The failure of the police and prosecutors properly to investigate allegations of sexual abuse against gangs of mostly Pakistani-heritage men has come back to haunt those responsible. But what if the rest of the country was unable to debate this matter fully because the law forbade it?
The Government is preparing to issue an official definition of so-called Islamophobia that could leave people open to prosecution if they were deemed to have said something disobliging about the religion.
Some have likened this to the return of the old blasphemy laws that once protected Christian theology but were abandoned years ago, with Christianity now the one religion anyone is allowed to take a pot shot at.
Believers may find that hard to stomach but in a free country, religions should not be protected from criticism. Yet that is what is being considered for Islam and its adherents.
The precise definition has yet to be decided and insiders say it would not be legally binding. But organisations would be urged to adopt it, as they no doubt would in the public sector.
Free speech campaigners say a definition drafted by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims appears to state that using the phrase “sex groomer” in relation to a person of Muslim background may be Islamophobic.
Whistleblowers who tried to bring the activities of these men to the attention of the authorities in Rotherham, Oldham and other towns have been accused of racism for doing so. The toxic nature of this debate has even drawn the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, into the fray, who has used the X platform that he owns to attack Labour ministers and now Reform leader Nigel Farage.
A simple way to avoid escalation is for Labour to drop the whole idea of an official definition of Islamophobia. It is inimical to free expression and corrosive of public trust.
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