Alex Miller
According to an August 11 press release issued by the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), police figures show that religious hate crimes in London, targeted primarily at the Muslim community, have risen by almost 700% compared to 2004 in the three weeks following the July 7 London bombings. In the same period, racist attacks in Scotland rose by a quarter compared to 2004. In response, the SSP pledged to fight Islamophobia and the attacks on multiculturalism that conservative politicians and the right-wing media have been encouraging in the wake of the bombings.
On August 3, an SSP press release criticised Conservative Party shadow defence minister Gerald Howarth, who was reported as saying of Muslims: "If they don't like our way of life, there is a simple remedy: go to another country, get out."
According to SSP national convener Colin Fox: "Every politician who makes the kind of remarks that Gerald Howarth did must share responsibility for the massive upsurge in racist and Islamophobic violence over the past weeks. These kind of remarks are fuelling hatred on our streets and giving racist thugs the respectable cover they need to carry out attacks in broad daylight, such as the one on two Asian men in Leith last week."
Fox also identified the "very real danger that the racist and Islamophobic remarks of politicians along with inflammatory material in certain sections of the press will launch a tidal wave of violence against our ethnic minority communities". He said that the SSP "pledges to stand alongside Scotland's Muslim and ethnic minority communities against racism and Islamophobia and to continue our campaigns against the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and in defence of our civil rights and for peace and justice".
On August 12, SSP parliamentarian Tommy Sheridan said that he would fail the British citizenship test being flagged for immigrants. "For Conservative shadow ministers to talk of deporting people who reject a British identity puts them in the same sewer as the far right neo-Nazis like the BNP.
"Those who demand we all swear allegiance to a British identity had better prepare to deport every Scot who sees themselves as a republican. I want to see Britain broken up and the Crown made redundant, not swear allegiance to them. An independent Scottish socialist republic, which banished poverty, obscene inequality and nuclear weapons, would secure my allegiance. I consider Britain to be a blood-thirsty monster which spread its influence across the globe at the end of a bayonet and a canon."
The SSP is backing a call by the Muslim Association of Britain for an all-Britain demonstration in defence of civil liberties on September 24, and Fox and Sheridan will address public meetings in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the lead-up to the demonstration.
From Green Left Weekly, August 24, 2005.
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