Prologue: “Political Islam” the Excuse for Britain’s Political Breakdown

Moral Panic Masks the Wreckage of its Own Making

When I responded on X to comments by Claire Coutinho, the Conservative MP and Shadow Energy Secretary, it was after her interview with Trevor Phillips. She claimed:

“There are parts of this country which are not properly integrated… Political Islam is a growing problem in Britain. Politicians elected on sectarian platforms petitioned the authorities to ban Israeli Jewish football fans from their areas. That’s not Britain as we know it.”

I clapped back:

“The Britain we know has been wrecked by your Party’s actions over decades, and unprincipled politicians who oil up foreign interests. Stick to your climate fear-mongering.”

Sarah Cholwill replied:

“Britain has not been wrecked. The country has moved through troubled times, and it happened that the Conservatives were in power at that time. What she is talking about is extremely important to modern Britain and should not be ignored.”

Sarah’s response gave me pause, not because it was right, but because it showed how deeply this narrative has already taken hold. Coutinho’s post and Phillips’s soft framing were loaded with assumptions that went unchallenged. Across Britain, people are being conditioned to believe “sectarianism” is creeping into politics, that “political Islam” isn’t just an influence, but an infiltration. It’s a dangerous idea, and one that demands more than a social-media reply. I wanted to provide a two-pronged response, as there are at least two issues here: first, the wreckage of Britain, and secondly, the issue of political Islam and conflation with Independent MPs.

Sarah’s comment “Britain has not been wrecked” reflects a polite form of denial that quietly sustains national decline. The wreckage isn’t abstract; it’s visible in every boarded-up shopfront, every overstretched hospital, every exhausted worker trying to make ends meet. Britain hasn’t simply “moved through troubled times”; it has been dragged through them by a political class now pretending that this is a cultural problem rather than the economic one they engineered. The Conservatives didn’t just “happen” to be in power; they were active architects of the situation we now find ourselves in. Austerity, deregulation, privatisation, these weren’t accidents of history; they were deliberate choices.

When people insist that this “should not be ignored,” they’re half right, but for the wrong reasons. What must not be ignored is how we got here, and who laid the groundwork for it. To be clear, this isn’t an exercise in partisan criticism. I’ll be just as honest and brutal about Labour, whose time in power, and its alignment with the same political and media ecosystem that shapes policy, messaging, and public perception, has left it entangled in the same machinery of blame and distraction. Together, these parties have convinced the public that others are responsible for the damage and that harm must be done to put things right.

The decline wasn’t the work of one party but a sequence of governments, coalitions, and ideologies reinforcing one another. The 2010 coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats set the tone for what followed, a decade of austerity that shrank local authority budgets by over 40% in real terms (IFS, 2019), forcing councils to cut libraries, youth centres, and social care. The Brexit years compounded the instability, knocking an estimated 4% off GDP according to the Office for Budget Responsibility and pushing business investment to 17% below pre-2016 trends. Meanwhile, both major parties courted the same donor networks and financial backers, ensuring that political risk always fell on the public, never on the markets.

This is the real context behind the current moral panic. When a political system runs out of credibility, it doesn’t admit failure; it changes the subject. The Conservatives, now out of power, are attempting rehabilitation through division, reviving the language of “political Islam” and “sectarianism” to frame decay as infiltration - but to be clear, this again isn’t a partisan criticism, it’s happening across the political spectrum. Labour, anxious to appear “strong on extremism”, echoes the same framing rather than rejecting it. The coalition years, the Brexit crisis, and the post-COVID stagnation were all moments where national unity was traded for political survival. The rhetoric of infiltration is simply the latest attempt to rebrand that failure as vigilance.

This leads to the second aspect of Coutinho’s soundbite; it’s clear there’s a wider distraction campaign at play. The “football ban” on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans before their match at Aston Villa, petitioned by an independent Muslim MP, was twisted into a story of anti-Semitism and “sectarian politics.” It was the perfect spark for a narrative waiting to happen. As mentioned, fourteen years of Tory rule hollowed out local government, sold off public assets, and turned every crisis into a marketplace. Now, out of office, they’ve found a new business model: culture war.

Seasoned political observers will see the pattern immediately; others may not, and that’s the point. Recognising this, as framing “political Islam” as an existential threat, the Tories are laundering their failures through moral panic. Talk about “sectarianism” long enough and you never have to talk about what you sold, who you sold it to, or why Britain no longer works. The deflection serves two purposes: it pressures Labour to overcompensate, locking both parties into the same moral script, and it restores Tory relevance by resurrecting an old ghost: fear of the internal enemy. Britain’s disintegration wasn’t infiltrated; it was home-grown, market-driven, and Conservative-authored.

So here’s the longer piece, not just a reply to a soundbite, but an attempt to trace how ‘political Islam’ became the latest excuse for a political system running out of truth.

Political Islam and Sectarianism in Britain - the Fallacy. Full Read.