Only one proposal put forward by Muslims who gathered to tackle the causes of extremism has been taken up
The battle for the hearts and minds of Britain's Muslims has intensified. Suddenly, a year on from the London bombings that left more than 50 dead, Whitehall seems to have woken up to the fact that people expected something serious to be done about Muslim disengagement in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
Last week, I wrote that the government's Preventing Extremism Together task force was a sham. Only one proposal put forward by the Muslims gathered to discuss the causes of extremism has been taken up - plans for a roadshow of moderate Muslim scholars. Even that, it turns out, was an idea discussed in advance by Foreign Office civil servants and then represented as something that had emerged from the grass roots. No wonder trust is such an issue.
As the rising Labour star Sadiq Khan has said, he and others on the task force felt "huge frustration" at the lack of progress. Although a government loyalist, he expressed deep concern that the exercise was beginning to look like "a short-term PR exercise" rather than a genuine attempt to engage Muslim opinion.
Challenged on the issue by the Commons liaison committee of senior MPs, Tony Blair could do little more than shift the onus on to the Muslim community: "In the end, government itself cannot go and root out the extremism in these communities . . . It's better that we mobilise the Islamic community itself to do this."
The government is in a state of anxiety over the perceived failure of the task force. On 30 June, the Foreign Office, which was jointly involved with the Home Office in organising the task force, took the unusual step of issuing a statement to deny the story in last week's NS. The statement claimed that a minute we published, dated 16 August 2005 and discussing which groups should act as partners in the roadshow, could not have been written by the official in question, Riaz Patel, because he did not start working at the Foreign Office until 21 November 2005. The statement went further: "The allegations in the article are completely untrue: the idea of a roadshow came out of the Task Force, the outcomes of which were announced on 22 September."
Strange questions
So what was going on? Was the document a sophisticated forgery, designed to undermine the government? No. The Foreign Office has confirmed that the document is genuine and that there is no suggestion the NS was dealing with a fake.
This is bizarre. The Foreign Office has yet to produce any evidence to rebut the story beyond the mere assertion that it is wrong. We find ourselves in the strange situation where the only defence the Foreign Office has is that its officials screwed up by putting the wrong date on the minute.
A Foreign Office spokesman suggested any confusion may have arisen due to the civil servant using on old computer template. This, I suppose, is possible. If it is of any help, my information from inside the Foreign Office suggests the document was created to discuss the selection of UK organisations for a "civil society dialogue event" in Qatar that took place in early November, before Patel is supposed to have started working at the Foreign Office.
There is, I am told, deep concern in official circles about the 30 June statement because people know it was misleading. I have since spoken to a senior Labour Party figure seconded to a Whitehall department during the months following the bombings, who has confirmed he was present at discussions about the roadshow in August. The individual has also told me that although Riaz Patel was employed by the Home Office in August 2005, he was already working on Foreign Office business. One member of the task force, Haras Rafiq of the Sufi Muslim Council, told me: "It was an open secret that the plans for the roadshow were being discussed by officials long before the task force reported." A third person working in Whitehall has come forward to say that advice on the roadshow went to ministers before the task force had finished meeting. The Foreign Office denies all this.
The Foreign Office is a department that has specialised in misinformation and half-truths in recent conflicts. Journalists are now understandably suspicious, and it is revealing that nobody who received the statement followed it up. Once more, the FO is not telling the whole story. Staff are so disillusioned that it has become the leakiest of all the departments.
A series of disclosures has provided a string of scoops for this magazine and forms the basis of a Channel 4 film to be broadcast later this month. Far from providing solutions to the crisis of Muslim disengagement, the Foreign Office has become part of the problem.
Martin Bright's documentary "Who Speaks for Muslims?" will be shown on Channel 4 on 14 July at 7.30pm. A pamphlet by him on the same subject will be published by the Policy Exchange think-tank on 12 July
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