Mick Hartley

Fiyaz Mughal in the Telegraph

Over half a decade of working with the Home Office on countering extremism, I saw it for myself, time and time again: a civil service culture that instinctively resists scrutiny of anything involving religion or ethnicity.

The moment you even suggest that the ethnicity or faith of perpetrators might be one factor among many worth examining, certain civil servants recoil.

They tell you that looking into it might “inflame community tensions”, or “increase hate crimes against Muslims” or “cause policing issues”.

These arguments become a convenient way to close down honest discussion. That’s the exact approach that now appears to be dominating the Government’s inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, and I worry it means that the state will never truly tackle the underlying issues.

It’s the same group-think that drove the response to the grooming gangs scandal: the same group think that’s now blocking any inquiry that dares to mention ethnicity or faith.

Over the years, a small circle of advisers from within Muslim communities have come to dominate this space. Many are closely aligned with the Labour Party, and they sing the same tune: that Islamophobia is the overriding issue facing Muslims, that Islamism should not be discussed, and that grooming has nothing whatsoever to do with culture or faith. I have worked for 25 years fighting anti-Muslim hatred and measuring its rise – I know the reality of that threat, but I also know that this narrow narrative has suffocated all other perspectives.

Dissenters like me, people who have challenged both the far-Right and Islamist extremism, are no longer invited in. Those who are, remain locked in a self-reinforcing cycle, telling ministers exactly what they expect to hear. And so the same mistakes are repeated, again and again.

If this inquiry is to mean anything, it must shine a light not only on the perpetrators, but on the machinery of resistance that has allowed these failures to persist for so long. Until we confront the ideological filters within the civil service itself, we will never get to the truth which the British public deserve.