This robust approach to criminal justice was duly backed by Lowe: “Now you’re talking”. In truth, though, the broader political currents Hussain represents are likely less pleasing to his fellow backbencher. For in his enthusiastic declaration of Islamic values, especially as a balm for the nation’s woes, he is the avatar for an increasingly prominent kind of British Muslim: educated, self-confident, political. Echoed across the country’s cultural life, and indeed in its birthrates, men like Hussain could soon shape life far beyond the internet, with vast consequences for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Perhaps the best place to understand the rising power of Britain’s Muslims is not Westminster, or even Hussain’s Blackburn — but my hometown of Luton. It’s safe to say the place that hosted the Islamist “Butchers of Basra” demonstrations, and is the birthplace of the EDL, does not have the finest reputation. Over recent years, in fact, it’s become a kind of negative poster boy for the terminally online Right, what with its Islamic schools, halal butchers and peri-peri chicken joints. Its once-thriving pubs, meanwhile, are becoming a thing of the past, and though there’s a Christian revival of sorts, it’s mostly immigrant-inspired.

That’s hardly the best news for people like Rupert Lowe, anxious over ethnic and racial change. Yet the fact is that where Luton leads, the country is heading. According to the most recent census, after all, 3.8 million Muslims now live in England: a sharp rise from 2.7 million in 2011. From 2001 to 2021, England’s Muslims have risen by nearly 150% in terms of number of people, and grown by 116% as a proportion of the national population. A sharp decline in Christian identification has only hastened these trends, as have Muslim birthrates. Think, again, of Luton. It’s now a majority-nonwhite town where one in three residents are Muslim. More than that, it’s the baby capital of England, with Slough, Oldham and much of East London following closely behind. Judging by the recent data, the demographic trajectory of England will be increasingly shaped by Islamic social conservatism.

Behind the headline growth, however, or the vivid streetscapes of towns like Luton, Britain’s Muslim population remains strangely complex. Studies suggest that the country’s Muslims believe in the richness of Britain’s opportunities — yet aren’t particularly impressed with the society they live in. Once again, the numbers here are telling. Though over 85% think this is a good place to live, over three in five feel that most Britons put themselves over their families or communities. Strikingly, this number rises even higher among British Muslim millennials.

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That last figure strikes at the heart of the so-called “integration paradox”: the idea that as ethnic and religious minorities become more integrated into the economic and social mainstream over the generations, they will do away with their ancestral and faith-based identities. This optimistic theory has been blown to smithereens by the British Muslim experience. Just like Adnan Hussain, a former solicitor born in Burnley, younger Muslims are not only more likely to be born in the UK, educated at British universities, and work as white-collar professionals than their elders — they are also more inclined to identify with their faith.

Compared to their elders, younger conservative Muslims are generally more aware of the excesses of social liberalism in mainstream Britain, even as they fail to share their cultural connections with ancestral homelands. It’s in Islam, not Kashmir or Sylhet, that they find a true sense of belonging, a trend that will only continue as Muslims from different ethnic communities intermarry. All the while, younger Muslims tend to have greater expectations and demands of the nation’s politics, certainly compared to foreign-born elders who were often just grateful to escape conflict or corruption.

That shift, in turn, makes younger British Muslims more prone to disappointment with the nation’s institutions, especially over issues with an implicitly religious character, notably Palestine. There is also the ironic possibility that by being more integrated — economically, educationally — younger socially conservative Muslims are more exposed to secular trends not to their liking. Young Muslim YouTubers shaming the social mainstream over perceived forms of moral degeneracy are hardly in short supply, even as figures like Hussain are tougher on deportations than many white liberals.

All this works to reinforce the religious identity of British Muslims. And if that encourages many to “selectively” integrate — being decent neighbors and working hard without fully immersing themselves in the country’s culture — that still leaves a stark divide with the non-Muslim majority, especially around women’s rights and mixed-sex interaction. Consider the case of Maheen Kamran. An aspiring medical student who won the seat of Burnley Central East in last year’s local elections, she ran on a platform which not only called for an improvement in school standards and public cleanliness — but also encouraged public spaces to prevent “free mixing” between Muslim men and women. More recently, the East London Mosque organized a fun run which barred female participation.

