‘When do the defense measures of a paranoid country become their own agents of self-destruction?’
Christopher Bollen, Orient
‘Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.’
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
In Britain we have a complicated but comprehensive set of laws and rules on rehabilitation. We believe in giving people a second chance even if they’ve committed some pretty awful crimes. In fact, in 2013 we changed the law to enable more people with longer sentences to be ‘officially rehabilitated’ more quickly.1 In a nutshell if you get a sentence of up to two years in prison for a crime, and trust me you’ve got to do something pretty bad for the courts to give you two years’ custody these days, then about four years after the end of your sentence you don’t need to disclose it for most jobs, insurance applications and most other aspects of life. You’ve done the crime, served the time, and after a period are allowed to wipe the slate clean and move on. So you could steal a car, snatch a granny’s handbag, even assault your partner and after a few years, providing you behaved yourself, move on with your life.
The rehabilitation periods for non-custodial sentences like fines, cautions and supervision orders are even shorter, whilst compensation and reparation orders are treated as spent as soon as they come to an end.2
I worked as a criminal defence lawyer before I entered politics. And whilst, like many criminal defence lawyers, I had my regulars, individuals who I knew would get themselves into some sort of trouble every weekend and for whom I knew I’d get that early Sunday-morning call to come and represent them during police questioning, I also met many for whom the foray into criminality was a one-off, and eventually even some of my prolific offenders managed to put the life of crime behind them and live drug-free, violence-free, crime-free lives. They were rehabilitated.
In politics the principle of rehabilitation applies too. I’ve yet to meet a colleague who hasn’t at some time in his or her life done something, said something, been somewhere or met someone and lived to regret it. For me it was my terrible dog-whistle homophobic campaign literature on Section 28 during the 2005 General Election campaign. Politicians on the left are usually caught by their radical, anarchist views of a bygone era, something these days Jeremy Corbyn and some of his colleagues are regularly questioned about and confronted with, whilst on the right of politics we are usually embarrassed by our historical racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. Many in cabinet today have form for stupid comments, actions and associations from the past. Politicians are humans who, like everyone else, can make the wrong calls.
Politicians can also be self-righteous, moralizing individuals who expect the public to accept their change of view and their apology and to acknowledge that they, like most Brits, are on a progressive journey and thus can be and indeed are rehabilitated. And yet politicians will merrily, for political advantage, hang the past around the necks of others.
Politics, amongst other things, is the art of debate and discussion, to persuade the other of your viewpoint, to reach out to those we disagree with to show them our way, the better way, to have our opinions challenged so we continue to grow as thinkers, to always strive to find solutions, to give diplomacy a chance, to disagree within the parameters democracy sets, to trust the ballot box, to passionately disagree with another’s view but fight just as passionately for their right to have a say, and all within a commitment to the rule of law.
Fighting the General Election in 2005 as the parliamentary candidate for Dewsbury, I hadn’t learned all these lessons. I was, and still am, on my political journey, constantly evaluating my views and opinions. That election campaign for me was an early lesson on how much both Britain and I still needed to learn and change. It was a campaign where I faced both overt and covert bigotry – overt from those who felt they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for ‘a Paki’, despite voting Tory in the past. For them the lure of an active and high-profile campaign fought by the BNP was tempting. Some of my best campaign conversations took place with the ‘overts’. The challenge of a doorstep racist whom I discovered after a lengthy and heated conversation was not a racist but just ignorant of difference was both worrying and comforting: worrying that people could be so ignorant, comforting that they could be persuaded to rethink. The challenge of a battle of ideas which left both them and me thinking differently was good, old-fashioned street politics.
And then there were the ‘coverts’, those within the conservative, orthodox Muslim community who had for decades stood proudly with a female Labour MP but for whom the thought of a Muslim woman wanting to step into a leadership position was a step too far. They were the types for whom gender trumped any conversations on policy – and indeed there were few policy conversations during these encounters. This covert bigotry troubled me more than the out-and-out racism. It was hard to pin down, difficult to get someone on record to talk about and deeply entrenched.
When I lost the election it would have been easy to vilify Dewsbury’s orthodox Muslim men, who took it upon themselves during the campaign to discredit and dismiss me and ultimately rejoice in my defeat. The jeers and boos that I was met with outside the town hall in the early hours of the morning of 7 May 2005 as the counting of votes came to an end and the result was announced, leaving in the glare of the amassed media, is a moment that in its own way will always stay with me.
