Our Wretched Home Office.

 Over half a decade of working with the Home Office on countering extremism, I saw it for myself, time and time again: a civil service culture that instinctively resists scrutiny of anything involving religion or ethnicity.

The moment you even suggest that the ethnicity or faith of perpetrators might be one factor among many worth examining, certain civil servants recoil.

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They tell you that looking into it might “inflame community tensions”, or “increase hate crimes against Muslims” or “cause policing issues”.

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These arguments become a convenient way to close down honest discussion. That’s the exact approach that now appears to be dominating the Government’s inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, and I worry it means that the state will never truly tackle the underlying issues.

I’ve spent much of my working life engaging various government departments on issues of hate crime, community cohesion and extremism. In 2012 I set up Tell Mama, an organisation which monitors anti-Muslim hate and supports victims.

This meant countless meetings with the Home Office to highlight groups whose values and world view were at direct odds with the values of our nation; groups who were willing to inflame division and tensions through their actions. I would regularly write to Home Office and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) officials to highlight report findings and the deeply divisive videos and content that Islamist groups were putting out into the public and social media space.

In particular back then – in the mid 2010s – I was alarmed to discover that Prevent coordinators, the people tasked with countering extremism, were regularly engaging with what I saw as extremist groups.

Mughal speaking at a Together Against Antisemitism demonstration in Parliament Square, Dec 2019 Credit: Alamy

On countless occasions I put it to the civil servants in charge of counter-extremism that it seemed deeply antithetical to the cause of counter-extremism to engage with groups who believed in Sharia marriage, polygamy and openly attacked Muslims who engaged with Jews. Some of these groups didn’t fully agree with the democratic structures of our country – this was serious stuff and especially when they were willing to use conflicts in the Middle East to inflame tensions in the UK.

When I raised it, though, the response was a wall of polite obstruction. Each local authority, I was told, makes its own decisions. There might be legal risks in naming these organisations. Some civil servants insisted these were simply “legitimate Muslim groups” who should be included in community engagement, as though their form of Islamic interpretations were “normative” Islam.

It was a masterclass in bureaucratic resistance. And behind every excuse was an ideology: a belief that acknowledging the problem might undermine social cohesion. A handful of civil servants understood the risks, but most preferred to look away. It taught me a lesson that feels painfully relevant to the current inquiry into grooming gangs. When civil servants are driven by ideology rather than evidence, difficult truths are buried, and real people pay the price.

Some of these people are still there, working in the Home Office and MHCLG today.

The problem as I see it goes all the way back to Gordon Brown’s government. That period, post-Blair, was when the themes of social cohesion and community harmony became dominant within government. The old Department for Communities and Local Government (now MHCLG) grew out of that thinking, and over time it embedded a particular type of civil servant – people whose entire careers have been shaped by what I call “kumbaya politics”. By that I mean the kind of world view where everyone sits around holding hands, pretending that the world is fine and that we must never look too closely at uncomfortable realities for fear of upsetting someone.

Nowhere is that more entrenched than in the MHCLG. Within that department, there’s a powerful narrative that says: anything which risks making one community look bad must be resisted. And when that mindset filters down through advisers and policy officials, it becomes impossible to have a transparent, evidence-based conversation about complex social issues.

In the Home Office there are some who will say that even using the term “Islamist extremism” is offensive or counterproductive – this, despite the fact that hundreds of British citizens have been killed by Islamist extremists on our own soil. If they can’t even bring themselves to say the words, how are they going to face the even more sensitive questions that arise around grooming gangs?

Take it from a moderate, Islamist extremism is still the biggest threat ... We need to remain focused and vigilant against this cancer in our society

This is the machinery that survivors of grooming are up against. A civil service very sensitive to being labelled as racist and reluctant to “open up racial divides” by looking into the issue in detail.Sadly these themes emerged in the statements of the abuse survivors who resigned from their roles in the Government inquiry this week. When I saw that one of the women, “Elizabeth” from Rotherham, quit on the grounds that she felt “selective narratives [were] being promoted – ones that appear to serve particular agendas.These arguments become a convenient way to close down honest discussion. That’s the exact approach that now appears to be dominating the Government’s inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, and I worry it means that the state will never truly tackle the underlying issues

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I’ve spent much of my working life engaging various government departments on issues of hate crime, community cohesion and extremism. In 2012 I set up Tell Mama, an organisation which monitors anti-Muslim hate and supports victims.

This meant countless meetings with the Home Office to highlight groups whose values and world view were at direct odds with the values of our nation; groups who were willing to inflame division and tensions through their actions. I would regularly write to Home Office and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) officials to highlight report findings and the deeply divisive videos and content that Islamist groups were putting out into the public and social media space.

In particular back then – in the mid 2010s – I was alarmed to discover that Prevent coordinators, the people tasked with countering extremism, were regularly engaging with what I saw as extremist groups.

 Fiyaz Mughal.