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’.
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