I had had the audacity to stand, I had had the audacity to want to represent my hometown folk in parliament as I had for years represented them in the local courts. I had wanted to herald a moment of progress when a woman from a very private community could take a very public stance. The noise from the crowd that morning wasn’t your regular northern anti-Tory bashing, it was a very vocal manifestation of the judgement the community had passed that day: we are not ready for Muslim women to lead, we are not ready for this change.
So imagine my very bitter delight when exactly a decade later the very men who had led the campaign against women in politics, who had grasped at religion and morality to justify their position of bigotry and who had spent more time focusing on the length of my skirt than my slick multilingual campaign speeches, now proudly stood next to a young woman, the younger sister of a friend, as she became the first Asian Muslim woman to represent my old home ward at the tender age of twenty-five. The bitter pill for me was that, in winning, she ousted one of my closest friends and one of the Conservative Party’s most decent and hardworking councillors.
But Savile Town had changed. In a period of a decade the unthinkable had become the possible, and those with unsavoury views had not only said they no longer held those views but also showed they’d moved on.
If those men in Savile Town can be rehabilitated, there is hope for everyone.
Yet time and time again, the message from government is that if you as a Muslim have ever believed, thought, said or even flippantly commented on an issue which could be seen as ‘extremism’, there was no road to rehabilitation. There was no redemption, no possibility for meeting, speaking to, sharing a platform, being associated or simply having a connection, however tenuous that might be, with someone who had believed, displayed, thought or suggested he or she had the aforementioned ‘extremist’ views.
So in your youth or in your heady days of activism or simply during your political journey, if you hadn’t believed and said exactly what we the government say and believe right now on the issue of Islam, faith, women, minorities, homosexuality, you are persona non grata, not to be spoken to or engaged with, not allowed even to appear on the same platform.
This policy, which I term the policy of disengagement, started under the last Labour government under the leadership of the then secretary of state for communities and local government, Hazel Blears, in 2007. John Denham tried to restore sanity when he replaced Hazel Blears in 2009, but months later, when the Coalition Government was formed in 2010, the policy returned. It continues to be applied today.
So for nearly a decade, firstly under Labour, then during the Coalition years and today under a Conservative administration, successive governments have adopted a policy of non-engagement with a wide range of Muslim community organizations and activists. And more and more groups and individuals have over time been seen as ‘beyond the pale’ for something they said or did in their past or someone they were associated with said or did in the past.
Not only is this policy ludicrously impractical at a time when the need for engagement and understanding our Muslims is greater than ever before, it is also dangerously counterproductive. Over half of British Muslims are under the age of twenty-five. They are in the media spotlight almost on a daily basis, they have access to more connections, information and travel than ever before, they are our frontline in the battle against terrorism and they are disengaged. The issues around terrorism can only be properly responded to with a ‘whole community’ response. This includes the government, the police and communities of which the British Muslims are an essential component.
A decade into this approach, I’m yet to be convinced that not engaging and not listening to a community gives us the best insight into ‘them’ and that not speaking to ‘them’ is the best way to convince ‘them’ of ‘our’ viewpoint.
The policy has been driven by a small number of politicians and commentators influenced by the now much discredited and failed neo-conservative thinking from the United States, although the election of Donald Trump has brought this divisive thinking back into the mainstream.3
The Coalition years saw regular battles in government about this policy, and the divide wasn’t just along party political lines. Many a one-nation Tory with a strong commitment to civil liberties felt disturbed by this policy, not least because names of individuals they considered friends and associates started to be considered unacceptable by government. I recall a specific conversation with a senior cabinet minister about a young man with whom he had worked for a number of years but about whom the Home Office had concerns as someone with ‘extremist views’.
There were a growing number of organizations and individuals who had said and done things which we felt were ‘extremist’, although not illegal, and thus were individuals and organizations that could not be engaged with by officialdom. So no meeting, no sharing of platforms with them, no photographs and certainly no funding or partnerships. The challenge was finding agreement amongst ministerial colleagues as to what or who counted as extremist and beyond the pale.
