I have repeatedly warned of the dangers of the notorious APPG definition of Islamophobia since it was first proposed by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims back in 2018. Most recently, I wrote a report for the Free Speech Union entitled: ‘Banning Islamophobia: Blasphemy Law By The backdoor‘. Professor Richard Dawkins kindly wrote the foreword to that report in which I warned that adopting that definition of Islamophobia would effectively prohibit valid criticism of Islam or Muhammad. Yet this definition has been formally adopted by the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, several other political parties and multiple local councils. Recently, there have been renewed calls for it to be formally adopted by the Government into law.
Open letter to Angela Rayner
Earlier this month, the Network of Sikh Organisations wrote an open letter to Deputy-Prime Minister, Angela Rayner MP – Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, raising specific concerns about the APPG ‘Islamophobia’ definition. The letter warns that: “Adoption of this contested definition into law would have serious implications on free speech, not least the ability to discuss historical truths.” It concludes by threatening a judicial review if the Government were to formally incorporate this definition into law.
One problem with the APPG definition is that it defines ‘Islamophobia’ as “rooted in racism” and “a type of racism”. I and others have frequently pointed out, however, the rather obvious fact that Islam is not a race. It is a religion. People from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds are Muslims, and Muslims themselves do not see themselves as anything like a separate race. The Sikh letter makes this point, and argues that this conflation of race and religion does not fit with the Equality Act 2010.
Reply concedes definition contradicts Equality Act
The Network of Sikh Organisations has now received a reply to its letter from Lord Khan who is Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Faith, Communities and Resettlement. He was copied into the letter to Angela Rayner.
Lord Khan’s letter concedes the point about the APPG definition conflicting with the Equality Act 2010, saying:
As you have mentioned, the definition proposed by the APPG is not in line with the Equality Act 2010, which defines race in terms of colour, nationality and national or ethnic origins.
This is a very significant concession since the Government cannot now adopt a definition of Islamophobia which it has stated is in conflict with the Equality Act. This is likely to mean that plans to adopt the APPG definition of Islamophobia into law have finally hit the buffers. No Government will adopt a definition which is recognised to conflict with the Equality Act.
Concerns remain
Concerns remain, however. Lord Khan’s letter does not back away from saying that the Government is seeking to formalise a definition of Islamophobia. It states:
Defining Islamophobia is a complex issue, and we want to ensure that any definition comprehensively reflects multiple perspectives and implications for different communities. This Government is actively considering our approach to tackling Islamophobia through a more holistic lens, and will provide further information on this in due course.
It is not clear what is meant by “a more holistic lens” for tackling as yet undefined “Islamophobia”. While the conflation of religion and race is admitted to be a problem with the APPG definition, Lord Khan’s letter makes no mention of any of the other problems with this definition, not least that it is defined as targeting “expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”.
Rooting a definition in perception opens the door to a whole range of interpretations and will certainly serve to inhibit freedom of speech when it comes to Islam.
‘Anti-Muslim’ is a better term
Later in Lord Khan’s letter he makes reference to “anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hatred”. This is encouraging to see since I and others have argued that ‘anti-Muslim’ is a much clearer term to use in these contexts. Indeed, any definition of ‘Islamophobia’ is likely to conflate attitudes towards Muslims as individuals with attitudes towards Islam the religion. Criticism of the religion must be allowed if our society is to retain free speech in relation to Islam. It is better, therefore, not to define ‘Islamophobia’ at all, but instead to use the term ‘anti-Muslim’ which makes clear that it is directed against Muslims rather than against the religion.
Where next for defining ‘Islamophobia’?
A question remains over what all those political parties and organisations that have formally adopted the APPG definition of Islamophobia will now do? Will the Labour Party drop this definition from its code of conduct? What about the Liberal Democrats and all those local councils? Surely they can’t continue with a definition that stands in conflict with the Equality Act?
I suspect the Labour Party will wait for the Government to come up with an alternative definition and then replace the APPG definition with that one. Other organisations may follow suit. It all depends on the Government coming up with an alternative definition. But that, as Lord Khan’s letter admits, is not easy if you want to preserve free speech.
