Racial capitalism is a mediating force further exacerbating Islamophobia.

3.3 Situating Muslim populations in Britain’s imperial history of “race”, class, and gender relations. As the literature on racial capitalism emphasises, Britain’s racial, class and gender relations developed in the context of its formation as an empire. Virdee focuses on precisely this imperial and colonial history, underscoring the co-constitution of racial and class relations. He argues that the historic integration of some British workers into the nation was “underpinned by its notion of a singular people united by race and religion” (Virdee 2014, 5). A British identity centred on whiteness relied on the racialized othering of members of the global British working class from Ireland, the Caribbean, East Africa and South Asia (ibid). Virdee charts the history of this national compact in which the entitlements of deserving white workers to employment rights, fair wages and state welfare, made possible by Britain’s imperial political economy (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2018), took precedence over the rights of their colonised cousins. He notes that “class as a representational form and material relation was indelibly nationalized and racialized” (2014, 5). To this end, Shilliam shows constructions of the “white working class” as the “indigenous constituency, independent of colonial pasts, and unfairly displaced by multi-coloured newcomers”, which hinge on colonial distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor, are relevant today in relation to debates on Brexit (2019, 6). The result of the referendum on EU membership was explained as the revolt of “left behind” white working class voters, let down by a political class who had allowed excessive immigration. It is in this broader setting of “Taking Back Control” of Britain, offered by the Vote Leave campaign, that the experiences of an ethnically heterogeneous and largely working class British Muslim population, constructed as the undeserving poor, can be understood. Historically, British Muslims came predominantly from the Commonwealth countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, arriving to fill gaps in the British labour market in the post-war period, in manufacturing, the light industries, and the service sector (Peach 2006, 136). However, data from the last national census in 2011 shows that these groupings make up a falling percentage of the overall Muslim population, which numbers approximately 2.7 million people (MCB 2015). The proportion of Muslims who identify as “Black African” and “Black other” is rising, as is the proportion of those who describe themselves as “Arab” and “Asian other” (ibid.). This includes a growing Somali community, which the Muslim Council of Britain suggests could total 250,000 people (ibid.). Despite the ethnically heterogeneous makeup of Britain’s Muslims, structural inequalities reflected in unequal outcomes in housing, education, health, labour markets and the criminal justice system, cut across these groupings, albeit unevenly. Almost half of the Muslim population lives in the 10% most deprived areas in the UK, with 28% of households in social housing (MCB 2015). Given the link between deprived areas and poor health outcomes, Muslim women over the age of 65 are more afflicted by ill-health and disabilities, relative to the general population (Ibid). Muslims are unemployed at “nearly double” the rate of the general population, with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB 2015) citing a “religious penalty” compounding the broader discrimination faced by BME people in the labour market (Ibid). As Hall et al. (2017) show, groups already reliant on state welfare and public services have been the worst affected by austerity measures. For Britain’s Muslims, the reduction in quality of life has not simply been a consequence of class positioning, but is tied to how they are racialized as the undeserving poor, a process underway prior to the onset of austerity. Baker et al. show there were three “surges of interest in the subject” of so-called Muslim “benefit scroungers”, in 2001, 2003 and 2005; the first and last dates coinciding with the start of the War on Terror, and the London bombings (2013, 181), with a further “small peak” in 2008, coinciding with the GFC. They explore how initially it was prominent so-called “preachers of hate” who were maligned for being benefit scroungers, but that later this logic was applied by British newspapers to “any Muslim who receives benefits” (Baker et al. 2013, 187). Furthermore, these constructions were tied to right-wing critiques of a New Labour government accused of generous welfare “handouts” being “exploited by certain Muslims who want to destroy Britain’s way of life” (ibid). It is this intersection of “race” and class which has justified austerity politics targeted at the undeserving poor, composed of Britain’s racialized others, and within this to the everyday experience of Islamophobic hate crime.