There were numerous occasions where one department would consider an individual or group persona non grata whilst another government department would engage. The annual Remembrance Day event in November at the Cenotaph on Whitehall was one such moment. The Muslim Council of Britain, an organization that ministers did not engage with, would still attend the Remembrance Day event at the invitation of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to lay a wreath on behalf of British Muslims.
The quality of the Coalition government thinking on who was acceptable and who not was at best amateur, at worst dangerous. The evidence base, which appeared to be made up of Google searches, unsubstantiated accusations, old historic references and bizarre conspiratorial connections between individuals, was shockingly shoddy.
Many ministerial hours were wasted unpicking and questioning the ‘evidence’, and agreement between colleagues was rare.
Some ministerial colleagues who would have been incensed that they should be held accountable for the comments and actions of their ministerial mates were quick to impose ‘whole group accountability’ on others. The Muslim Council of Britain, for example, was considered beyond the pale because of comments made by Daud Abdullah in 2009, at the time one of the MCB’s deputy secretary generals. His comments were criticized by the then communities secretary as capable of being construed as an attack on British troops, even though the MCB unequivocally condemned any suggestion that their organization supported attacks on British troops and distanced itself from the comments of Abdullah, who too confirmed that they were his personal views.4 The ‘do as we say not as we do’ approach that sadly many a politician has become known for was dished out in large portions to community groups and activists. Group responsibility, guilt by association and collective punishment were the order of the day.
Government now has a fully functioning unit for this process called the Extremism Analysis Unit, which was officially launched in 2015 and described by the then home secretary as a unit that ‘will help us to develop a new engagement policy – which will set out clearly for the first time with which individuals and organisations the government and public sector should engage and should not engage’.5 It was described in 2016 by Home Office minister Karen Bradley as having ‘a remit to analyse extremism in this country, and abroad where it has a direct impact on the UK and/or UK interests … a cross-government resource, with government departments able to commission research and analysis’.6
The unit struck me as the extremism police run by civil servants7 but argues that it ‘engages widely with partners across government, academia and communities’.8 Details of who these ‘partners’ might be are not published, and neither are the EAU’s full remit and terms of reference. Its findings are not made public, its budget is not clear, and those who are ‘discussed’ are neither informed nor given the right to reply.
During my time in government we only ever ‘banned’ two groups: Hizb ut-Tahrir and, upon pressure from myself and mainly Lib Dem colleagues, the English Defence League. The Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain and the Islamic Society of Britain were not, however, engaged with by ministers or officials. Personally, the policy of disengagement is one I consistently ignored because it is one I practically could never implement. I’m authentically ethnic. I live, work and play alongside Britain’s Muslim communities. I attend birth celebrations, weddings and funerals within the community on a weekly basis. I shop where they shop, I eat where they eat, I meet where they meet. There is no way, unless I relocated to a nice cottage in a Suffolk village, that I could ‘not engage’ with individuals, members of organizations and community activists – in the way my white cabinet colleagues could.
After the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby British Muslim organizations and activists, from conservatives to liberals, women’s networks to student bodies, were maturely united and clear, unequivocal and unconditional in condemnation of the terrorist attack. There were no ifs and buts in the communities’ response and no ‘justification’ for the atrocity. Many from British Muslim communities who led this effort were the ‘disengaged’ and on the government’s ‘beyond the pale’ list, individuals and organizations I had been advised not to engage with, advice which at that moment I was grateful I had ignored. At that difficult moment the lines of communication between community and government had to be opened, and I was relieved that I’d never closed them, including with the Muslim Council of Britain.
The Muslim Council of Britain was the most high-profile of a number of groups over which we never reached agreement, but one which nevertheless was never formally engaged with. Neither engaged with nor proscribed, they remained, as they do now, in no man’s land. Unlike some colleagues, I never viewed the MCB as extreme or dangerous. My criticism, which I have on numerous occasions discussed with successive secretary generals of the MCB, is that, with a few notable exceptions, it has elected a leadership that is neither equipped to represent, nor is genuinely reflective of, the contemporary aspirations of large sections of British Muslim communities. It has until recently been dominated by mainly first-generation migrants; it has been overwhelmingly influenced by the more orthodox element of British Muslim thought; it has been almost entirely male in its senior leadership. The MCB has been late in accommodating change, often behind the curve, because in an attempt to take ‘everyone’ in the community with it, it has often been held back by the most intransigent of those it seeks to represent. But my experience of meeting ‘faith communities’ for over a decade in frontline politics both in opposition and in government has been that these traits are prevalent in most faith-based organizations. It was concerns about this issue, amongst others, which led to the setting-up of Nisa-Nashim, a Muslim–Jewish women’s network for the many women from both religions who have at some point struggled with male-dominated faith-based organizations.
