This story first broke a while ago now, but there seems to be a renewed flurry of interest in the issue, if little agreement as to what precisely Ed Miliband meant when he expressed his wish to clamp down on Islamophobia. Tom Holland’s tweets highlight this ambiguity:
There’s been a whole series of stories such as this, from Rod Liddle:
I hadn’t realised that Ed was going to make Islamophobia a crime.
He implies – although the facetious tone makes it difficult to gauge what he thinks Miliband really meant – that a Labour government would outlaw views such as the ones he expresses in his article, a dislike of many practices and beliefs associated with Islam, though not subscribed to by all Muslims.
Writing in the Commentator, Robin Mitchinson expresses outrage at Miliband’s promise:
To ingratiate himself with Muslim voters, he promises to criminalise ‘Islamophobia’.
He said: ‘We are going to make it an aggravated crime. We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime. We are going to change the law on this so we make it absolutely clear … our abhorrence of hate crime and Islamophobia.”
He has been here before.
Ed voted for a clause in the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act that would have criminalised ‘deliberately insulting religion’. This was defeated after lobbying by civil liberties groups. Now he wants to bring it back.
He goes on to say that, “the police will record Islamophobic attacks right across the country.” Not in the case of anti-Semitism, of course; Muslims only are to be protected. So if this comes to pass, we can expect no further police enquiries into abduction and rape of under-age girls by Pakistani gangs. It will be ‘open season’ for these crimes and no doubt a good many others.
(Here’s a reminder of the controversy around the 2006 Act mentioned by Mitchinson.) Like other coverage of Miliband’s words, this post is distractingly over the top. Does this former barrister really think that Muslims could not be prosecuted for violent crimes as a direct consequence of what Miliband is proposing? Also – antisemitic crimes are already recorded separately. Theresa May has recently made the perfectly reasonable suggestion that anti-Muslim crimes should also be recorded systematically, and in the interview with Muslim News Miliband followed suit.
This article seems to offer a useful corrective, although I thought there was some lack of clarity/consistency in the statements made in paragraphs 3 and 4. But – like other coverage of the story, and like Miliband’s initial comments – it reinforced the unhelpfulness of ‘Islamophobia’ as a term.
Labour’s stance is not favouring Muslim communities – it simply reflects a consistent desire to clamp down on all forms of hate crime. As their manifesto made clear:
“We will take a zero-tolerance approach to hate crime, such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. We will challenge prejudice before it grows, whether in schools, universities or on social media. And we will strengthen the law on disability, homophobic, and transphobic hate crime.”
The Conservative Party promises an equally tough stance on all forms of hate crime – including Islamophobia. In her keynote counter-extremism speech, Theresa May stated ‘We will require police forces to record anti-Muslim crimes as well as anti-Semitic crimes’.
Because ‘Islamophobia’ is so often used to smear critics of Islam – or simply of some variants/manifestations of Islam – that quotation from the manifesto might indeed conjure up the kind of scenario Douglas Murray imagines here, where a conference on Islam could fall foul of the law.
Clearly there’s a gulf between violent and abusive behaviour targeted at people just for being Muslim and criticism/mockery of ideas and practices associated with Islam. But there is sometimes an intersection between the two, as this incident demonstrates:
In one case, a teenage Muslim pupil at a school in Oxfordshire was this week allegedly slapped and called a “terrorist” by classmates after a teacher raised the murders of 12 people at the French magazine in a classroom discussion and suggested Muslims should be “challenged” by the display of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The boy told his parents he did not wish to return to school.
Returning to Ed Miliband – the NSS expresses its concerns about his words more temperately than most. It would be good to have clarification – limestone optional – but I would be very surprised to see any attempt to reintroduce the measures proposed in 2006. In the current climate the backlash would be much sharper.
