What is driving Britain's Muslim Brotherhood panic?

There is a familiar pattern in politics.

When a problem feels too complex to tackle honestly, people look for shortcuts. In Britain, the latest talk of banning the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be driven by that same impulse.

Rather than engage with Muslim civic life, the British government has once again submitted to scapegoating and rendering these communities suspect.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has already said the government is keeping the issue "under very close review".

In the Commons on Tuesday, when Reform UK MP Richard Tice asked Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper whether she would ban the group outright, she raised concerns about whether the Brotherhood is fuelling extremism abroad.

Such comments create the sense of a threat without offering any real evidence.

We have been here before. In 2015, the UK government conducted a formal review of the Muslim Brotherhood, examining its ideology, activities and presence in Britain.

It did not recommend a ban or find grounds for proscription.

That investigation was carried out under a Conservative administration with every political incentive to be "tough". If the evidence was not there then, it is hard to see what has changed now.

Today, 'Muslim Brotherhood' is being turned into a vague label pinned on any Muslim organisation that certain foreign governments dislike

To be clear, the Muslim Brotherhood is not an organisation I am here to defend.

Like any large political or religious movement, it has its shortcomings and internal contradictions. But that is hardly unique. Any movement marked by decades of struggle across different countries will exhibit both strengths and weaknesses.

Today, however, "Muslim Brotherhood" is being turned into a vague label pinned on any Muslim organisation that certain foreign governments dislike and that some domestic politicians find convenient to target.

The renewed push for a ban has little to do with fresh intelligence or updated security assessments. It reflects a sustained political effort by authoritarian allies, particularly the United Arab Emirates, alongside segments of Britain's right wing that have long targeted Muslim groups.

What we are seeing now is the latest turn in a cycle in which stale but malicious claims are revived and normalised at the government level despite the absence of evidence. The result is a policy debate built on Islamophobic conspiracy theories that smear legitimate civic and charitable work as covert extremism.

Foreign pressure

The loudest voices pushing for a Muslim Brotherhood ban are not British security agencies, but foreign regimes such as the UAE, which has spent years exporting political grudges through well-funded lobbying campaigns.

A major New Yorker investigation in 2023, backed by court filings, showed how the UAE paid a Swiss private intelligence firm to run smear campaigns that falsely branded critics and even ordinary businesses as Muslim Brotherhood fronts.

It planted stories, edited Wikipedia pages and briefed banks with the explicit aim of bankrupting targets and labelling them part of a "terrorist" network.

Parts of the British political class have absorbed this framing with little question. We have already seen how easily the accusation is weaponised.

Former cabinet minister Michael Gove, protected by parliamentary privilege, declared the Muslim Association of Britain to be the "British affiliate" of the Muslim Brotherhood.

That claim is false and reckless, but once spoken in parliament, it is repeated as fact.

Islamic Relief, one of the world's major humanitarian organisations, has faced similar smears despite passing every British regulatory test placed before it.

On 3 December, the UAE's role in driving this campaign was once again highlighted when GB News apologised and paid "substantial damages" to the charity.

Islamic Relief had brought legal action after the British broadcaster aired false allegations by Emirati influencer Amjad Taha that it had funded "terrorists" - parroting the UAE's long-standing claims that the organisation is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

GB News removed the segment and accepted that the allegation was untrue.

For a charity whose staff have been killed while delivering aid in conflict zones, such smears are not only baseless but place workers at further risk.

The case illustrates how UAE-aligned disinformation enters the British media landscape with serious consequences for Muslim organisations.

Domestic amplification

This foreign pressure does not operate in isolation. It connects seamlessly to a homegrown Islamophobia feedback loop inside British politics.

Only a fortnight after Reform UK appointed Henry Jackson Society executive director Alan Mendoza as its chief advisor on global affairs, Tice stood up in parliament to ask whether the Muslim Brotherhood should be banned.

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The timing was not accidental. The think tank has been described, even by one of its own founders, as a "monstrous animal" and a "racist organisation". Muslim civil rights groups have long accused it of stoking fear about "Islamism".

This is how the loop works. A think tank spends years pushing a narrative that almost any organised Muslim public life in Britain is part of an Islamist threat.

Its director then becomes a senior adviser to a hard-right party that trades in the same talking points. That party's MP stands in parliament to demand bans on the "Muslim Brotherhood".

Ministers respond by saying the government is "keeping it under review".

The exchange is then cited as proof that Muslim organisations are a problem, justifying more reports, more lobbying and more pressure to ban. At every stage, the same small circle of actors feeds off its own rhetoric.

Manufactured threat

Once the "Muslim Brotherhood" label is stretched to fit whatever you want it to fit, it ceases to hold any meaning and instead becomes a political weapon.

It turns into guilt by association, where simply knowing someone, quoting someone or sharing a religious inspiration becomes grounds for suspicion. 

This is the heart of the problem. Step by step, you end up treating Muslim civil society in Britain as if it were a network of hidden extremists.

We have seen this before.

The claim that law-abiding Muslim charities, mosques and organisations are part of a global plot to impose sharia mirrors the old antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish cabals secretly controlling world events.

Britain is drifting towards a policy shaped less by evidence or genuine security concerns and more by the fears of foreign authoritarian states and their allies in our own politics

We would never tolerate those myths being laundered into respectable debate, and we should not tolerate their Islamophobic equivalents.

This is where the real danger lies. Britain is drifting towards a policy shaped less by evidence or genuine security concerns and more by the fears of foreign authoritarian states and their allies in our own politics.

A ban would not make the UK safer. It would only give bad-faith actors a powerful new tool to smear Muslim organisations that do vital civic, community and humanitarian work.

The real question at stake is not whether the UK should ban the Muslim Brotherhood, but how Muslim participation in Britain will be defined in the years ahead.

If the government is serious about tackling extremism, it should engage with the communities most affected by it, not stigmatise them. And if it is serious about defending rights and the rule of law, it must avoid shortcuts that turn Gulf rivalries and far-right talking points into domestic witch hunts.

Britain does not need a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood. It needs the confidence to resist panic, the maturity to ignore pressure from authoritarian allies and culture-war entrepreneurs, and the courage to protect its own civil society rather than turn it into collateral damage.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.