“If we don’t make the white vote angry, he’s gone,” wrote the campaign staffer. “Go strong on the militant Moslem [sic] angle,” while making Tory voters fear “they are being used by the Moslems”. You may think the above writings are an example of a particularly vicious British National party intrusion into our democratic process. But this was the 2010 campaign of Phil Woolas, Labour’s immigration minister under Gordon Brown.

The result? A leaflet asking voters to stand by their candidate, claiming the Lib Dems wanted to “give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay” and warning of the “extremists” winning, accompanied by images of angry Islamist protesters clutching banners such as “Behead those who insult Islam”.

When Woolas was ejected from parliament for lying about his opponents, Labour MPs mutinied in his defence and raised money for a fighting fund: one fellow MP offered £1,500, while others demanded the then deputy leader, Harriet Harman, resign for backing the court’s decision to expel him.

Today, after days of an attempted Islamophobic pogrom on English streets, the question we should........

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