Of course, no one could argue that government should not have a set of people, a unit, a department who tell us who the ‘dangerous folk’ are and keep us safe. My argument is we do and have had for over 100 years: the intelligence services. We also have the police, experts in detecting, preventing and prosecuting the dangerous lot.
The fact that since 7/7 we have only seen only one murder inspired by Islam on the streets of London – the tragic killing of Lee Rigby – shows that, although our intelligence services have had some not-so-glorious moments in the recent past, the allegations of torture being one, on balance they do a very good job. In government often the most rational of arguments were made by intelligence officers around the table. I always found them more considered, informed and nuanced than politicians’. And often they were the only ones who would refer to the contribution made by British Muslims as members of these services in keeping us safe.
The police and the intelligence services relied on expertise to determine the plotters, planners and would-be terrorists,9 whereas politicians’ ability to make policy was clouded by personal ideologies and prejudices against those whom they do not like.
Politicians make policy in a ‘paranoid state’. Policy-making which should have targeted the harm of ‘terrorism’ is increasingly simply targeting ‘the Muslims’. I say this very specifically because I saw it at first hand. Let me give some very practical examples of the ‘paranoid state’ in practice.
A number of religious festivals are celebrated in No. 10 Downing Street each year: from Christmas through to Easter, Diwali to Vaisakhi, Hanukkah to Eid. And yet it was Muslim-focused events, such as the annual Eid reception, that had to be double-checked and cross-referenced. Invitations would often be held up until the last minute, causing much embarrassment. The potential political fallout of us getting it wrong was played out in an environment of frenzy and farce. An unacceptable view on the Middle East, a religiously conservative view on gay marriage or a historical less-than-PC approach to minorities could result in a ‘no invite’. On a number of occasions an invite was issued and then ‘revoked’. Imam Asim, the Ministry of Defence’s Muslim chaplain, was obliged to embarrassingly ‘disinvite’ individuals to the RAF Northolt Eid reception in 2011. It did not appear that anyone ever deemed it necessary to check these apparently ‘unacceptable’ views held by individuals and groups of other faiths and communities, nor was this process ever condemned.
Another example is the refusal by government ministers and eventually civil servants to attend events where there might ‘possibly’, ‘potentially’, be a speaker whose views we might find unsavoury, even when attendance would itself provide the perfect opportunity to challenge these views.
In 2007, when he was leader of the opposition, I arranged for David Cameron to visit a mosque in the UK. It was six years before he returned to one, in 2013, as a confidence-building measure after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, when mosques up and down the country were targeted by far-right activists. My office was instructed to find a ‘safe’ mosque, one that was ‘politically uncontroversial’, one that was not theologically aligned to the more conservative elements of the community, one that was Barelwi or Sufi in its teachings and definitely not a Salafi, Deobandi or Tablighi Jamaat mosque – in other words, one that fitted the description of the government’s version of acceptable Muslim belief. I didn’t argue against the stupidity of the request, I was simply grateful the prime minister had finally agreed to visit a mosque: a show of solidarity in those troubled times was for British Muslims long overdue.
We chose the mosque where the imam and spiritual leader was the father of an ex-civil servant whom we had also recently contracted to deliver a flagship anti-religious hate crime project. We agreed to visit the day the mosque was holding a community event called the ‘Big Iftaar’. This initiative was my baby, one we’d developed at the Department for Communities and Local Government and championed in response to the attacks on mosques in the wake of the murder of Lee Rigby. It was an initiative that encouraged mosques to reach out to their local communities during Ramadhan, the month of fasting, and invite them in to share the breaking of the fast meal. It was the British Muslim take on the ‘Big Lunch’, an Eden Project initiative which brings communities together to share lunch and has been running successfully since 2009.10
The mosque visit was a great success, and the prime minister managed to combine good photo opps – frying samosas in preparation for the iftaar – with substance – hearing directly from women who had been victims of anti-Muslim hatred. And yet a few months after the visit I was hauled in to No. 10 and rebuked for my ‘choice of mosque’. The prime minister’s chief of staff, now Lord Llewellyn, told me, ‘It was your job to protect David.’ When I asked about what the concerns were, none was forthcoming. Frustrated by this cloak-and-dagger approach, I asked for concerns to be put in writing. Nothing was ever sent back. The issue was pushed around various political appointees within No. 10, each one ‘unsure’ what the concerns were and ‘where’ the concerns had been raised. This paranoid government-within-a-government approach was something that I’d come across over a number of years, and it wasn’t just restricted to ministers and advisers employed by government.
