Mick Hartley

Fiyaz Mughal in the Telegraph – ‘Moderate Muslims like me have been cut off by Labour in favour of extremists’:

Last year, while working as a contractor for the Home Office’s Channel programme, which is part of the Government’s counter-extremism strategy, he wrote in The Telegraph that he found it “astonishing” that during a Home Office summit on extremism, the threat of Islamism was not mentioned for the first 90 minutes. The day after the article’s publication he was contacted by a senior Home Office official who wanted to discuss his engagement with the media, as well as the possibility of future government work. The official appeared to be “trying to pressure me not to speak about Islamism in the public domain”.

Mughal believes that “what we have [now] are groups like the Greens and Labour who are basically pandering to the worst parts of the ideological section of my community and entrenching them deeper into state institutions”.

Labour in particular is running scared, he suggests. “There were voices… just as Labour came in that were saying to government sources and ministers: ‘Don’t use the word Islamism, because it gives Islam a bad name’. That was part of this simplistic, idiotic mentality of some of these people who still have connections to some of these Islamist groups. People within Labour. And they listened to them.”

Apart from anything else, such squeamishness around the language does a disservice to the majority of peaceful Muslims, he believes. “Because if you don’t use the word ‘Islamist’, the public gets the view it’s all Muslims [who are a problem]. You have to distinguish the problem… otherwise all Muslims get melded in.”….

“I suspect some of the advisers in this Government who have had problematic links with Islamist groups are sitting and advising them,” he says. “I know they are. They’ve got the ear of Labour [and are] basically saying, ‘No, he’s not the right type of Muslim, he’s not the guy to talk to, he’s a bit on the pro-Israel side.’ That’s being fed into some on the ministerial level. And I strongly suspect the Government has [listened to] those voices.”

Behind this, he believes, is the misguided hope by Labour of clinging on to, or winning back, the Muslim vote. “The concern is they move more in a direction to listen to these [toxic] voices, try to bring them back in. And that excludes moderates like us,” he says. “We’re out.”

It all sounds horribly plausible.

To his credit, Mughal was one of the few Muslims to speak out about the grooming gangs.

Labour’s proposed appointment of an “anti-Muslim hostility tsar”, meanwhile, does at least make some of the right noises:

The Spectator has been leaked a draft copy of Protecting What Matters, a document outlining Labour’s new cohesion strategy which is to be unveiled in a cross government push next week. The 47-page paper features a crackdown on extremism and names Islamists as the biggest threat to community cohesion. It also outlines fresh demands that new arrivals in Britain seek to integrate and speak good English, described as a ‘fundamental basis for participating in society and an expectation of those who wish to call the UK home’. It states: ‘Those who come here must make a genuine effort to integrate into and engage with our shared way of life.’ The last census found that more than a million people could not speak English well or at all.

The report states clearly that Islamists are responsible for three-quarters of the police’s counterterror workload and 94 per cent of all terror-related deaths in the past 25 years. The plan also rejects calls, predominantly from British Muslims, for blasphemy laws in the UK.

We shall see.