The residents of Birmingham ought to be able to sleep more easily tonight. Peter Clarke’s 129-page report into the city’s schools found no evidence of plots to indoctrinate, groom or recruit school pupils to an agenda of radicalisation, violent extremism or terrorism. This is also the key finding of the reports commissioned by Birmingham city council and Ofsted.
Clarke, a former counter-terror police chief, found that a small number of governors in a small number of schools have sought to influence curriculums with bigoted views. He says: “There has been coordinated, deliberate and sustained action, carried out by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools. The effect has been to limit the life chances of the young people in their care and to render them more vulnerable to pernicious influences.”
Some of the views expressed are clearly unacceptable. There should be no place in our schools for the promotion of intolerance, division, sexism or homophobia. But these are problems that are capable of being solved without the inflammatory rhetoric most associated with the recently sacked Michael Gove. There is no natural spectrum that takes a person from observing a faith to extremism, to violent extremism.
Unfortunately, a great deal of damage has been done by politicians who whip up hostility towards migrants coming to this country or towards a Muslim community that is very much part of Britain. Viewing the problems of governance through the prism of “culture wars”, with Birmingham schools as the battlefield, was bound to leave many casualties. The reality on the ground is a huge increase in bullying – including in one case Muslim children having a dog set on them – and being taunted with accusations of learning to make bombs at school. The impact of this stigma on a whole generation of the city’s Muslim students when applying to universities and jobs cannot be overstated.
A brave bus passenger who challenged a woman’s drunken, racist rant was attacked and spat on, Newbury magistrates have been told. Afterwards, fellow Thatcham travellers praised victim Christine Dare’s courageous stand. Miss Dare later told police: “I had to act. It was too much to ignore.”
Two Muslim women were ordered to leave a swimming pool in a French holiday village on the southwest coast for wearing body-covering “burkinis”. The women had plunged into the pool at le Port Leucate wearing full body swimsuits, including a head-covering hijab veil, but were immediately told to get out of the water.
Two inmates at a maximum security prison have been condemned by police for posting crude explosive devices and racist letters to solicitors in West Yorkshire.
A teenage girl walking home from school through Bristol’s city centre was spat at in one of the busiest streets in the centre – a place where she should have been safe. And while the incident took place, leaving the 17-year-old feeling humiliated, nobody stopped to intervene or help.