When I was appointed to the job of minister for faith at the Department for Communities and Local Government in 2012, my then newly appointed political adviser, or SpAd, as they are known in the trade, was taken ‘off site’ to be spoken to by an individual who was employed by the Conservative Party. My SpAd was told that he had ‘concerns’ about me and was asked to keep an eye on me, especially whom I met with. This individual was not elected nor a government employee and yet thought it appropriate to instruct a paid government official to effectively spy on a minister who attended cabinet and occasionally the National Security Council and was a privy councillor.
These were harsh personal experiences of an approach to policy-making which I consider dysfunctional and dangerous. This paranoid approach to all things ‘Muslim’ was in my experience, and to the best of my knowledge, not practised for any other community.
An interesting comparative case is the Global Peace and Unity Conference (GPU) arranged every few years by the Islam Channel at the Excel Centre in London. The GPU is a weekend of family-friendly entertainment, food stalls, ethnic fashion and the odd firebrand speaker. It’s an opportunity for families to feast, charities to raise much-needed donations and businessmen to make deals. Attendance at the conference is in the tens of thousands. GPU started in 2005 and took place twice during my time in government. I attended and spoke at the event in one of its early years alongside ministers from the then Labour government and politicians from all parties. Speaking to an audience of 30,000 people was a unique experience.
But concerns emerged about GPU providing a platform for speakers who hold or have in the past held what can be described as either illiberal views or orthodox conservative views on gender and sexuality, views not dissimilar to those held both historically and currently by some Conservative politicians.
In government the debate about whether ministers should or shouldn’t attend was split between those of us who felt that attendance was necessary and those who wanted to boycott the event. The former view was that to be absent from such a huge gathering of Muslim families was a missed opportunity to get our message out, and what better way to challenge illiberal views than to present the alternative view from the same stage. This view, amongst others, was a view held by my colleague Dominic Grieve, the then attorney general and now chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, and by Nick Clegg, the then deputy prime minister.11
The alternative view was to impose a boycott and ban ministers from attending because attendance would be viewed as an endorsement.
A compromise was reached: my party refused to allow me to attend, whilst the Lib Dems sent a junior minister. A moment where we could have made a real impact with thousands of British Muslims was viewed by Muslims as a snub from government. A white, male non-Muslim Liberal Democrat attended; the UK’s first Muslim cabinet minister was told she must not. The banners and boycotters won the battle, the diplomacy and dialogue wallahs started to lose the war.12
However, there appeared to be no similar concerns when the prime minister attended the Festival of Light in 2015, by coincidence also at the Excel Centre. The prime minister met privately with Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) general overseer Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye and received a rapturous welcome when he was introduced to the 45,000-strong crowd by Pastor Agu Irukwu, leader of RCCG UK, which has 732 churches worldwide.13 Yet the festival, the umbrella organization and indeed the people he met have made controversial comments on gender and sexuality.14 Pastor Irukwu is quoted as saying: ‘But man marry man and woman marry woman. Then no need to stop global warming because soon there won’t be newborn children. What’s that they want to adopt, who will give birth to the child and how?’15
Pastor Irukwu had been one of the signatories to a letter ‘on behalf of tens of thousands of black churches’ addressed to the then Labour government about what were called ‘anti-Christian laws’, namely the Sexual Orientation Regulations, which outlawed discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities, services, education and public functions on the grounds of sexual orientation. The letter raised concerns about the promotion of the idea that ‘homosexuality is equal to heterosexuality’ and argued ‘this is now we believe to be the truth’.