The best hope is that this Government ends up giving up on trying to define ‘Islamophobia’ and recommends using the term ‘anti-Muslim’ instead. That is where the last Government got to. As expected, however, the new Government is intent on reversing this decision.
Nevertheless, the admission by Lord Khan that the APPG definition conflicts with the Equality Act is a big deal. It should have dealt a death blow to adopting that definition. Let’s hope it has set back plans to formally define ‘Islamophobia’ in law at all.
Tim Dieppe is Head of Public Policy at Christian Concern. This article was first published on the Christian Concern website.
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A high-resolution copy of the above graphic would be nice, please.
It may be that to do so would breach copyright. You can download the report that it comes from here and you’ll find the graphic on page 7 of the pdf. It’s worth a read. Particularly as it’s apparently not arguing against Net Zero.
https://ukfires.org/impact/publications/reports/absolute-zero/
By 2050 it calls for:
1) Road use at 60% of 2020 levels – through reducing distance travelled or reducing vehicle weight.
2) Electric trains the preferred mode of travel for people and freight over all significant distances,
3) Zero flying
4) Zero shipping
5) Heating powered on for 60% of today’s use.
6) All appliances meet stringent efficiency standards, to use 60% of today’s energy.
7) Total energy required to cook or transport food reduced to 60%
8) Demand for scrap steel and ores for electrification much higher, no iron ore or limestone.
9) All materials production electric with total 60% power availability compared to 2020
10) Any cement must be produced in closed-loop, new builds highly optimised for material saving.
11) Manufacturing inputs reduced by 50% compensated by new designs and manufacturing practices. No necessary reduction output.
12) All energy supply is now non-emitting electricity.
13) Zero fossil fuels.
And beef and lamb phased out. These people are complete nutters.
Sheep can graze pretty much anywhere in the UK and it benefits the land. Trying growing crops in some parts of the Scottish Highlands and Wales, for example – impossible. Eating meet is good for you. How you cook it may be detrimental, but the meet itself isn’t.
Ah, yes. That has to have been started by 2030 and completed by 2050.
Better get eating, I suppose.
There’s a connection between sheep and lambs?
Someone should tell them.
3) Zero flying
4) Zero shipping
Living on an island will become very, very interesting.
Especially on an island relying on 100% imported food as farming has been abolished because it’s too polluting and not needed. OTOH, the justification for abolishing shipping is that it’s claimed to be impossibe to drive vehicles on water without burning fossil fuel, completely ignoring the fact that world-wide trade existed long before the invention of the steam engine, let alone steam-engine driven ships becoming first technically feasible and then dominant, something which only started to happen around the middle of the 19th century and took until will into the first third of the 20th (merchant sailing fleets were still common until after the first world war).
One could almost believe these people are as clueless as they’re stupid and that they don’ usually coordinate their respective pet projects with each other. Hence, there’s a department for abolishing farming to save the climate and a department for abolishing international trade to save the climate and both pursue their mutually conflicting goals without even knowing about the other department.
Which gets me back to an idea I had a while ago: The whole climate scam is really just a scheme for fleecing the tax paying population without any intention to accomplish what the supposed goals are. By strange coincidence, no amount of emission avoidance exertions in the UK can accomplish a meaningful reduction of global emissions.
I suspect these net-zero nutters are aware of the option of wind-powered sea transport, but refuse to promote it. Why? Because their plan really is for the general population to be restricted to small free movement areas (the 15-minute city), so encouraging travel from our island is a definite no-no. The Channel Tunnel will be so booked up with freight traffic that there won’t be space in the timetables for passenger trains (except maybe for “VIP” transport). And those same VIPs will be the only ones able to own a private yacht and escape.
What will the Maldives do with all their airports?
Of necessity the State became heavily involved in agricultural production during World War 2 and as ever with state intervention is was reluctant to back off. It was state funded agricultural advice and support that heavily pushed the use of chemical fertilisers to boost food production and so it is ironic that it is now the state that is going to increase the price of fertiliser with these eco taxes.
