In 1992 the race equality thinktank Runnymede set up a commission to consider anti-Semitism in contemporary Britain. Its report, entitled A Very Light Sleeper, published in 1994, found that anti-Semitism wasn’t just in the form of violence or harassment by the far right but also in more subtle stereotyping and denial of the contribution of Jewish life to Britishness,1 findings which could apply today in relation to Islamophobia. It made a number of recommendations, including a code of conduct for the media, the teaching in schools of the place of the Jewish community in British life, changes to legislation and a system of monitoring anti-Semitic incidents. It also recommended that Runnymede should set up a broadly similar commission to consider Islamophobia.
Despite concerns raised in the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair and the riots in Dewsbury, Bradford, Burnley and Blackburn, little progress was made, and it took a further five years for the issue to be taken up, once again by the Runnymede Trust, under the chairmanship of Professor Gordon Conway. The report, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, was launched in November 1997 by the home secretary, Jack Straw.2
This was the first time that the subject of Islamophobia had been comprehensively tackled in relation to a British Muslim population which had had a significant presence in our major cities for at least a quarter of a century, was around 1.5 million in number and had hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. Sixty recommendations were put forward in the report targeted at government departments, bodies and agencies, local and regional statutory bodies and voluntary and private bodies. Recommendations included making criteria and procedures for providing state funding for religiously based schools more transparent, and permit appeals against decisions of the secretary of state; local education authorities to use their influence to ensure that local Muslim communities are appropriately represented on schools’ governing bodies, particularly schools which have substantial proportions of Muslim pupils; applying consistent principles in the teaching of history in relation to Islam; scrutinizing measures and programmes aimed at reducing poverty and inequality with regard to their impact on Muslim communities; reviewing equal opportunities policies in employment, service delivery and public consultation and ensuring that these refer explicitly to religion as well as ethnicity, race and culture; guidelines on good employment practice on matters affecting Muslim employees; making discrimination on religious grounds unlawful; employers and unions to include references to religion in their equal opportunities statements and policies, and state their opposition to discrimination on religious grounds both in recruitment and in general personnel management; treating evidence of religious hatred as an aggravating factor in crimes of violence or harassment, as already with racial violence; reviewing legislation on blasphemy and including in this a study of relevant legislation in other countries; political parties to take measures to increase the likelihood of Muslim candidates being selected in winnable seats, and using their influence to increase the representation of British Muslims on public bodies and commissions; proposing the appointment of Muslims to the House of Lords.
It attracted wide interest and media coverage in both the UK and abroad. It also defined Islamophobia, focusing on four key words: discrimination, exclusion, prejudice and violence. A more comprehensive definition was later developed by the Center for American Progress in the report Fear Inc.: ‘an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from … social, political and civic life.’
There has been much disagreement amongst commentators and academics about the term Islamophobia.3 The arguments focus around what exactly it is we are referring to when we use the term. Is phobia an appropriate word to use or does the term shut down debate on Islam? I prefer the terms anti-Muslim sentiment and anti-Muslim hatred but like many others use Islamophobia as a quick and lazy term. Criticism of Islam, as of any other religion, is in Britain a legitimate and legal endeavour. Indeed, Islam itself has a long tradition of questioning, challenging and critique. Britain does not and should not protect Islam but we should absolutely protect individuals who follow a faith. But most importantly it lent its voice to the calls from the likes of the Muslim Council of Britain for the inclusion of a question on religion in the census of 2001, giving us accurate figures for British Muslims for the first time. And the emerging data from the census 2001 brought a new level of clarity to understanding and analysing the Muslim situation in the UK.
It also led to the setting up three years later in May 2001 of the Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism (FAIR), beginning the process of documenting anti-Muslim hate crime and responding to the changing policy environment after Runnymede and later, in readiness for the introduction of legislation which would outlaw discrimination on grounds of religion in the workplace.
As a follow-up to the commission and the report, and independently of the Runnymede Trust but led by a trustee of the Runnymede Trust, Dr Richard Stone, the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia was established, and it produced a report in 2004 at the launch of which Dr Stone made some damning comments: ‘The only area where there has been major change is within Muslim communities themselves. Government has not taken on board, in a deep way, the anti-Muslim prejudice in this country.’4
These concerns, raised a year before 7/7 and over a decade after the Runnymede Trust raised the flag of concern, were no further developed six years on in 2010, when I first entered government.