The RCCG, like most churches, like most faith communities, is on a journey, having said things in the past which they probably would not agree with now, and in some cases they still interpret scriptures literally and in a manner not in accordance with what we perceive today as modern British values. They too, like GPU, are a broad church, with individuals who may have unsavoury views that aren’t shared by all, and they too have their firebrand speakers.
Many a Muslim group or individual has simply not been allowed to attend the Conservative Party conference despite being deemed ‘safe’ enough to attend the Labour, Lib Dem and SNP conferences.16 The questions we therefore have to ask ourselves are these: are we defending our values per se or only defending our values against Muslims? Is an illiberal view only unacceptable when that view is held by a Muslim? Are historic statements on gender and sexuality only unforgivable if made by Muslims? Is collective guilt reserved for Muslims? Are conservative religious practices only problematic if the practitioners’ faith happens to be Islam? Are we genuinely making policy ‘where everyone plays by the same rules’?17
These are not easy questions for me to ask, and I have thought deeply before asking them. But when we reach a point when organizers of GPU write to government and ask them to approve or reject, clear or dismiss, and greenlight or ban the speakers we find acceptable and unacceptable, when they give us a free rein and government simply refuse to take it, we have reached a deeply worrying point.18
This setting up of the community and community events to fail, this ‘not attending’ whatever you do, this ‘not playing’ even if you let us set the rules is not in line with the oft-touted British values of fairness and mutual respect and tolerance.
Now I know that there may be extremists out there whose life ambition is to convince Muslims there is no place for them in Britain and who will seize on these comments and use them to poison young minds. To you I say this: I value and defend the values of freedom of speech, democracy and the rule of law, I want my nation to genuinely assert these values, I would defend them whether they worked for me or against me, unlike you, who simply use them as a convenient tool when it suits. It’s because Britain has these values that I can make these difficult arguments so publicly.
To my colleagues in government I say, as I’ve argued for years: we must have transparency in policy-making and consistency in application of policy. There is nothing that feeds victimhood quite like treating some people differently from, and worse than, you treat everybody else.
In government I said the approach smacked of McCarthyism, a term named after US politician Joseph McCarthy, who in 1950, during the Cold War years, suggested communist and subsequently homosexual infiltration of the state and other government departments. The term describes Joseph McCarthy’s approach to hunting down and exposing these ‘enemies within’. His approach in 1950s America led to individuals having their reputations ruined based on defamatory statements made on little or flimsy evidence. Conspiracy theories were the order of the day, and many a homosexual was hounded out of office. Critics of McCarthy would be silenced with accusations of being traitors and communist sympathizers. His approach and party political positioning of the issue is widely accepted as hindering genuine counter-subversion work, and the term McCarthyism today is synonymous with making accusations without proper regard to evidence and using unfair investigative techniques to restrict dissent or political criticism. When I used the description in government I was shouted down. But surely, if it looks like McCarthyism, feels like McCarthyism, smells like McCarthyism, it’s nonsense not to call it McCarthyism.
If we have decided to view ever-increasing numbers of Muslim organizations or individual Muslim activists with suspicion and to dangerously narrow engagement with British Muslims to a dozen or so people from a community of over 3 million, then let’s at least have the decency to say that’s the approach we’ve taken. Let’s abide by our values and tell those whom we are not engaging with the reasons they are ‘out in the cold’. Let them know the case against them and let them have an opportunity to defend themselves. The rules of natural justice, rules that have stuck in my mind from when I first studied law at the tender age of sixteen, nemo iudex in causa sua – no one can judge their own case – and audi alteram partem – the right to know the case against you – are fundamentally British values.
This approach of maligning through association seems all the more ridiculous when we look at the unsavoury characters around the world we have in the past and continue to not only talk with, but trade with, fight alongside and consider our friends and allies – ‘friends’ like Gadaffi, Hosni Mubarak, General Zia, Saddam Hussein and General Sisi to name a few, and of course President Trump, with whom the PM walked hand in hand. Yet it’s an approach that we, the Conservative Party, used as a key plank of our campaign for London mayor in 2016. Time and again the party used dog-whistle messages to connect the Labour candidate, Sadiq Khan, to ‘extremists’. The approach was both dangerous and disingenuous. The subtle message of the campaign was Khan is a Muslim and cannot be trusted to run London; the evidence paraded in aid of this message was ‘connections’ Khan had with extremists, a message that the then home secretary, now prime minister, Theresa May, disappointingly put her name to.
