The UK government is covering up its submission to extremists over suppressing free speech.
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This is an expanded version of my column in The Times (£) today.
When a government department starts shredding the evidence behind its decisions, it’s a fair bet that it it has something to hide from the public.
Last March, the government introduced a non-statutory definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” as a way of weaponising the charge of “Islamophobia” without being seen to do so.
The Starmer government set up a working group which invited people to make submissions aimed at defining the term. This provoked horror from critics who claimed it would create a blasphemy law by the back door for Islam.
The group eventually scrapped the term “Islamophobia” in favour of “anti-Muslim hostility” in an effort to head off such opposition. The government adopted this definition and is encouraging public, private and charitable bodies to act on it.
Critics claim, however, that this Islamophobia-lite is so vague and subjective that it will still have a chilling effect on free speech.
One of those critics, the Conservative justice spokesman Nick Timothy, has now discovered through freedom of information requests that Angela Rayner’s communities department has deleted all the submissions made to the working group.
So public bodies will be deciding whether to take action against “anti-Muslim hostility” by using a slippery definition for which the reasoning has been deliberately concealed.
Timothy has drawn the obvious conclusion that the submissions were destroyed to hide the influence by Islamist extremists over the definition’s wording...
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