Also ironic is the fact that it is mixed family farmers that are often best able to maintain soil fertility in a sustainable manner and need less chemical fertiliser input but it is these sort of farms that are being pushed out of existence.
Ah well let’s hope we soon sort out this Ukraine war as we may soon need to buy grain from Russia to prevent starvation.
“… maintain soil fertility in a sustainable manner…”
All fertilisers are “chemical” – cow-shit and urine are made up of chemicals. The whole of life is “chemicals” – we Humans are just big bags of water and chemicals. I blame the schools.
Clearly fertilisers maintain soil fertility in a sustainable manner otherwise there would be no crops.
As a matter of fact, “traditional” methods are not sustainable, which is why, soil fertility could only be maintained prior to modern fertilisers by crop rotation and leaving fields to lie fallow. This greatly reduces the amount of food produced, is inefficient = raised costs = raised prices.
There is always a good reason why we moved from doing A to doing B.
I do have a problem when bureaucrats in suits are telling farmers what is ‘sustainable’. We’ve been farming since the stone age. Do they imagine our farmers are clueless.? Like those TV adverts of charity to donkeys, to ‘teach their owners how to look after them properly’, like they haven’t kept and worked donkeys for 5,000 years. Really..?
The comment about Ukraine. The US has loaned a vast sum to Ukraine, which Ukraine will pay back in land to Blackrock, so in fact we will be buying grain from Blackrock, which I think was the idea all along.
“…in fact we will be buying grain from Blackrock, which I think was the idea all along.”
Yes, indeed. This is what the attack on farmers is all about. They are to be priced (taxed) off the land and the likes of Blackrock will buy it up.
Whoever controls the food supply controls the people. Depopulation in other words.
No, Britain doesn’t find itself there. It put itself there by not caring enough to inform itself about the consequences of Net Zero.
I blame (many of) the voters.
Not a fair comment, only recently has there been a party to vote for that doesn’t support this stupidity.
Being informed about it now, perhaps we will choose a more sensible path. But expect the green blob to fight back.
I take your point that my criticism of many voters may be not fair. Maybe. We still put ourselves here – we didn’t just find ourselves here.
Entirely fair. It isn’t just about voting – it’s about teaching yourself, informing yourself, intelligent thought, being active. There was no Party to vote for to get us out of the EU, but sufficient people created a momentum to drive the issue.
As with Covid, masks, lockdowns, mRNA jungle-juice we have a largely compliant, uninformed population of people who don’t have the sense they were born with.
Yes – as Adam Smith said: there’s a great deal of ruin in a Nation.
It goes back further to 1945 when the “great” British public signed a pact with the Devil – Socialism. In return for worldly goods – welfare state, State-run everything, lots of free stuff – it signed away its soul… independence, sovereignty, dignity, self-reliance and freedom. The ultimate result is to end up in Hell, where we now are.
Don’t mind the allegory.
The most damaging was giving the State exclusive control over the minds of children – mandatory attendance in indoctrination farms from age 5 to 16 (now 18), next control over our medical care to the point where now we must alter our lives to serve the interests of the State via the NHS.
Now we serve pagan gods too – Earth and elements.
How many demonstrations of insanity are required before these people are sectioned?
But there’s this policy of ‘care in the community’…
Some might be interested in this: https://www.soilassociation.org/farmers-growers/low-input-farming-advice/ I’m a member of that organisation, but not a commercial farmer. Another site of interest might be “Harry’s Farm”, which is a YT one. His business is in Oxfordshire, and he often churns out information about Defra and others.
This seems like a strange platform to promote the Soil Association on – this is an extreme environmentalist organisation which wishes to see an end to not just nitrogen fertiliser use, but all other manufactured chemicals in farming.
In other words it wishes to take us back to preindustrial agricultural practices and the endemic famines that entailed.
The Soil Association, and Green movement in general are a central part of the ideological and practical delusions that have led us to a government making efficient and reliable farming increasingly difficult in this country.
Just parking the starvation of their population for a moment, because while aware of the fertiliser tax, I noticed for the first time that this import tax will also hit cement. Well excuse me, but having prevented the domestic production, because it won’t be possible under net zero rules, where will the scumbag socialists get the materials from to replace the windmills that will have exceeded their operating life after 15-20 years. How are they going to manufacture these things without plastic and metal and what will they mount them on?
