Islamophobia

Lord Singh of Wimbledon Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I acknowledge the massive and continuing work that my noble friend does in this area. As to her last point, I am very happy to meet the all-party group and community organisations to discuss these issues. There is a definition, as my noble friend rightly says, used by the Runnymede Trust. There are many definitions, but we do not use a single definition of Islamophobia, and I do not accept that there is a need for a definitive one. It is clearly recognised, and we have very effective monitoring of race-hate crimes. As my noble friend knows, considerable work is done by Tell MAMA and the Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group in these areas. We do that while understanding and being able to recognise Islamophobia, but perhaps not being able to define it precisely.

[Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, has rightly drawn our attention to the vagueness of the term Islamophobia. I add a point that concerns me: the culture of victimhood that it can easily lead to, which is not very healthy. There is also the way in which figures for crimes against other people are included in the statistics for Islamophobia—up to one-third, according to a freedom of information request. But the greatest concern is that this sort of thing does not really tackle the underlying issue of hate crime, which arises out of ignorance and prejudice. It is there at all levels of society, and we are doing very little to combat it.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord is right about the general nature of the fact that we have a considerable body of hate crime based on race, gender, religion, disability, sexual orientation, age and so on. Any hate crime is a crime against us all; that is a starting point. It is worth noting that we have some very effective legislation in this country, which is—thank goodness—very much enforced on a routine and regular basis. I do not accept that we are unable to act on this because we have no particular definition of Islamophobia. As I said, considerable and very effective work is done by Tell MAMA and the Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group in that area. We see the results of that every day through very effective reporting and enforcing, and considerable interfaith work done by groups coming together in that regard.