BORIS Johnson’s burka comments just refuse to go away, much to the annoyance of Prime Minister Theresa May.
Yesterday, she received a letter from the Muslim Council of Britain, urging her to subject her former foreign secretary to a full disciplinary inquiry.
READ MORE: Boris Johnson’s burka remarks make hate crime ‘more likely’
The MCB, the UK’s largest Muslim umbrella body with more than 500 affiliated national, regional and local organisations, mosques, charities and schools, said Islamophobic incidents had increased over the last week, since Johnson compared women wearing the burka to letter boxes and bank robbers in his Daily Telegraph column.
READ MORE: Split emerges in Tory party as Boris Johnson faces expulsion over burka comments
In yesterday’s paper, Johnson didn’t mention the row that has engulfed his party, instead arguing for a rise in the stamp duty threshold.
In a statement, the MCB said: “It is of deep concern that some Conservative Members of Parliament appear to be pressuring the chair of the party to dismiss the complaints made.
READ MORE: Boris Johnson's input on the burka should be welcomed by Muslims
“In contrast, it is the view of the Muslim Council of Britain that the process must be followed and no exception made for Mr Johnson.
“Mr Johnson deployed memes used previously by the far right and his comments appear to have spurred on anti-Muslim bigots, with attacks on Muslim women on the streets.
“A dismissal of the complaints at this initial stage would mean that the investigating officer considered the complaints, the impact on Muslim women on the street and the legitimisation of the far right to be ‘obviously trivial’ or ‘lacking in merit’.
READ MORE: Davidson backs calls for Boris to apologise over burka comments
“Such a decision would send a clear message that the party does not treat Islamophobia with the seriousness it deserves and would be an indictment of the party’s ability to take Islamophobia seriously.”
Tell Mama, a project monitoring anti-Muslim incidents, says it has seen a specific increase in the abuse of women wearing niqabs and hijabs in the last week.
Johnson, who has refused to apologise, is already subject to a disciplinary investigation by the Tories, after dozens of complaints alleging that he had breached the party’s code of conduct.,
The inquiry could lead to Johnson being suspended or thrown out of the party, although it seems much more likely he will be asked to undergo diversity training.
All of those would have to be signed off by May.
Johnson’s allies have complained about the process. The MP Jacob Rees-Mogg claimed it amounted to a “show trial”.
Over the weekend the former foreign secretary received an endorsement from Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon. The right-wing populist told a Sunday newspaper that Johnson was potentially “a great prime minister” who had “nothing to apologise for”.
May’s former de-facto deputy prime minister Damian Green said he feared Johnson was “being turned into a martyr by the alt-right”, which would be “a disaster for him and the Conservative Party”.
“I am particularly concerned by reports that President Trump’s sacked adviser Steve Bannon is forming a Europe-wide far-right campaign group – and has been in touch with Boris. I hope that no Conservative politician, including Boris, is taking advice from him about how the Conservative Party should behave,” Green wrote in an article for the Mail on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Johnson’s comments have attracted the support of the BNP, which said the he was putting the interests of the people “before that of the globalist paymasters”.
Labour MP David Lammy tweeted: “Boris Johnson’s Trump impression is so bloody obvious that even the deranged buffoons at the BNP can see it. Their endorsement of him should worry decent-minded politicians”.
In his latest column for the Telegraph, Johnson said “absurdly high” stamp duty should be cut.
Housing developers, he added, were showing “disdain” for young people. “This is meant to be Britain, the great home-owning democracy,” he wrote, “but we now have lower rates of owner- occupation for the under-40s than France and Germany.
“That is a disgrace. And you cannot expect young people to be sympathetic to capitalism when they find it so tough to acquire capital.”
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