A charity boss cancelled for ‘Islamophobia’ has won an important victory

It sometimes feels as if there is never any good news in the fight to preserve freedom of speech in Britain. At the very moment, for example, when the United States has a president who is ripping up the shibboleths of what Suella Braverman memorably called the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’, our deputy prime minister Angela Rayner is reportedly planning to set up a 16-person council to draw up an official definition of Islamophobia.

But it isn’t all gloom. Last week saw a small but potentially very significant legal victory for free speech when a charity trustee who had been blacklisted by the Charity Commission for posting thought crimes on social media won his appeal. 

The story is relatively straightforward. In 2023, Gary Mond, a trustee of the Jewish National Fund UK (JNF UK), one of the oldest and largest Jewish charities, was barred by the Charity Commission after it learned of a small number of posts which could be “perceived as anti-Islam” (as the appeal ruling put it). This was a reference to various social media posts and ‘likes’ by Mr Mond between 2014 and 2021, including one in which he wrote that “civilisation” was “at war with Islam”. It is clear from the rest of the post that he meant “Islamism” or “Islamic fundamentalism”, but nevertheless that is what he wrote.

In another, on Facebook, he responded to a post which said: “British Parliament votes for air strikes in Iraq against Islamic State. Prominent Muslim Labour MP resigns in protest. Imagine a British Parliament with substantially greater numbers of Muslim MPs or MPs representing constituencies with Muslim voters. Britain would be hamstrung in trying to protect its essential security interests.” Mr. Mond commented: “When this happens – and the odds are it will – the Britain that we knew will have gone forever”.

He also ‘liked’ a post on Facebook by Pamela Gellar, a US commentator who was banned from the UK by Theresa May as Home Secretary because of her extremist views.  

The posts were first unearthed in 2021 by the Jewish News when Mr Mond was a prominent member of the Board of Deputies, the representative body of British Jews which has long had a default liberal-left stance. Mr Mond was a Conservative and, as such, had political enemies among the small number of hard left members at the Board. 

The newspaper report of his posts was an example of what has become known as “offence excavation”, when the social media histories of (almost always) right-wing figures are trawled for posts which can be used to paint the subjects as bigots or reprobates.

Whoever dug up Mr Mond’s tweets, it worked. Within days, Mr Mond was suspended from his position as a Senior Vice President of the Board. He subsequently resigned from the charitable roles associated with that. He also stood down from JNF UK in February 2023 (but only because he had served his maximum 12 years as a trustee). Mr Mond had been brought to heel for having dared express views that were at variance with the accepted thinking of the liberal left.

The Charity Commission then weighed in, disqualifying him as a charity trustee or manager for two-and-a-half years on the grounds that his online activity could have brought the charities into disrepute. It is that decision which Mr Mond appealed – at a personal cost of £60,000 – and which has now been overturned by the General Regulatory Chamber, in effect the appeal tribunal for the Commission. The significance of the ruling is not so much that this is the first time a disqualification order has been overturned and that the posts did not constitute “the conduct of someone who is unfit” to be a trustee, but rather the broader grounds behind the decision. Mr Mond, the tribunal ruled, “has the right to freedom of expression”.

This should be of profound importance. Mr Mond’s disqualification was based on the Charity Commission making a judgment about the acceptability or otherwise of his political views – specifically, of course, about his views of the influence of Islamism on British politics. It brings to mind the historian Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” For the Charity Commission, views which are outside the progressive consensus are, by definition, wrong-headed – and thus incompatible with the trusteeship of a charity. 

The Commission has tried to put the best gloss on its defeat, with a spokesman saying: “The outcome of this case brings more clarity to trustees’ appropriate use of social media, underlining the need for all trustees to act in the best interests of their charity including while posting in a personal capacity.” This is drivel. The clarity the case brings is that the Commission was wrong to impose its views of what is permissible for a charity trustee to think. 

But welcome as the ruling is, its importance may be limited by the seemingly inexorable drive under the current government to ban certain unacceptable views. Ms Rayner’s Islamophobia council is reportedly to be headed by Dominic Grieve, the former Conservative Attorney General, one of the worst conceivable people who could hold such a position. Mr Grieve wrote the forward to a report in 2018 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims which proposed a definition of Islamophobia (subsequently adopted by the Labour Party) as “a type of racism targeting expressions of Muslimness”. Pointing out the number of Muslims in grooming gangs could be perceived as Islamophobic under this definition, as would be almost any criticism, or even some factual statements about Islam.

Mr Mond has done us all a great service by refusing to bow down before the Charity Commission’s thought police. But the battle for free speech is a long way from being won.