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Labour must reach out to communities of faith

Labour must reach out to communities of faith

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Yesterday in South London the Labour leadership candidates Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn attended a hustings entitled “Faith in the Future of the Labour Party”. The event had been brought together by the Good Faith Partnership and a number of Labour faith groups. It was billed as an opportunity for the candidates to engage with faith communities and show how their leadership would work with faith groups.
 
I’ll start with the positives. The faith groups who set up the event deserve credit for pulling it off. It was great to see them operating together in their engagement with politics. Second, before the candidates spoke we had four short speeches from activists of the Sikh, Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. All of these were excellent, in fact they were by far the most engaging and challenging contributions that were heard all evening. For those, like me, whose confidence in the future of the party is somewhat ebbing it was especially heartening to hear from three young ethnic minority women activists.
 
The Christian speaker gave a rallying, uplifting call for working together as people of faith. The other three delivered the hardest and most sincere messages of the evening. The Muslim speaker told us just how serious a problem we have with the visibility and acceptance of Muslim women within political discourse. The Jewish speaker challenged the anti-semitism question head on, concluding that “Jews are not paranoid and we are not manipulative and our concerns need to be heard”. Finally, the prize for the bravest contribution of the night went to the Sikh speaker who used her Labour hustings speech to praise David Cameron for his work on Sikh relations and to criticise the Labour party for their failure to do so.
 
These were all serious points which pose important challenges for the party in terms of how it engages with faith groups. Given the diversity of our communities, and given the scale of faith involvement in social action and community, what would they actually do? Plenty, one would have thought, for the candidates to get their teeth into. The negative of the evening was that neither really bothered.
 
In their set piece speeches we got some nice platitudes about how important faith groups were in the foundation of the modern Labour party. Corbyn’s speech seemed oddly disjointed. It began with those platitudes and an anecdote about the diversity of his Islington constituency, them segued awkwardly into a basic reiteration of his economic policy, before swinging back to a final defence of his position on anti-semitism. It concluded with a call that interactions with faith groups needed to be “more than photo opportunities”. A nice sentiment, though what these interactions would be we would never hear.
 
Smith, characteristically, had the better sound bites and at least superficially seemed a little more engaged. He began by noting how dispiriting some of the points made by the faith activists had been, though how he planned to confront them again went unsaid. He said that the party needed to “rely on faith groups” and the two examples he drew on were food banks and countering the rise of hate crime.
 
When we came to the Q&A, however, even the platitudes ended. In a room literally filled with community organizers, faith activists, religious leaders and charity workers, we heard precisely nothing from either candidate about how they would actually engage with faith groups. We heard nothing about how either would win back those traditional Labour-backing faith groups (like the Sikhs) who are beginning to move away from the party. If you had come to the event hoping to hear how faith groups would, in practice or in principle, become partners in the movement and be part of a strategy for delivering change, then you left disappointed.
 
Both candidates promised we would get a deeper engagement with faith groups and an end to an interaction that was simply about “photo opportunities”. Tellingly, while we got no evidence of the former, we did at least end with a nice photo.
 

Ben Ryan is a researcher at Theos. 


Image via Youtube available under this Creative Commons Licence

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