Institutions can promise to tackle their problems because they grasp that there really is a problem. Or they can promise to do so because they begin to discern – often very tardily – that others, including their own members and supporters, believe there is a problem. On the surface, at least, the difference between these approaches cannot always be easily defined. Yet people usually have a gut sense of which has been adopted. They also know which will lead to real solutions.

Sayeeda Warsi, formerly the chair of the Conservative party, has demanded that it launch a full and independent inquiry into Islamophobia (or, as she put it, a “fuck the Muslims” tendency) within the party, echoing a call from the Muslim Council of Britain. Lady Warsi, the MCB and other critics point to cases including the Conservative councillor suspended after sharing an article calling Muslims “parasites” and Tory MP Bob Blackman, who retweeted a message from the founder of the English Defence League (by mistake, he says) and was a member of an Islamophobic Facebook group (to which he says he was added without his knowledge). Most damaging of all – because it was a matter of party strategy, not just the action or words of an individual – was the London mayoral campaign of Zac Goldsmith, which sought to tar Sadiq Khan as an extremist, and the subsequent attempts to justify those tactics.

Writing for the Guardian, Lady Warsi acknowledged that her party has begun to strike a new note, stressing the unacceptability of abuse and discrimination. But she rightly described its plan for tackling the issue as woefully inept; the obvious problem with voluntary diversity training is that those most likely to offend are unlikely to take part.

If Conservatives think they can brush such issues aside, they should only look to the continuing storm over antisemitism within Labour. On Thursday, its national executive committee adopted a new code of conduct, using the widely accepted definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance but not all of the accompanying examples, fuelling the controversy rather than laying it to rest.

To paraphrase the Chakrabarti report on antisemitism in Labour, the Tory party is not overrun by Islamophobia. Nor is Islamophobia unique to Conservatives, any more than antisemitism is unique to the left. And there is no doubt that accusations of bigotry and discrimination can be “weaponised” for political purposes, often hypocritically. But the exploitation of grievances for political purposes does not mean that those grievances are unfounded. When representatives of a minority group warn that there is a problem, the institution involved should pay real attention. The self-interested motive is protecting its reputation and support. The greater one is recognising how quickly such poison can spread if not checked. A superficial reckoning will not satisfy critics; more importantly, it will not solve the problem.