And where will the money come from to pay for them once the UK finishes up with a worse credit rating than north Korea?
According to page 13 of the UK FIRES pdf (page 23, as printed)
There you go. Mud huts. At least it’s not caves.
Looking forward to see how successful those options will be supporting windmills in the North Sea
Bamboo eh?
I didn’t know we grew bamboo in the UK.
Loads of it is grown in Lincolnshire for making fabric. I haven’t seen any grown to construction sizes though.
Thanks. I never knew.
I suppose it’s useful for a growing panda population.
In Hong Kong, bamboo and ropes are used to construct scaffolding for high-rise buildings (more then then floors). OTOH, the people living there are a lot¹ smaller and lighter than we are, so, it’s unclear how transferable this technology is.
¹ With my 5’6″ and just under 11 stone, I’m slightly undersize for a European man but positively among the giants in Hong Kong.
What sort of properties will we build without cement? Mud huts? Oh, err…
The eco socialist buffoon Starmer just told us at COP29 that he doesn’t want to tell us all what to do? What was that? Some kind of Freudian slip? —–Telling people what to do is what the entire absurd GREEN movement is about.—-You cannot eat meat, you cannot eat Dary, you cannot drive a Petrol Car, you cannot fly in Planes, you cannot cannot cannot cannot cannot……………Is there anything that we can do? –YES SHUT UP, and if you don’t shut up we will trawl the internet, find you, and then we will force you to shut up.
It is very pleasing, albeit the topic is not, that Chris Morrison has arrived at the position I have been espousing for at least two years, probably more.
“One of the original founders of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore is in little doubt about what will happen if hydrocarbons are removed from food production. He recently told Fox News: “If we ban fossil fuels, agricultural production would collapse. People will begin to starve, and half the population will die in a very short period of time.”
My usual shorthand is depopulation.
Oh look, some interesting job ads.
I see T. Bliar wants another grifting traitor.
Professor Tim Wilson thinks Agenda 2030 is reasonable and all the arguments against it are conspiracy theories!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qLinJHRUpI&t=1s
I can’t believe that this catastrophe will come to pass. Surely once international travel is restricted, and food is in short supply, people will rise up and take care of these fanatics, by looking for the nearest lamp post. If the indigenous population won’t rise up, I’m pretty sure the new Britons will.
Oh wouldn’t it be lovely to see the likes of Kneel and Thieves being dealt with by rampant ROPers?
Indeed! I wonder if Starmer has made a rod for his own back.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But the government are always trying new approaches, trying to push right up to the boundaries, how much will these idiots take? Like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.
I too would imagine that more recent arrivals would be the least likely to abide by the rules being imposed from above. I don’t think it’s racist to suggest that, there are a host of reasons why it might be the case.
However, perhaps there will be some sort of ‘two-tier’ system brought in to prevent disorder. Maybe those who are members of ‘historically marginalised’ communities who have not experienced the opportunity to rack up much of a carbon footprint in the past, would get an extra allowance – they can set their heating at 18 degrees C.
However, perhaps there will be some sort of ‘two-tier’ system brought in to prevent disorder. Maybe those who are members of ‘historically marginalised’ communities who have not experienced the opportunity to rack up much of a carbon footprint in the past, would get an extra allowance – they can set their heating at 18 degrees C.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
https://youtu.be/-k_ZvwxU0bg?si=7BDHp-sG5QnXaiCO
The bowler hat farmer warning us to stock up.
“Death cultist”! An excellent catch all phrase for the current government. We can all go to hell in a handcart and when it all becomes too much the euthanasia bill is getting its second reading on 29th November! May God help us all!
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Sounds like it is time for the British voter to say no, that have had enough. What kind of gov’t would pursue starvation of their people? Has GB gone completely mad?
We need this front and centre on the DT as a minimum. I’d be interested to know what if any relationship Toby & Co. have with them. Hopefully a good one. Decibels are needed at this stage and the DT seems like a good place to start.