I have just returned from the UK Conservative Party's annual conference in Birmingham, where I heard British Prime Minister Theresa May make the most nationalistic speech uttered by any recent British prime minister. The Conservative Party angrily denies claims that this nationalism has anything to do with racism or bigotry, and I have so far felt inclined to accept this. However, details are now starting to emerge of a troubling incident during the Conservative Party conference which if true does indeed suggest that the Conservatives may be on the way to becoming a sectarian and even racist political party. This incident concerns the fringe meeting hosted by TellMAMA, a respected UK organisation which monitors anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry. The facts are contested, and the full story has not yet been established. However, this much is undisputed: Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of TellMAMA, arrived with his team late last Tuesday afternoon to make preparations for the evening fringe event. They were denied conference passes. According to TellMAMA's account of events, what followed was unacceptable. The TellMAMA team told me that they were harassed by security guards in an unpleasant way. TellMAMA staff say that these guards followed them around, stared at them in a threatening fashion, and insulted one of them. Despite making representations through third parties, TellMAMA staff were unable to get into the conference and obliged to cancel the fringe event at the last minute. Crucially, this is not an isolated case. This treatment of TellMAMA fits in with an established pattern of contemptuous or insulting behaviour from the UK Conservative Party towards Muslim organisations. Three years ago, I chaired a conference fringe meeting arranged by the Muslim group Engage aimed at boosting Muslim participation in British politics. The businessman and political activist Sufyan Ismail made an eloquent case that Muslims were natural Conservatives. However, an otherwise impressive occasion was marred by the failure of the party to deliver on an official promise that a Conservative Party MP would speak at the event. When I confronted the then party chairman Grant Shapps about it later, he told me there had been "security issues". However, as Shapps in due course admitted to me, this excuse had no basis in truth. Last year, a conference event about Muslim charities arranged by the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO) in the UK was cancelled at the very last moment. Conservative Party Chairman Andrew Feldman reached this decision following the publication of a newspaper article claiming that one of the charities, Human Appeal, had links with terrorism. Unfortunately, the Conservative Party cancelled the event (at which I had also been booked to speak) without checking the newspaper's claims and crucially without contacting ACEVO or Human Appeal. When I examined the article the following day, it was easy to see that it contained a number of serious errors, as the Conservative Party could have discovered had it taken the trouble to check the story. So there is a demonstrable pattern of abusive or contemptuous behaviour towards Muslim organisations at Conservative Party conferences. Now let's try a thought experiment. Let's imagine that the Community Security Trust (CST), the respected body which exposes anti-Semitism in the UK, had been treated this way at a Labour Party conference. Let's imagine that they had been denied passes, and then said that their staff had been harassed by security guards. I reckon that this would have quickly made the news and been interpreted as evidence of embedded institutional anti-Semitism in the UK Labour Party. I have no doubt that Party leader Jeremy Corbyn would have ordered an immediate investigation and probably apologised fulsomely to the CST. There's no evidence yet of much of this happening in the wake of the TellMAMA fiasco at the Conservative Party conference. When I spoke to a party representative, he put the blame squarely on TellMAMA. According to this account, TellMAMA applied too late for its conference passes. The security company involved flatly denied the TellMAMA claim that its staff had behaved in a threatening way. A spokesman said that "we are very happy that our staff behaved in an entirely appropriate manner." The Conservative Party added the extra claim that TellMAMA had itself been abusive to the member of Conservative Party staff who had refused their passes. At this point I need to declare an interest. I have known TellMAMA for many years. I sat on the panel and spoke at the press conference which launched the group four years ago. They are a UK government-funded body which does excellent and badly needed work exposing bigotry and intimidation towards Muslims, and it is of course hugely ironic that TellMAMA now claims that its officers were themselves abused at a Conservative Party conference. There are two contradictory accounts of how TellMAMA was refused entry to the Conservative conference, and nobody yet knows the truth. But let's bear in mind that the alleged treatment of TellMAMA forms part of a pattern of behaviour by the Conservative Party towards Muslim organisations. The Party's candidate for the mayor of London elections last year, Zac Goldsmith, campaigned against the Labour Party candidate Sadiq Khan on blatantly sectarian lines. At one stage, former Conservative prime minister David Cameron even went so far as to vilify Suliman Gani, a south London imam who had connections with Khan, as a supporter of Islamic State (IS), an outrageous and unfounded charge. Only after the mayoral election was over did the then prime minister utter a feeble apology. So there is a history here which means that it is essential that the new Conservative Party Chairman Patrick Mcloughlin gets to the bottom of what happened in Birmingham last week and apologises if need be. Equally, if TellMAMA's claims are unfounded then it should retract them. Last week's conference was a success in many respects. Theresa May has unified her party, something no other senior party figure could have managed in the wake of the European Union referendum vote. She made a capable conference speech, and the Conservatives projected themselves as a party of government. However, there is a point at which nationalism can turn into bigotry. If TellMAMA's story is true, then that point was passed at Birmingham last week. The writer was the British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013.
