After an attack on Berlin’s “Christopher Street Day” LGBT parade left one dead and 29 injured on Saturday, Labour Cabinet minister Chris Bryant posted on X that “this horrific event shows why we still need Pride.” Yet he remained silent on the attacker’s motivations, and when challenged stated that the motivating ideology was simply “hatred”. Bryant posted this even after Germany’s Interior Minister publicly confirmed the motive was Islamist. The attacker, Abdul Ballout, a known Islamist, was shot dead by Berlin police on Sunday.

It is troubling that Bryant won’t call out the motivation of the attacker. He was ordained as a priest in the Church of England before he first left active ministry and later Anglicanism entirely because he couldn’t reconcile his homosexuality with his Church’s treatment of gay relationships. Naming Christian homophobia is considered laudable in his own support base.

But naming Muslim homophobia? This, in contrast, threatens the unofficial British state settlement around crimes which undercut the narrative that multiculturalism only has benefits and never brings new problems. The most obvious case is of nationwide grooming gangs. But there has been a constant drumbeat of lesser yet still serious incidents, from the reaction to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 to the Wakefield woman forced to go to the local mosque to plead for her son’s life in 2023 after he damaged a Quran.

In this sense, it’s easy to see how hard facts rarely support simplistic political narratives, and Muslim communities in Western Europe aren’t a monolith. At the extreme, some Islamists actively seek to murder gay people. The broad centre of Muslim opinion around Europe holds ultra-conservative views on homosexuality, while abhorring violence. It’s important to remember that a growing minority of Muslims are actively liberal on homosexuality, including most Muslims with a prominent position in public life.

The vast majority of Muslims in the UK, Germany, and neighbouring countries aren’t a threat to gay people, even if they are very conservative. But one also has to be realistic about how different the cultural and religious context is. The small number of imams and jama’ahs that affirm same-sex relationships have to meet in secret.

Bryant can’t name this problem, any more than he can name what motivated the attacker in Berlin. But had the attack been perpetrated by fascists, he would likely have no problem drawing political lessons, and would almost certainly warn of the dangers of voting for Right-wing parties such as Reform UK and the AfD. In fact, these Right-wing parties are now increasingly full of gays and lesbians, and voters often turn to them as the only parties willing to name the most significant threat to LGBT people’s physical safety in modern Europe.

Bryant represents a working-class Valleys constituency where 60% voted Leave and Reform received over a third of the vote in May. There’s every chance he could come a distant third to Nigel Farage’s party and Plaid Cymru at the next general election. It’s a place where people’s trust in the system is crumbling. Every refusal to name what is obvious in news reports risks becoming the final straw for the public.