TV review: The Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Courts; The Sex Clinic

Sometimes a television programme raises far bigger questions than it actually gives a platform for, which is the case with Panorama’s The Secrets of Britain’s Sharia Courts (BBC1, Monday). Wedged in this half-hour slot are explosive issues such as the sovereignty of British law, the role of religion in arbitrating on marital disputes, and the place of women in Islam.

The show adopts a feisty, no-holds-barred approach in this piece of investigative journalism presented by Jane Corbin, yet has strange ellipses at certain points that leave huge questions dangling. At one juncture, Corbin says, ‘The previous government gave up on its attempt to investigate sharia councils. They couldn’t get proper access to them.’

Eh? Is that all it takes to fall off the radar of official probity, to be inaccessible,
unavailable, incommunicado? Did ‘the previous government’ — one assumes that refers to Labour — stumble at the first hurdle of its investigation because things got a bit complicated? And by ‘couldn’t get proper access’, does that mean that the authorities were prevented from knowing what goes on in sharia courts, and found this state of things acceptable? Yet there is no follow-up to those two thundering sentences.