For a Government so concerned with the rise of right-wing populism, Keir Starmer and pals seem bizarrely intent on vindicating all of the least charitable right-wing predictions about what a Labour Government would be like.
Following the furore about grooming gangs at the beginning of the year, reports broke last week that the Government was planning to introduce a new legal definition of ‘Islamophobia’, which could criminalise criticism of migration from majority Muslim countries and even crack down on those who talk about Muslim grooming gangs.
According to the Telegraph, the Government intends to convene a 16-member ‘council’ on Islamophobia, which could include figures such as controversial Leeds Imam Qari Asim. Appointed as an ‘independent adviser on Islamophobia’ in July 2019, Asim was dismissed in 2022 after leading protests against the screening of a film about the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter. Call me cynical, but I remain skeptical about Asim’s commitment to freedom of speech given his record.
The ‘Islamophobia council’ could also feature Dominic Grieve, the former Conservative MP who served as Attorney General for David Cameron. Back in 2018, Grieve authored a foreword for ‘Islamophobia Defined’, a report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, which aimed to produce a ‘working definition’ of Islamophobia for legal adoption.
Leaving aside the substance of the report for a moment, ‘Islamophobia Defined’ is a methodological disaster, which relies heavily on anecdotes, and on the work of activist charities such as the Runnymede Trust. It focuses heavily on ‘perceived discrimination’, rather than on tangible examples of negative sentiment, and aims to portray Britain as a country with an endemic Islamophobia problem. Eventually, the APPG’s report settled on the following definition:
Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.
This was the definition adopted by the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee in 2019, and so we might reasonably expect a government-led review to reach a similar conclusion. Eagle-eyed readers will note that this definition is unhelpfully broad – but fortunately, ‘Islamophobia Defined’ also provides a number of helpful examples of situations which might be covered by the working definition.
Less fortunately, the examples presented in the report paint a grim picture. One example includes ‘engaging in stereotypes about Muslims’, such as by suggesting that Muslims have a particular propensity to support acts of terror, or by suggesting that Muslims tend to be more politically illiberal.
It’s easy to see how broad definitions like this one could punish ordinary Britons who engage in legitimate political analysis. According to polling conducted by JL Partners last year, 46% of UK Muslims say that they have more sympathy with Hamas than with Israel – while 52% supported making it illegal to depict the Prophet Muhammad. Could it soon become illegal to acknowledge facts such as these?
But the list of examples doesn’t stop there. Under a strict application, the APPG definition could also criminalise complaining about immigration from majority-Muslim countries, talking about Muslim overrepresentation in prisons, opposing halal slaughter, making stereotypical jokes about Muslims, opposing Palestinian statehood – or even mentioning that somebody is a Muslim when the Government deems this fact ‘irrelevant’.
A formalised legal definition of Islamophobia would empower police forces to clamp down on everything in the list above, and more. Expansive anti-free speech laws, such as the Public Order Act 1986, could easily be weaponised against those who express uncomfortable sentiments.
This is particularly worrying given that, in many cases, police are already cracking down on speech perceived as anti-Muslim. Just last week, a man in Manchester was arrested for burning a copy of the Qur’an in public while in February 2023, four pupils in Wakefield were suspended from school and investigated by police after scuffing a copy of the Qur’an.
And even when police don’t enforce these de facto blasphemy laws, local communities often do. In 2021, a teacher at Batley Grammar School was suspended and forced into hiding, after showing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad to students. An official government definition of Islamophobia would only lend credence to the kind of illiberal mobs which hounded this teacher out of a job for the crime of providing a Western education to his students.
This is no accident; in fact, this is the logical next step in the British state’s approach to managing multiculturalism.
Minority groups are afforded special legal protection, political representation, and parallel institutions, such as courts and schools. Relations between groups are mediated by the state, with ‘alleviating community tensions’ as the main guiding principle. The state seems particularly concerned with policing the law-abiding majority, and affords this group no special representation.
This approach, in turn, invites more special pleading from minority groups – and thus more rights and protections for those groups. The APPG definition is a case-in-point. It mimics the expansive IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which critics say restricts criticism of Israel. In recent years, calls have also grown for a specific legal definition of ‘Hinduphobia’ and ‘anti-Sikh hate’.
This all points in one direction – fewer rights for the law-abiding majority, more special protections for minority groups, and further restrictions on free speech, driven by a desire to protect the project of multiculturalism.
If we are to avoid sleepwalking into this sorry fate, we must reject these calls and dismantle the dangerous anti-free speech laws which enable crackdowns on inconvenient or offensive speech. As a nation, we deserve the right to free expression, whether or not it causes offence. We deserve to live in a country where our freedoms are protected, regardless of who it upsets.
Most of all, we deserve to live in a country with the self-confidence to stand up for its norms, and ignore the baying of the illiberal mob.
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