These ‘connections’ that the Conservative Party exploited were threefold.
Firstly, it was said that Sadiq Khan, during his time as a practising lawyer, human rights activist and chairman of Liberty, a civil rights organization, represented the likes of Louis Farakhan, the infamous leader of the US group Nation of Islam, and Babar Ahmed, who was extradited to the US by the UK government in 2011 to face terrorism charges. Khan’s involvement with both was professional. I dread what the press could dig up about the clients I and many other lawyers – and there are lots of us in politics – have represented in the past. If we are to become a nation where a lawyer can be guilty of being an extremist because he represented people with extremist views, then how are we to judge those, including myself, who’ve represented paedophiles and rapists?
Secondly, apparently Khan could not be trusted to keep London safe because one of his sisters, one of eight siblings Khan has, had married and subsequently divorced – and that may be an important fact – a man who allegedly had or has extremist views.19 So are we to assume that all politicians are now accountable for the views of men and women their siblings may choose to marry? The ex-chancellor George Osborne was also sadly a strong supporter of the ‘guilt by association’ approach; we had many a disagreement on it, and yet I’m sure he’d quite rightly be appalled if his ability as chancellor had been questioned because of the conduct of his younger brother, Dr Adam Osborne, who has courted his fair share of controversy, including being suspended by the General Medical Council for writing fraudulent prescriptions.20
And thirdly, Khan has shared platforms with local Tooting imam Suleiman Ghani. Ghani for sure has some dubious views on women, homosexuality and organ donations,21 views for which he has been criticized by Sadiq Khan, but despite these views he was courted by and photographed with Dan Watkins, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Tooting, in 2015, Conservative MP for Twickenham Tania Mathias, Conservative MP and financial secretary to the Treasury Jane Ellison and indeed even the Conservative mayoral candidate, Zac Goldsmith.22 Khan had associated with the same man that the Conservatives had. Now members of parliament do numerous events in their constituency where local faith leaders too are invited, and it would be a worrying state of affairs if all future politicians would be maligned because their local imam, vicar or rabbi seemed both to hold some dubious views and enjoyed being photographed with his local MP.
For David Cameron to suggest, as he did at Prime Minister’s Questions, that Khan had met Ghani ‘again and again and again’ without once clarifying that Ghani was Khan’s equivalent of the embarrassing local parish vicar who opposes homosexuality, divorce, abortion and female bishops, and that Khan and Ghani had had a falling-out precisely because of these views, was wrong and not statesmanlike.23 The prime minister’s comments were covered by parliamentary privilege, something other parliamentarians too have used to make accusations which would likely be actionable in the ‘real world’. When Cameron’s comments were subsequently repeated outside the privileged environment of parliament by the secretary of state for defence, Michael Fallon, he was sued by Ghani and reportedly paid ‘thousands of pounds’ in compensation and legal costs.24 Despite this unsubstantiated accusation, maligning of a citizen and political faux pas, Fallon continues to serve as secretary of state for defence.
I explore this matter in detail because it hit the public consciousness, whereas the maligning of less high-profile individuals goes unnoticed. The knitting together of the views of others, perfectly legitimate connections and a few untruths can so easily destroy reputations. The consequences for individuals can be as wide-ranging as losing jobs, declined foreign visa applications, extended ‘random’ checks at airports and online abuse. Some take legal action and succeed;25 others, like most Brits, don’t have the financial means to clear their name, but most in the interests of damage limitation simply keep their heads down and hope the media circus will move on.26
But perhaps the most worrying example of this was when a cabinet colleague in the presence of the prime minister suggested adopting the ‘Al Capone approach’, saying that if we can’t get ‘them’ for their ideas and beliefs ‘they’ hold, let’s do ‘them’ for health and safety, charity commission bureaucracy breaches and money matters. I was shocked at the conversation. But it was no surprise to me months later when the government announced its review into the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization which many of our foreign allies have issues with, the same phrase was used as a quote from a senior source close to the inquiry. The source said ‘We cannot ban the organization, but that was never the intention of the review. We can go after single individuals, not for terrorist-related activity, but through the Al Capone method of law-enforcement. We cannot get them for terrorism, but I bet you they don’t pay their taxes.’27
The ‘Al Capone’ conversation meeting was memorable for many reasons, but three stuck in my mind: firstly, the ease with which colleagues felt comfortable in using the levers of power to ‘harass’ communities; secondly, the boldness of a Lib Dem colleague when he suggested that Michael Gove, the then secretary of state for justice, sounded more anti-Islam than anti-Islamism; and thirdly, because it took place around the time self-confessed neo-conservative writer Douglas Murray, when writing of the government’s response to the Lee Rigby murder, referred to me as ‘the enemy at the table’.28 I thought this concept of ‘the enemy within’ would make for a very good book.
