Hurrah! A setback for the enemies of free speech

This has been a bad month for those who want to shut down free speech in Britain.

First there was the wholesale failure of Fiyaz Mughal (whose ‘work’ I have written about before). Readers will recall that Mr Mughal – whose website, Tell Mama, claims to record and counter ‘Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred’ – used the immediate aftermath of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby to claim hysterically that, ‘The scale of the backlash is astounding… there has been a massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice’. He also used the opportunity to attack the UK government’s counter-terrorism policy. All this before Drummer Rigby – who some people may remember was killed in an actual attack by two Islamic extremists – was buried.

The Sunday Telegraph subsequently revealed that Tell Mama’s study was completely wrong. Among many other things Tell Mama had conflated actual incidents with virtual online expressions of hatred and failed to do even the most basic checks, reporting all claims as facts. In a follow-up story the Sunday Telegraph also revealed that:

‘The organisation has received a total of £375,000 from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) since last year. “Mr Mughal was giving data on attacks to DCLG which wasn’t stacking up when it was cross-referenced with other reports by Acpo [the Association of Chief Police Officers],” said one source closely involved in counter-extremism. He was questioned by DCLG civil servants and lost his temper. He was subsequently called in by [Liberal Democrat MP] Don Foster and told that he would receive no more money.’

Well, unsurprisingly Mughal didn’t like these facts being exposed to public view and did everything he could to try to reclaim his credibility. I believe his attempt to be what people on Twitter call an ‘epic fail.