The mosque’s decision caused predictable outrage from liberal politicians. But that still leaves the question of how eager British Muslims are to take advice from the mainstream on matters of gender equality, especially given its struggles over even defining what a woman actually is. That’s broadly been Hussain’s own line. More than that, British Muslim traditionalists, whether in Luton, Blackburn or elsewhere, may well argue that Western-style empowerment has contributed to the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family unit, and has fed the fertility crisis which means Britain now faces an economic timebomb. And all this in a country where a fifth of people routinely report that they have an unfavorable view of Muslims as a group.

These tensions may even get worse, as upwardly mobile British Muslims begin to hold more positions of influence in business, the public sector, and larger civic associations. Indeed, there are growing signs of religious co-ordination across sectors, with the new Muslim Impact Forum (MIF) having a central mission of “uniting Muslim leaders and institutions across politics, charity, and business to move ideas into collective action”. This hints at a broader point. While the ever-growing British Muslim population has been caricatured by some as an undereducated and welfare-dependent monolith, one which has colonized Britain’s social housing stock, the reality is somewhat different.

In truth, it’s a relatively youthful population, one defined by its upward social mobility — and which is increasingly assertive across national life. Young British Muslim sportspeople, notably England’s Pakistani-heritage cricketers Shoaib Bashir and Rehan Ahmed, have not shied away from expressing the centrality of their Islamic faith. Something similar can be said of Tottenham Hotspur’s Djed Spence, who in September became the first recognized Muslim to play international men’s football for England during their 5-0 win in Serbia.

Hussain aside, the most obvious recent example in politics is Shabana Mahmood’s appointment as home secretary. Her arrival in Marsham Street was met with disquiet by some on the Right due to her religious background, and the fact that she was allegedly the first Muslim to take up the post. Not quite: Sajid Javid, who was the first home secretary of Pakistani Muslim origin, appears to have been memory-holed — which tells us much about changing attitudes. It almost feels as if, as a “hyper-integrated” Muslim, one with a white British wife and who once said that Christianity was the only faith practiced in his home, Javid didn’t count as a real Muslim. Yet if Javid was the kind of “sanitized” Muslim more acceptable to the political mainstream, he is far from the norm. Echoing Hussain and other Muslim MPs, Mahmood has told The Times that Islam is the “centerpoint” of her life.

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Faith aside, Mahmood has plenty on her plate. Consider the small-boats crisis, a thoroughgoing national emergency, and one largely down to the unchecked importation of younger males from Muslim-majority countries: exactly the kind of person Hussain and Lowe would like to send back home. At the same time, Labour recently announced a national statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, with Mahmood finally announcing Baroness Anne Longfield as the chair. That’s a start, but as a minister of Pakistani-Muslim heritage herself, Mahmood will be under pressure to make sure the inquiry thoroughly investigates the cultural and societal drivers behind the abuse, especially when men of her own ethno-religious background are disproportionately involved. Then there’s the looming threat of Islamism, with antisemitism partly promoted by Britain’s segregated Muslim communities.

Whether fair or not, anyway, Mahmood will be under extra pressure to deliver as home secretary because of her ethnic identity and religious affiliation — which exposes the growing tendency to hold British Muslims “collectively responsible” for problems surrounding security and integration. Mahmood, like many of her peers, has another major headache too: the rise of religio-political mobilization within traditionally Labour-voting British Muslim communities. In her seat of Birmingham Ladywood, she was run close in the last general election by pro-Gaza independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob, who also performed well in the last West Midlands mayoral election. British Muslim voters have deserted Labour in droves under Starmer’s leadership; before being elected as an independent, Adnan Hussain was a Labour activist.

Here’s yet another irony: British Muslims have become so socially integrated, and politically disillusioned, that they’re now mobilizing along religious lines, electoral shifts which be devastating for Labour in Muslim-dominant parts of the country. That’s especially if Your Party, the Greens, and George Galloway’s Workers Party for Britain, as well as the wider pro-Palestine independent movement, are all able to organize coordinated electoral pacts. All this varied activity could transform British politics, particularly if backed by traditional ethnic-minority habits that pool resources for community projects.

It’s clear, then, that the country is entering uncharted territory, with several of England’s provincial towns effectively becoming political battlegrounds between traditional British nationalists and Islamic social conservatives, with the only thing they share being a hatred of the so-called “legacy parties”. Some of the results from the local elections earlier this year provide a flavor of what is to come. Despite Reform UK taking control of Lancashire council, its candidates were beaten by independent Muslim candidates across Burnley and Preston. Whatever way you look at it, Britain is changing — and not necessarily in a direction Rupert Lowe will welcome.

