The notion of ‘Islamophobia’ is being used to stifle honest debate

Next year I will begin my fifth decade as a working journalist. As a writer, as an executive — and now as the chair of Index on Censorship — I have always tried to encourage honest, thorough and professional reporting and analysis of the UK’s ethnic and religious minority communities. Unless all our citizens share in a common understanding of our nation, the prospect of an integrated society will remain a distant dream.

The key words here are ‘honest’ and ‘thorough’. The tradition of British journalism eschews propaganda and partisanship. In my early days reporting on minority communities in London, many urged our teams to avoid topics that might lead others to stigmatise those communities; but had we done so, the principal losers would have been those very minorities. Had we avoided tackling the over-representation of young black men in prison, on the grounds that the story would ‘criminalise’ the community, many of the reforms that kept some out of jail might never even have been considered. Failing to investigate the corrupt practices of politicians in some parts of the city would have left Muslim-majority neighbourhoods to languish under the dead hand of municipal corruption.

Most British Muslims believe in and uphold the common values of our nation: the rule of law, the freedom to speak as they wish and to practise their faith as they see fit. It is a desperate shame that those who claim to act in their interests are now devoting such enormous amounts of energy to suppressing thorough and honest journalism about the one British community which most needs its story to be told to a wider public.

‘Sensitive’ and ‘contextualised’ reporting about Muslims may sound like a cause that any right-minded individual would support.