Would you ask a panel of committed vegans to provide objective, balanced advice on a national dietary policy? Only if you were looking for an entirely biased response. Yet this is effectively what the British government is doing on the question of whether the public should be free to criticise Islam.
This is why the Free Speech Union (FSU) recently wrote to deputy prime minister Angela Rayner. In particular, the FSU is alaramed about the government’s new ‘Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred and Islamophobia’ – a miniature Labour quango tasked with articulating an ‘official’ definition of Islamophobia. It should concern anyone concerned about free speech.
Chaired by former Conservative MP and attorney general Dominic Grieve KC, the working group is marked by secrecy and ideological rigidity. Its terms of reference make clear that the advice it gives to ministers will remain private and unpublished – in direct contravention of the government’s own code of conduct. And the group’s members clearly believe ‘Islamophobia’ – that is, the criticism of Islam and related practices – represents a unique threat to British society. It is a recipe for censorship.
There are also serious concerns about the way the group has gone about ‘consulting’ the public. For example, a recent ‘call for evidence’ on Islamophobia was launched without notice, and only came to light after being leaked. Unsurprisingly, the consultation was skewed towards a pre-determined outcome – in this case, a definition mirroring that which the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims cooked up in 2018. This defined Islamophobia as ‘rooted in racism and target[ing] expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. It isn’t hard to see where the working group is going.
Unsurprisingly, the consultation provided no invitation for those concerned about how a government-sponsored definition of Islamophobia might impact free speech. Groups such as Christian Concern, Don’t Divide Us, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and the Oxford Institute for British Islam – among many others – were all ignored by the working group.
You might think that conduct like this points to a distinct lack of objectivity on the part of the working group. And, dig a little deeper, and that is exactly what you will find. Of the five members whose names are publicly known, most have either endorsed the APPG definition or made statements closely aligned with its assumptions.
Grieve, for instance, was directly involved in the APPG’s 2018 report, authoring the foreword. He described it as ‘an important contribution to the debate as to how Islamophobia can best be addressed’. Another group member, Akeela Ahmed, who co-chairs the British Muslim Network, was cited in the same report calling for a definition ‘with legal power’ that could be ‘implemented by the government and the police’.
Most alarming is the presence of Baroness Shaista Gohir among the working group’s members. Not only has she publicly endorsed the APPG’s definition, she has authored a report linking ‘Islamophobia’ to the media reporting on the grooming-gangs scandal. The ‘disproportionate media coverage being given to British Pakistani offenders’, she argued in 2013, enabled ‘right-wing populist groups’ to exploit the issue to ‘fuel racism and Islamophobia’.
The attempt to recast criticism of Islamic beliefs and practices as a form of racial hostility raises the stakes considerably. Why? Because British law currently makes a clear distinction between the two. What is known as the ‘Waddington Amendment’ of the Public Order Act 1986 explicitly protects the right to criticise religion. It states that ‘nothing in this part’ should be interpreted as prohibiting ‘discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents’.
Adopting the APPG definition – and it’s hard to see the working group coming up with something radically different – would have a chilling effect on free speech. It would deter people from raising legitimate concerns about Islamist extremism, grooming gangs, even immigration, for fear they would be deemed racist. Its effect would be a modern-day blasphemy law, dressed up in the language of policing ‘hate speech’. Worse still, this is being developed behind closed doors, based on evidence gathered from a gerrymandered list of respondents, in a process overseen by an entirely unelected body.
Under Labour, the UK has enough problems as it is. The last thing we need is for blasphemy laws to be smuggled on to the statute books without any of us realising.
Freddie Attenborough is the digital communications director of the Free Speech Union.
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