BIRMINGHAM CITY COUNCIL FREEZES MUSLIM COUNCILLORS OUT OF ANTI-TERROR CAMPAIGN
From the Stirrer
Muslim councillors are being frozen out of Birmingham’s efforts to clamp down on Islamist terrorism according to Respect councillor Salma Yaqoob.
The local authority was awarded £500,000 as part of the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda last year – and has now been given an additional £2.4 million.
Yaqoob’s beef is that this is being spent by city officials in liaison with management consultants Waterhouse, without reference to elected Muslim representatives.
When she raised the issue at a recent Council meeting she was told she would have to take it up in private with the Cabinet Minister for Equalities Alan Rudge.
“This is public money,” said an outraged Yaqoob.
“The way it’s being spent should be discussed in public. It should all be transparent.”
A case in point is a major anti-extremism conference organised by Aston-based Waterhouse in October (see link here).
The event includes an address by reformed radical Ed Hussain, who Yaqoob argues is a divisive figure, more likely to stir up anger than heal wounds.
“He is somebody who doesn’t want dialogue, he wants to close down dialogue” she said.
Yaqoob again tried to take up the lack of democratic accountability at a cross-party meeting of Muslim councillors and community officials earlier this week – only for one city official to warn her that what she was doing was “against procedure”.
He warned that he would report her to Mike Whitby and Alan Rudge, and stormed out of the meeting before returning 15 minutes later. The official is now the subject of a complaint.
“This is really worrying” Yaqoob said. “Some officers don’t seem to realise that their job is to act in accordance with what councillors want – not the other way around.
“The real issue here is that councillors are the elected representatives of the people and we have the contacts and the knowledge.”
A terrorism researcher writes: this is just why we need more people like Salma in council chambers. She’s spot on. Hussain is the kind of person this sort of approach by government tends to throw up - he fits right into the model that says that most of those people are OK but some of them are threats to Western civilisation, so what we need to do is get the law-abiding majority to denounce the violent extremists. Unfortunately it’s an utterly mistaken model on a number of levels, & won’t work in practice - my book (out next year) is partly about how a very similar approach didn’t work in Italy.
Comment by Phil — 8 August, 2008 @ 11:55 am
Phil
fascinating stuff - can you expand on that argument (I mean less than your book, but more than you have already said here!)
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 August, 2008 @ 12:08 pm
Intersting to know how much Waterhouse are being paid for their services out of the £2.9 million of pubic money - as if a large Coucil like Birmingham were not capable of organising appropriate events (if they are not then somethings wrong).
“City official warned Salma that he would report her to Mike Whitby and Alan Rudge” - unbelievable, perhaps someone should remind him that like Slam says that he is accountable to the Councillors and Salma is accuntable to those that elected her (as a Respect Councillor)not Whitby or Rudge whoever they are.
This sort of burocratic manouver needs exposing in the Coucil chamber (’name and shame’) as soon as possible.
Neil
Comment by Neil Williams — 8 August, 2008 @ 12:30 pm
I felt Tariq Mehmood made some very pertinent points in this article written shortly after 7/7:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9591.htm
Comment by Adamski — 8 August, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
seems, that the Birmingham City Council generally acts a bit strange, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/7530519.stm
Comment by Entdinglichung — 8 August, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
What happened in Italy, in the context of a huge level of anti-government mobilisation, was that the ‘armed struggle’ groups were used as a means of dividing the movement: the government and the Communist Party demanded that the movement dissociate itself from the terrorists, denounce them, grass them to the police, etc, etc. The problem was that, in practice, denouncing the Red Brigades wasn’t enough - you had to denounce everyone who’d ever thrown a brick at a police line, and once you’d done that you had to denounce everyone who didn’t denounce them quickly enough - since if they didn’t denounce violence that must mean they supported it, right? Initiatives like Unite Against Terror are horribly familiar from the Italian context.
What this meant in practice was that more or less everyone to the left of the Communist Party was fair game for some very heavy policing - after all, these people were terrorist sympathisers, or as good as. What the government now seems to be trying to do is draw the line between terrorist-sympathising-Muslim and law-abiding-Muslim, and intervene at every level (from schools up) to stop people crossing that line.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to discourage people from becoming terrorists, but this strategy isn’t about what people actually do - it’s based on the idea that certain opinions and beliefs are themselves dangerous, so that anyone who holds them can be treated more or less as a terrorist suspect. One of the problems with this approach is that it’s quite likely not to work - left-wing terrorism in Italy really got going *after* the repression of the movement. Given a peaceful outlet for their beliefs (or even a rowdy but non-lethal outlet), most people will tend to take it.
Comment by Phil — 8 August, 2008 @ 8:02 pm
Phils comments are very informative. What we have here is a situation in which to be accepted by the British establishment you have to be close to neocon in your outlook and deny that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have any influence on the level of the terror threat…
And given that there were British agents at the highest levels of Irish republican organisations in the past, is it not possible that something similar is happening today? Evidence about violent extremists, from members of the Muslim community and from researchers, was ignored by police only for prominent individuals to be arrested once they performed for the media: http://www.newstatesman.com/200610090025
Comment by Charlie Marks — 10 August, 2008 @ 1:03 am