Of the many strange permutations that the so-called ‘war on terror’ has thrown up perhaps none is stranger than the process by which the distinctions between left and right that orientated western metropolitan politics since the time of the French Revolution have seemingly collapsed in relation to the ‘Muslim question’.

The demise of the left–right split was perhaps almost inevitable with the end of the Cold War, and the installation of neo-liberalism (and its multiple variants) as the only way of organising societies. There was, however, always the hope or expectation that some of the advances made by anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles would survive this neo-liberal dispensation. It was even argued that neo-liberalism would underwrite anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Free markets would lead to societies that were free, unencumbered by exclusions based on ‘irrational’ factors such as gender, sexual orientation, disability and race. Deng Xiaoping’s famous quote ‘It does not matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice’ would seem to capture this possibility. A colour-blind meritocracy beckoned. Certainly, in the Anglophonic plutocracies, etiquette changed so as to mitigate the most blatant expressions of racist opprobrium. Racism became uncouth as well as uncool. It was no longer the common sense, no longer part of the uncritical chitter chatter of the genteel and well-heeled. Its only outings were a matter of scandal: the drunken outburst, the off-the-cuff, off-mic remark, the private joke that leaked into the public domain ... With the marginalisation of the language of racism from public discourse, one would have assumed that circumlocutions like ‘some of my best friends are black ...’ and ‘I am not racist but ...’ would also have been cast into the dustbin of bad manners.