuse to neglect his day job.

Nor does it mean that the Tories were wrong to remove the whip from him. A political party should have an absolute right to choose who represents it. Given that their first priority is the acquisition of power, it is hard to say that Mr Anderson has, by yanking the spotlight back from the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism problems, made that task any easier. His comments were, to misquote Talleyrand, worse than a crime because they were a mistake. Still, at least having acted as it did, the government has the high ground next time (and we all know there will be a next time) some Labourite is caught saying something untoward about Israel.

But if there is political benefit in sending one of their own to the hospital so that, in future, the government can send one of the opposition’s to the morgue, we might want to stop and ask if this is really a game we wish to be playing. For if Mr Anderson’s remarks were crass but no crime, he is, at worst, guilty of a failure of manners, victim of an ever more complex code of etiquette designed to separate “us” – who know how to behave – from “them” – the uncultured savages who do not. Like the late Queen’s Lady in Waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, fired from her job at the palace for asking a guest where she came from, it was not the plain meaning of his words which condemned him, nor any traditional understanding of racism, nor even a coherent understanding which condemned him, it was a failure to keep up with an ever-changing and ever-narrowing code of acceptable conduct.

Societies which go down that path are rarely thriving, vibrant communities. Like pre-Revolutionary France and the late Chinese Empire, they are moribund and stagnant, energies which could be used productively, deployed instead to police a vast range of impeccably mannered drones, status being awarded for courtly behaviour rather than concrete endeavour. We all know how that ended up. “Well behaved girls don’t make history”, the slogan tells us. Neither do well-behaved men.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.