The establishment of FAIR brought into being a body to record anti-Muslim incidents, but the activity largely remained within the Muslim community and didn’t enjoy the level of political backing that work against anti-Semitism in the UK enjoyed. No formal process was set up within government and no schools initiatives existed to tackle it.5
But as my friend and ex cabinet colleague Eric Pickles, MP, once reminded me, ‘The bloody Muslims need to help themselves and not always be looking to others to help them out.’ These oddly phrased but robust words convinced me, as it had the Runnymede Trust, that the best template in dealing with religious hate crime was how the battle against anti-Semitism had been fought. That British Muslims needed to organize themselves and operate as professionally as British Jews if the issue of discrimination against them was to be taken seriously. I therefore used the work to combat anti-Semitism as a blueprint.
In 2005, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) against Antisemitism set up an inquiry into anti-Semitism in the UK led by the then, now disgraced, Labour MP Denis MacShane. The inquiry was ‘established to investigate the belief, widely held within the Jewish community, that levels of antisemitism in Britain are rising’. It reported in 2006 with thirty-five recommendations, including that the Home Office provide support in addressing the security needs of British Jews especially at places of worship and faith schools, that all police forces record anti-Semitic crime as a separate category of hate crime, that the Home Office report annually to parliament on progress, with regard to Israel that a conversation take place with the media to ensure sensitive and balanced reporting of international events and for government departments to support more interfaith work and anti-racism initiatives in school later.6 The government welcomed the report and responded comprehensively, agreeing to take forward many of the recommendations.7
I felt a similar approach needed to be taken in relation to Islamophobia. I felt an APPG against Islamophobia, followed by an inquiry, followed by a report, followed by a government response would bring much needed energy to an issue which seemed not to worry politicians. Little did I know what a storm I was about to create.
My private parliamentary secretary (PPS), the former MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, Eric Ollerenshaw, persuaded Kris Hopkins, the MP for Keighley, a constituency with a sizable Muslim population, to chair such a group. He agreed. Eric at the Conservative Party conference in 2010 met with an organization called IEngage, a breakaway group from the MCB, who volunteered to act as administrators to the group in the way the Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism Foundation pays a member of staff to administer the group looking at anti-Semitism. The subsequent objections to this group, from the Jewish Chronicle to Lord Janner and the Community Security Trust, a charity working to combat anti-Semitism, led to the APPG collapsing before it started. The objections were based on allegations of anti-Semitism levelled at the trustees of IEngage. Indeed, Robert Halfon, MP, former Conservative Party chairman, used his parliamentary privilege to make such allegations of IEngage being ‘aggressively anti-Semitic, homophobic and [having] extensive links to terrorism in Tunisia and the Middle East’ on the floor of the House weeks after the launch of the APPG.8 Bizarrely IEngage was also undermined and briefed against by the MCB, who were not at all happy at being outshone by a breakaway group. The APPG against Islamophobia was subsequently revived, with Stuart Andrews, the MP for Pudsey and a close friend of Eric Ollerenshaw, agreeing to chair. After the pain of its birth, it never managed to find a secretariat; nor did it produce anything which the government took seriously. Its hard-working chair Stuart Andrews and volunteer secretariat Hayyan Bhabha continued to run the All Party Parliamentary Group organizing meetings and briefings, which were always badly attended. Last year, when new officers were elected, I agreed to serve as vice chairman of the group, but the group’s history is hard to shake off, and it is sadly all but dead in name. As my colleague and MP for Grantham and Stamford Nick Boles said to me, the plan to kill the group was ‘a good plan well executed’.
Having failed to follow in the footsteps of the work on anti-Semitism, I called a meeting of a small number of activists and donors to see if ‘the Muslims’ could set up an organization similar to Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity that has been fighting anti-Semitism since 1994 and is the well-funded, well-run brainchild of someone whom I have great affection for, Gerald Ronson. This effort, too, failed, mainly through a lack of funding and inter-community rivalry. But some good came out of these conversations. One of the attendees at this initial meeting was Fiyaz Mughal, and out of the discussions was born Tell MAMA, an anti-Muslim-hatred monitoring body, which I subsequently supported through government funding.
Alongside funding Tell MAMA, we set up a cross-government working group on anti-Muslim hatred, a group that Fiyaz Mughal served on but subsequently briefed against.
MEND is the latest and the only national grass-roots and community-driven group tackling anti-Muslim hatred.
Despite these groups and the long journey on this issue, Runnymede this year marking twenty years since the publication of Islamophobia: A challenge for Us All, the response to our dislike for Muslims is neither well organized nor well funded and is certainly not a government priority.