Downing Street consults former Boris Johnson advisor who said Islamophobia 'exaggerated'
Downing Street is consulting Boris Johnson's former policy chief, who described institutional racism as a myth and defended the former prime minister likening Muslim women who wear veils to "letterboxes", on multiculturalism.
It comes amid suggestions that Keir Starmer's Labour government could adopt a more right-wing approach to immigration and multiculturalism in response to the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform party.
Munira Mirza, a prominent and polarising figure in British policy circles, ran the Number 10 policy unit from 2019 until 2022 under Johnson, and is now being consulted on multiculturalism by Starmer's aides, according to the Times.
A longtime critic of liberal multiculturalism, Mirza has reportedly been discussing "how to govern a multi-ethnic society" and the future of the left with Starmer's advisers, with the backing of the prime minister's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.
These conversations are occurring alongside talks with leaders of Blue Labour, a socially conservative faction of the party, who are working on a project entitled "Future of the Left" for the right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange.
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Widely accused of promoting Islamophobia, Policy Exchange was considered highly influential in shaping the counterextremism policy of the previous Conservative government.
Now it appears it has the ear of key Downing Street figures.
'Diversity is Divisive'
Mirza, whose family is originally from Pakistan, grew up in Oldham in the north of England.
She has extensively argued against state multiculturalism and suggested that Islamophobia and racism are exaggerated by anti-racism campaigners.
Mirza has argued that attempts to combat racial inequality through diversity programmes and what she called "box-ticking multiculturalism" encourage a "culture of grievance".
A Revolutionary Communist Party member as a student at Oxford, she wrote for its in-house journal, Living Marxism, until it was bankrupted and shut down in 2000 after being sued for accusing the ITN news organisation of inventing Serbian atrocities during the Bosnian genocide.
Mirza then wrote for Living Marxism's successor, Spiked, producing pieces with headlines that included "The Press Should Be Free to Ridicule Islam" and "Diversity is Divisive".
She became development director at Policy Exchange in 2006, publishing a paper the following year that argued multiculturalism encouraged Muslim extremism and claimed some Islamophobia was being "exaggerated" by some Muslims.
Mirza wrote that "the preoccupation with Muslim vulnerability and Islamophobia has skewered our understanding of why such problems exist, and in many ways, has made things worse for Muslims".
She asserted that this reflected a "victim mentality" that was "given social credence by institutions, politicians, the media and lobby groups".
Defending Boris Johnson
In 2010, Mirza argued that "the more we seek to measure racism, the more it seems to grow".
She worked closely with Johnson when he was mayor of London, and strongly criticised now-Foreign Secretary David Lammy's review of racism in the criminal justice system, which found widespread racial bias, in 2017. Mirza dismissed institutional racism as a "myth".
In 2018 she publicly defended Johnson after he claimed Muslim women wearing face veils "look like letter boxes".
She wrote that he "knows far more about Islam and Islamic cultures than most of the politicians who are now lining up to attack him".
Then, when Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Mirza was appointed head of the Downing Street policy unit.
In 2020, she presided over a commission on race and ethnic disparities, whose findings a United Nations report slammed as promoting "racist tropes and stereotypes", which the authors denied.
Some of Starmer's allies reportedly worry that the prime minister is set to lurch to the right on cultural issues like immigration and multiculturalism in a move to tackle Reform.
The news comes after the British Muslim Network (BMN) launched on Tuesday night with backing from the Labour government.
UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who nearly lost his seat in the last election to pro-Palestine activist Leanne Mohammed, and Labour's faith minister, Lord Wajid Khan, spoke at the BMN's launch and praised the group.
Streeting admitted that "successive governments and the Labour Party had not got the relationship right" with the Muslim community.
Yet the BMN itself has been plagued by accusations that it is unrepresentative of Muslim communities and risks undermining the Muslim Council of Britain's attempt to secure engagement from the government, a characterisation that the network denies.
Its launch represents a markedly different approach to multiculturalism to Mirza's.
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