Tell Mama and the battle for the future of British Islam

Tell Mama is Britain’s most prominent opponent of anti-Muslim prejudice. It monitors everything from criminal assaults to everyday abuse. The far right loathes it, and the Conservative press sells the grotesque pretence that the group exaggerates prejudice to divert attention from the horror of Islamist violence.

But attacks from the right only wound. Tell Mama’s ‘friends’ in the Muslim community have turned out to be far more dangerous and are threatening to destroy the organisation. ‘I am on a knife edge,’ one activist told me. ‘I may just leave. I’m so fed up.’

Two weeks ago Andrew Gilligan reported in the Sunday Telegraph that Baroness Warsi’s Whitehall working group on anti-Muslim hatred has been infiltrated by men with backgrounds in organisations that can hate for England. Muddassar Ahmed, for instance, worked with the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, a fanatical outfit with Jews on the brain. During the last two elections it devoted its energies to campaigning against ‘Zionist’ MPs. Labour’s Lorna Fitzsimons lost her seat after the organisation told local Muslims to sack her because she was ‘Jewish’.

Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Tell Mama and a former adviser to Nick Clegg, told the Sunday Telegraph he was so concerned ‘about the kinds of groups some of the members had connections with, and some of the groups they were recommending be brought into government’ that he left Warsi’s committee.

The baroness presents herself as a plain-speaking politician. But as with Nigel Farage, her relaxed image hides the soul of a control freak. I hear rumours of a threatened libel action, and of intense lobbying of the board of Tell Mama to force Mughal to back down.

While pressure was applied in private, a public campaign began on Twitter under the hashtag ‘Don’t Tell Mama’.