Fiyaz Mughal on the disaster of communniny thinking:

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

He doesn’t in fact actually mean religion or ethnicity as such, he means specifically that one religion, the one he names. I don’t think UK civil servants freak out much when the subject is Anglicanism.

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.

Purported “Islamophobia” is right up there with purported “transphobia” for ignoring and silencing dissenters.

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.

In other words groups who were motivating “Islamophobia” rather than preventing it.

I was alarmed to discover that Prevent coordinators, the people tasked with countering extremism, were regularly engaging with what I saw as extremist groups.

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 [and] polygamy and openly attacked Muslims who engaged with Jews…

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. 

Which is so interesting, because what about the fact that not acknowledging the problem might undermine soshul koheezhun? Why is social cohesion based on nodding happily at energetic subordination of women while ignoring the misery of those subordinated women? It’s frat-boy social cohesion, not the kind that sees women and girls as actual people.

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.

But, again, some communninies more than others. Much more than others. In particular, of course, the massive communiny that is female people is never as coddled and protected and defended as the Moosslimm communinny, and of course the atheist communniny and the Jewish communniny are also disdained.

And it’s not just ideology – it’s also groupthink. Over the years, a small circle of advisers from within Muslim communities have come to dominate this space. Many are closely aligned with the Labour Party, and they sing the same tune: that Islamophobia is the overriding issue facing Muslims, that Islamism should not be discussed, and that grooming has nothing whatsoever to do with culture or faith. I have worked for 25 years fighting anti-Muslim hatred and measuring its rise – I know the reality of that threat, but I also know that this narrow narrative has suffocated all other perspectives.

The problem here is that it’s of the nature of religions to be groupthink. That’s what religions are.