Now one could argue that surely if people have views and ideas we don’t like then isolating them and distancing them from decision-making is a good thing. It’s what we did with the IRA and those associated with them in years gone by. But then as now we alienated a much larger group of Catholics than just the terrorists, we dismissed those who sought to highlight genuine Irish grievance as apologists for terrorists and we had an inconsistent approach to the way we treated communities, Protestant and Catholic. I would argue that the approach then as now was counterproductive, and one thing we can all agree on is that peace came about by talking to those we neither liked, nor trusted, nor agreed with.29
My view has always been that there are many groups and individuals whose views on a whole series of issues are at best conservative and at worst extreme, and government should not fund or take these groups or individuals as partners. As a country we absolutely have a right to state clearly what we feel is an acceptable and an unacceptable view on a whole series of issues. Let me take women’s rights as an example.
Every woman in this country has a right to determine her own future, to pursue an education and career, to choose to spend her life with the person of her choice, to wear what she wants, to travel how she wants, to choose whether to have children or not. She should be free to make choices that are her choices. Of course, there are interpretations of all faiths which may appear to cut across what I have described above, from the issue of divorce and remarriage in Catholicism, to the status of, and discrimination faced by, widows in Hinduism,30 to the value of female testimony in Islam, to the issue of female bishops in the Anglican Church and the very prescriptive role and responsibility of orthodox Jewish women and their impact on the pursuit of higher education.31
In a country committed to gender equality, even if we still have a serious problem with domestic violence, even if two women a week are killed at the hands of a current or ex-partner, even if each year we see around 1.3 million female victims of domestic abuse, even if we have a gender pay gap, and women are underrepresented at the top political and business tables, we cannot allow interpretations of faith or manifestations of culture such as forced marriages and female genital cutting to silence us. We must speak out consistently across all communities when we see women’s rights being trampled upon, including being brave enough to call out misogyny, which we did not, in meetings with President Trump. We must exert our values.
And so groups or individuals who do not hold to the view that women and men, whilst different, are equal should not be funded to run government projects or considered as acceptable partners for government policy. They should, however, be engaged with, challenged and most importantly be given the opportunity to change their views, to travel a journey, to redeem themselves from their previous positions. So whether the historical unsavoury view was on gender or race, religion or sexuality or indeed any other issue, there must be a way back.32
Unfortunately, David Cameron’s Conservative government continued in a paranoid state until its death. A stark example was the failure by government to consult a single Muslim organization during the development of its flagship anti-radicalization website, ‘Educate against Hate’. This tool to be used by teachers and pupils amongst others was discussed with twenty-nine organisations but none representing British Muslim communities.33
Theresa May’s government has yet to formally pronounce on this issue, though its approach appears to be the same. I urge them to reflect, think again and move on from the mistakes of the past. We need a rehabilitated approach, one with an ambition to bring more and more into Big Tent Britain and not, as the current policy is doing, push more and more to the fringe. We need to create a wider public space where we can shine a light on views we don’t like or disagree with rather than creating a larger space on the dark side. We need to create the opportunity to change people rather than give them a free rein to rebel.
The rules of engagement must be clear, but engagement there must be, as a disengaged community is one that neither matters nor belongs.
And just as we have been quick to forgive and move on from President Trump’s past, his distasteful and divisive comments and conduct, we must find it within ourselves to adopt a similar approach to our own citizens. If we are prepared to roll out the red carpet for someone like Trump, surely we can at least map out the route of return for many of these organizations and individuals who we need standing alongside us to create a Britain at ease with its Muslims and Muslims at ease with Britain, strong and united, especially when, and sadly it is a when, terror strikes our streets again.34