Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss has claimed the Labour Party is influenced by “Islamism”, suggesting it is linked to a purported failure to tackle “grooming gangs”.
She further accused Muslim independent MPs of being “Islamist MPs” and suggested Islamism was connected to “climate change extremism”.
Truss, who was prime minister for under two months in 2022 and lost her seat in parliament in July 2024, made the comments in an interview on The Peter McCormack Show released on Friday.
The video racked up nearly 300,000 views in three days.
“We know that there is an ideology of Islamism which has become more powerful in British politics,” she said, in reference to the so-called grooming gangs scandal that has swamped the political discussion in the past week.
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“We’ve seen at the last election four Islamist MPs were elected.”
Truss claimed the police had failed to prosecute abusers partially due to “political correctness” and said that “local councillors with political power deliberately covered up and aided and abetted what happened.”
Over the past two decades, many Asian-origin and Muslim men have been prosecuted for severe sexual crimes, including rape, in several high-profile group cases.
This is typically referred to, including by the British government, as the “grooming gang” phenomenon.
Pakistani-origin and Muslim perpetrators only constitute a small percentage of group-based child sexual abuse cases in Britain.
However, innocent Muslims have been attacked, falsely imprisoned and even killed in the last several years over a narrative blaming Islam and Pakistani culture for the staggering child sexual abuse scandals.
Independent MP Shockat Adam told Middle East Eye that “divisive rhetoric is not going to define who we are and who I am.”
He dismissed Truss as “irrelevant” – but added that public figures should use “nuanced language in this polarised world”.
‘Four Islamist MPs were elected’
Four independent candidates – all of them newcomers to politics – were elected in the July general election on a pro-Palestinian platform, but none have described themselves as Islamist and Truss did not explain why she labelled them as such.
MEE has contacted them for comment.
Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohammed are members of a parliamentary Independent Alliance grouping alongside Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party.
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Corbyn likewise campaigned as an independent candidate on a pro-Palestinian platform in the July election.
Hussain told MEE earlier this week that he backed a new inquiry into “evil” sexual abuse, and said perpetrators should be “punished severely” and “made an example of”.
Truss continued in her interview to say that Islamism was “influencing the Labour Party, because they do not want to lose votes – lose votes in the election.”
“So we’ve got a combination of all those different things happening which creates a group think and creates a blindness to what’s going on,” she said.
“Or you could say it’s worse than blindness. You could say it’s deliberate neglect.”
Adam told MEE he believes Truss should be more “responsible”.
“We all have to work together and labels are not helpful,” he added.
‘Climate change extremism’
In the interview, Truss further suggested that Islamism is linked to “climate change extremism”.
“The ideology of Islamism, the ideology of net-zero-ism or climate change extremism – it’s no surprise that Greta Thunberg went from being an extremist on climate change or climate crisis, as she would call it, to being an extremist on Israel,” Truss said.
Thunberg, who became famous in 2019 as a climate activist, has vocally opposed Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.
Truss added: “There is an ideology here that has become more dominant not just in the British government, also in organisations like the BBC, who were found recently publishing huge numbers of articles that were anti-Israel, being very very biased.”
In 2024, lawyer Trevor Asserson produced a highly publicised report attacking the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, accusing it of anti-Israel bias.
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The study found that the BBC was 14 times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas, alleging a “deeply worrying pattern of bias”.
The BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen, dismissed the findings as “deeply flawed”.
Truss hired Asserson’s law firm earlier this week to send a cease and desist letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, accusing him of making “false and misleading” comments during the 2024 general election campaign that Truss “crashed the economy”.
Starmer’s spokesperson defended the comments on Thursday.
The law firm, which has its headquarters in London and its largest office in Tel Aviv, has taken up a number of pro-Israel causes in the UK over the past few years.
As prime minister, Truss’ mini-budget in September 2o22 announced £45bn of unfunded tax cuts, sending financial markets into a panic. Less than two weeks later, Truss resigned from the premiership.
She then lost her seat as an MP in the July 2024 election. Truss has maintained that she is a victim of a conspiracy.
