The issue of “radicalization” has been notably absent from discussions prompted by the UK general election that takes place on May 7.

Considering what a central public issue it is, this may seem odd. The simple fact is that with an election looming, politicians become anxious to secure as many votes as possible. Suddenly they stop saying things liable to imply that they regard Muslims as the “enemy within,” a group synonymous with terrorism. And because the election result is on a knife-edge, the present campaigners are desperate for every vote they can get.

It can be expected that after the election on May 7 Muslims will once more figure less as normal British citizens than as an endless source of pathological behavior. Admittedly, the British media is seldom short of deeply damaging stories about Muslims, be it men of Pakistani heritage guilty of “grooming” young white girls, or young Muslim women, so-called “Jihadi brides” who have rejected their own families and British society alike to join the self-ascribed Islamic State (IS). Yet who can credibly dispute that media organizations are heavily invested in demonizing Muslims? The truth is that lurid stories about Muslims are good for business. They also serve to mask the wider ills of British society.

What is striking about the election campaign is what is not being said. Outbidding one another with economic bribes to electorate, the party leaders have eschewed issues that are making for dangerous levels of alienation among British youth in general: The acute accommodation crisis, the low pay and punitive conditions endured by those in work, the preferential treatment accorded to the old. They are perhaps still more reluctant to tackle the particular reasons for alienation among young Muslims. That UK participation in US-led wars of aggression in Muslim lands has been a major cause of radicalization is practically a taboo subject.

The official line is that British foreign policy has helped to make Britain a safer place; even though the evidence is that it has done exactly the opposite. What has deepened disaffection still further is the grossly intrusive surveillance of Muslim communities. A vicious circle now obtains, with radicalization leading to mounting surveillance and mounting surveillance leading to mounting radicalization. This also goes undiscussed.

Muslims should not have to demonstrate that they are human beings like everybody else, but if this disastrous cycle is ever to be broken it will perhaps only be by Muslims stepping forward as people whose Britishness and abhorrence of violence are as palpable as their religion. One such, the Bolton-born boxer Amir Khan, is fighting to demonstrate his loyalty to the country of his birth — and not just with his fists. Priding himself on being more patriotic than any member of the hyper-nationalistic United Kingdom Independence Party, Khan goes into schools to proclaim his horror of terrorism and exhort young British Muslims to strive to “represent their country in a good way.”

When Khan opened his own gym, Prime Minister David Cameron accepted an invitation to attend the event and be photographed as the boxer presented him with a signed pair of gloves. It is a pity that Cameron has not shown a similarly conspicuous interest in the Muslim writers and artists who are coming to the fore in the UK. Still, they can speak for themselves.

In a recent feature for the Observer newspaper, rising stars of the new generation of British Muslim poets, playwrights and painters were eloquent about the one-sidedness of the relationship between Muslims and media, the invidious tendency of mainstream British reporting to portray Muslims only as objects of scrutiny and suspicion. The Blackburn-born poet and playwright Avaes Mohammad observed that Islamist extremism resonates with elements of Muslim youth for the same reason that far-right extremism appeals to sections of Britain’s white working class: The sense of disenfranchisement experienced by both in an impersonal society bereft of traditional forms of association and belonging.

Mohammad believes that there can be no enduring solution to radicalization until Muslims are routinely accepted as an integral part of British society. Articulate Muslims like him have a vital role to play in forging an inclusive new sense of British national identity fit for the 21st century.