Vox pops of Leave voters are too often restricted to white working-class folk in northern England and provincial towns across the Midlands. Regular venues are pubs and working men’s clubs. Soundbites such as “make Britain great again” and “put the Great back in Great Britain” are typical. As well as featuring on primetime TV, these segments are often used as digestible clips on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

But the coverage simply doesn’t reflect the diversity of the Brexit vote. Not all Leave voters are white, left-behind people who live in de-industrialised ‘hollowed-out’ communities. Nor are they all dispossessed ‘nativists’ longing for a bygone era of British territorialism and imperial might. This idea of Brexit as a “white working-class revolt” – an uprising of the nostalgic in stagnant regions abandoned by the London-centric political establishment – is put about by the media, and there is some truth in it.

But there is much more to it, too. Why else, for example, would Milton Keynes, a new town commercial hub, and Watford, with its multi-ethnic population and Zone 7 London Underground station, vote Leave? Media portrayals barely begin to tell the story of why 17.4 million people voted to get out.

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Data suggests that euroscepticism in Britain’s South Asian population – particularly the UK’s Indian ethnic group – is stronger than previously thought. Look at Osterley and Spring Grove. A relatively affluent, non-white-majority ward in the west London borough of Hounslow, it returned a Leave vote of 63.4%. Defying the wider national trend, non-white ethnicity was associated with voting Leave in the two multi-ethnic west London boroughs of Hounslow and Ealing.

A number of jurisdictions with large South Asian populations also delivered Leave votes, including Luton (56.5%), Hillingdon (56.4%), Slough (54.3%) and Bradford (54.2%). All have South Asian populations of 25% and above. It is fair to assume that these figures relied on healthy support for Brexit among voters of South Asian origin.

I wonder if political journalists and correspondents are aware of these voting patterns. If so, where are the vox pops with first-generation South Asian elders in Luton and Slough? How many economically secure west Londoners of Indian origin have been asked by mainstream media outlets to articulate their desire for the UK to leave the EU?

Why did the home-owning, higher-status workers in Osterley, many of whose origins are in Gujarat and the Punjab, not vote in a way – according to convention – that their socio-economic class would predict? [1.  Why did some South Asians vote for a campaign that was, at times, seen as bigoted and xenophobic? I have discussed various reasons here: perhaps voters didn’t feel particularly European; or perhaps the Leave camp’s pro-Commonwealth rhetoric pulled hard on the heartstrings; or perhaps the supposedly xenophobic and racist elements of the Leave campaign just didn’t offend many well-integrated, South Asian voters who strongly identify with the UK.]

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Their views could add great value to the national coverage as to how the Leave vote came about – which still seems to mystify many. London-based journalists don’t need to visit working-men’s clubs in the north and pubs in the provincial Midlands to find Brexit voters. They could look no further than the mandirs and gurdwaras in west London.

Osterley is a ten-minute drive from Sky News HQ, and comfortably under an hour from BBC Broadcasting House on the Tube. So why the myopia? Perhaps it is simply a case of the media being incredibly lax, not with their travel plans but with their research. Maybe the broad exclusion of South Asian Leavers is simply the result of ignorance.

The cynic in me wonders if this is the conceivably intentional no-platforming of non-white Brexit voters whose attitudes are at odds with the media’s dominant narrative. Could it be an orchestrated effort that seeks to portray the Leave result as precipitated by nostalgic, left-behind, lesser-educated, misinformed white working-class folk – low-resourced “simpletons” driven by their irrational jingoistic impulses? In short, is it a Remain plot?

I would like to think not, but either way, the use of vox pops in ‘Brexit Britain’ shows that the media cannot be fully trusted to delve into why important political and social events, such as the Leave vote in June 2016, take place. The appetite for thorough investigation and reporting realities has increasingly given way to the peddling of simplistic narratives.

In the case of Brexit, the dominant media narratives fail spectacularly in capturing the complex nature of British euro-scepticism. Brexit has exposed an unfortunate reality – that the media’s commitment to reporting the facts, pure and simple, leaves a lot to be desired. And while this could be the product of bad journalism and poor research, there is also the possibility that that its ‘research and inform’ function has been usurped by a role as ‘narrative manufacturers’. And that’s a big worry.