When I first heard that Angela Rayner had been tasked with creating an advisory council that will draw up an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’, I assumed it was another poisoned chalice handed to her by No. 10, particularly as Dominic Grieve has been suggested as the chair.
Is that the same Dominic Grieve who was leader of the awkward squad in the Commons and spent three years doing everything in his power to thwart Brexit? He’s bound to make the Deputy Prime Minister’s life just as miserable as he made Theresa May’s. If I wanted to see Rayner off as a leadership challenger, this is precisely the kind of crap I’d dump in her lap.
But I suspect that is wishful thinking. The government seems determined to criminalise ‘Islamophobia’, and adopting a formal definition is a necessary step before it can be embedded in law. Grieve has been tapped up because, in addition to being a former attorney general, he wrote the foreword to a 2018 report by the APPG on British Muslims, which included a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that was adopted by Labour, as well as dozens of Labour-run councils.
That definition of ‘Islamophobia’ is so broad that it includes pointing out that Islam has, in the past, been imposed on conquered populations by force, which would make any book on the history of Islam ‘Islamophobic’, as well as drawing attention to the over-representation of Muslims in grooming gangs. It even says accusing a ‘Muslim majority state’ of ‘inventing or exaggerating Islamophobia, ethnic cleansing or genocide perpetrated against Muslims’ is ‘Islamophobic’, which presumably includes anyone disputing Iran’s description of Israel’s operation in Gaza as a ‘genocide’.
Grieve may stop short of recommending that the Crown Prosecution Service should refer to these examples when deciding who to prosecute, although he did say in his foreword that he ‘greatly welcomed’ the report. But even if ‘Islamophobia’ was more tightly defined, criminalising it will still have a chilling effect on free speech. At the very least, it will encourage the police and courts to go further than they do at present.
Dominic Grieve is bound to make Angela Rayner’s life as miserable as he made Theresa May’s
Last Saturday, Greater Manchester Police arrested a man for burning a copy of the Quran in the city centre and subsequently charged him with a racially and religiously aggravated public order offence. ‘The Quran is a sacred book to Muslims and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress,’ said the judge. ‘This is a tolerant country but we just do not tolerate this behaviour.’
The man has pleaded guilty, so we won’t have an opportunity to test whether this is a crime under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which makes it a statutory offence to intentionally cause someone harassment, alarm or distress. At least, we won’t in this case. The Free Speech Union is currently defending an asylum seeker who has been arrested for burning a Quran, but he hasn’t been charged yet. If he is, we will argue that prosecuting him is an unlawful interference in his right to freedom of expression, as set out in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
But if the judge in the Manchester case is right, it is already a crime to do something that causes a Muslim offence. Someone accused of intentionally causing harassment, alarm or distress could defend themselves by arguing it was ‘unreasonable’ for the person to experience those feelings, but if it’s not ‘unreasonable’ for a Muslim to feel ‘distress’ when a person sets fire to the Quran, why would it be when another Islamic blasphemy code is breached? Or, indeed, when someone points out that Ibrar Hussain, Imtiaz Ahmed and Fayaz Ahmed, who were given long prison sentences last month for the rape of a young girl, are all Muslims? Once you’ve allowed that becoming extremely distressed on religious grounds isn’t ‘unreasonable’ and anyone causing it is guilty of an offence, you’ve opened the door to criminalising ‘Islamophobia’.
Now that I’m a member of the House of Lords, will I be able to contest this in parliament? It’s not clear how, which is one of the worrying things about the government’s approach. Instead of bringing forward a bill criminalising ‘Islamophobia’, Rayner will argue that it’s already prohibited by law and all she’s doing is giving ‘guidance’ about who to prosecute based on the advice of a cross-party group led by a former Tory attorney general. The way to fight this, then, is to contest the prosecution of those accused of ‘Islamophobia’ and to persuade the authorities that causing Muslims offence is not, ipso facto, against the law.
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