The fringe anti-Muslim group Britain First is enjoying a burst of publicity after Donald Trump retweeted three of its propaganda videos. This has had the rare effect of uniting almost the entire British establishment in horror.

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A firm slapdown from the office of the prime minster followed condemnation by Jeremy Corbyn. The archbishop of Canterbury joined in. Even Melanie Phillips, author of a book called Londonistan, which laments the transformation of the urban landscape by headscarves and niqabs, told BBC radio that she was “absolutely appalled”.

Earlier in the same programme, the author Ann Coulter had defended Trump. She argued it didn’t matter if the videos were inaccurately labelled, and that “the native countries are blowing up at the just constant importation of people who do not share our western values – that’s the point at issue”.

Play Video 1:27 Retweeting from Britain First was the wrong thing to do, says May – video

There has been some lively discussion about whether the BBC was right to give Coulter airtime. My view is that, thanks to Nick Robinson’s tough questioning, she came across as someone whose relationship to the truth is flexible, to say the least. The theatrics honed over years of US TV appearances sounded close to unhinged at 8.30am over a British cup of tea. Any reasonable listener could tell she lacked credibility.

There have certainly been times when the BBC and others have amplified the divisive views of figures who represent only a tiny minority, in the name of presenting “both sides” of an argument. That is wrong. In the case of discussions about Islam, however, I wonder whether the oxygen of publicity debate slightly misses the point. I have no desire to give Britain First any greater status than the one it has in fact achieved – that of a political organisation with about 1,000 adherents which has failed to win in any election in six years of existence.

Q&A Who are Britain First? Show Hide Britain First is an Islamophobic group​ run by convicted racists.​ It was founded in 2011 by former members of the far-right British National Party (BNP) and loyalist extremists in Northern Ireland. It organises mosque invasions where followers, often dressed in paramilitary uniforms, raid multicultural areas in the UK. The group has an influential presence on Facebook and actively uses social media to publicise anti-Islamic material.



Its leader, Paul Golding, a former BNP councillor, and his deputy Jayda Fransen have been arrested several times.​ Fransen was found guilty in November 2016 of religiously aggravated harassment after she hurled abuse at a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.​ A month later Golding was ​jailed for eight weeks for breaching a court order banning him from entering a mosque. Rightwing terrorist Thomas Mair shouted “Britain first” before killing the MP Jo Cox during the EU referendum campaign in 2016.

But the fact is that some of its views – that Islam is inherently violent, that sharia law is a creeping threat, that British Muslims share some kind of culpability for terrorist atrocities committed in the name of their faith – are widely held. Only a very small number of people are ever going to take to the streets and engage in stand-up arguments with fellow citizens who do not share their beliefs, as Britain First members do. Far, far more identify to some degree with the positions they espouse.

In a 2016 survey by ComRes of 2000 Britons, for example, 31% agreed that Islam promotes acts of violence in the UK. Some 43% said it was a negative force in the country and only 28% believed it was compatible with “British values”. Anecdotally, I am only too aware of this strength of feeling. Whenever I have written about the subject – for example, on how Islam itself is insufficient to explain jihadist terrorism – I have been met with virulently anti-Muslim abuse. I have also had conversations with ostensibly liberal friends who are convinced that Islam is a force for evil in the world, and that all Muslims are homophobic.

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The sense that Islam is inimical to a modern, liberal way of life is endlessly reinforced by media organisations with reputation and reach. To take three examples among many: in August this year, the Times raised the alarm over a “Christian child forced into Muslim foster care”, only for much of its reporting to be contradicted by the local authority responsible. The Daily Mail followed up the story with a stock photo of a woman and a child apparently doctored to make it look like the model was wearing a full face veil, instead of the original headscarf. Also in August, the Sun’s former political editor Trevor Kavanagh wondered in a column for the paper what should be done about “the Muslim problem”.

There’s no doubt that Britain First is tiny, and Coulter is obnoxious. But some of their views are more mainstream than we feel comfortable acknowledging. The big question for those of us who want to change that is not whether broadcasters should ignore them. It is how we can demonstrate that the world is not as they see it.

• David Shariatmadari is a Guardian writer and editor