Mick Hartley

Back to the "Islamophobia" debate. From the Times:

The definition of Islamophobia adopted by the Labour Party put “grooming gangs” in inverted commas and suggested that using the term in relation to Muslims was racist.

The wording was contained in a report by an all-party parliamentary group (APPG) of MPs co-chaired by Wes Streeting, now the health secretary.

Since March 2019, the party has adopted the “definition and examples” set out in the 2018 report, which includes a warning that “Asian grooming gangs” were a modern iteration of “age-old stereotypes and tropes about Islam”.

The document listed these as “sexual profligacy and paedophilia, or Islam and violence”, concluding that they “heighten vulnerability of Muslims to hate crimes”.

On Wednesday Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, said that, according to the APPG on British Muslims report, “talking about sex groomers was an example of Islamophobia”. She added: “This is exactly why people are scared to tell the truth.”

And why it's clear that Labour – see Starmer's claims about jumping on the "far-right" bandwagon – is not going to learn any lessons here. Hands over ears, carry on as normal. Talk of grooming gangs is "Islamophobic".

Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP who first raised concerns that white girls as young as 11 were being groomed by British-Pakistani men, said she was shouted down as a racist in meetings and that local councils “were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness”.

Claims of racism were also levelled at Andrew Norfolk, the Times investigative reporter who exposed the grooming scandal in 2011, and Sarah Champion, the MP who spoke up for victims of abuse in Rotherham.

Champion was nominated in the “Islamophobe of the year awards” in 2018 by an Islamic charity.

That's how it works.