Kemi Badenoch has asked Sir Keir Starmer to revoke his party’s adoption of the definition of Islamophobia put forward the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims in 2018, saying that it suppresses open discussion of grooming gangs by making “people scared to tell the truth”.
At last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, the Conservative leader also asked Sir Keir whether he intended to make it the official government definition – something he failed to rule out.
The APPG definition puts “grooming gangs” in inverted commas and suggests that using the term in relation to Muslims is racist. According to the accompanying report, such “age-old stereotypes and tropes about Islam… heighten vulnerability of Muslims to hate crimes”.
The APPG on British Muslims was co-chaired by Wes Streeting, now the Health Secretary. Its definition was adopted by the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn in March 2019 – but not by the then Conservative government, led by Theresa May, who believed it would damage free speech. It has since been adopted by the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Green Party and several local councils.
Critics, however, have called it too wide-ranging and said it could silence people trying to expose rape gangs of predominantly Pakistani heritage.
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”.
Accusations of racism were also levelled at Andrew Norfolk, the Times reporter who exposed the grooming scandal in 2011, and Sarah Champion, the MP who spoke up for victims of abuse in Rotherham.
Ms Champion was nominated in the 2018 “Islamophobe of the Year” awards by an Islamic charity.
Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Tell Mama, a project monitoring anti-Muslim hatred, said: “My view is the APPG definition is too wide-ranging in relation to characteristics of what Muslimness are about… and must be discarded.
“We must talk about grooming issues for the sake of vulnerable children and make it crystal clear that in doing so it is not the problem of all Muslims, but we need greater understanding of why there has been a concentration of men of Pakistani heritage in these gangs.”
There are also fears that a formal government definition of anti-Muslim discrimination to be used nationally would effectively act as a blasphemy law.
Stephen Evans, the Chief Executive of the National Secular Society, said: “Portraying all Muslim men as potential sex abusers is clearly anti-Muslim bigotry, but the problem with ‘Islamophobia’ is the way the term is used to smear those with legitimate concerns.
“It’s vital that we can engage in open and honest discussions about a religion with increasing cultural and political significance. The term ‘Islamophobia’ threatens to stifle these critical conversations.”
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