Baroness Warsi endorses government pulling funding from Islamophobia monitor
Former Conservative chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has endorsed the Labour government's decision to pull funding from an Islamophobia reporting service accused of severely under-reporting hate crimes.
Tell Mama, which is funded by the communities ministry, was founded in 2012. The Guardian reported on Saturday that no grant will be provided to the organisation from the end of March, leaving it facing closure.
"I support this decision by the government and its decision to re think how it funds the monitoring of anti Muslim hate," Warsi said on social media platform X on Tuesday.
Warsi, who is widely considered a leading figure on Islamophobia in Britain, was one of the early advocates for Tell Mama to be funded by the government as a minister in David Cameron's cabinet.
"I was there at the outset of Tell MAMA and despite opposition from my government colleagues at the time fought for it to be funded in government," she said, "however sadly over the years too many questions have arisen which in my view make the organization unfit for purpose."
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Last March, the previous Conservative government halted plans to appoint Tell Mama's founder, Fiyaz Mughal OBE, as its independent adviser on anti-Muslim hatred.
That decision came after it received notice of a Byline Times investigation which revealed Mughal had suppressed a Tell Mama-funded report on the Conservative Party's ties to Islamophobic and antisemitic political parties.
'Consistently lower' figures
In July 2024, Byline Times reported that Tell Mama under-reported anti-Muslim hate crimes by more than 90 percent between 2017 to 2022.
Its published figures were "consistently lower than anti-Muslim hate crime statistics published by the Home Office based on police data". Police data itself was found to systematically underestimate hate crimes.
In response, Tell Mama insisted "it is impossible to record all hate crimes and particularly difficult given the scale, nature, geographical location and nationality of British Muslims from over 50 Muslim-majority countries".
Warsi is now an independent peer after quitting the Conservatives last September, complaining that the party had moved too far right.
'My regular engagement with a hyper diverse British Muslim community has shown that large sections simply do not trust or chose [Tell Mama] to report their experiences of anti-Muslim racism and attacks'
- Baroness Warsi
She said on Tuesday that "too often my regular engagement with a hyper diverse British Muslim community has shown that large sections simply do not trust or chose TM [Tell Mama] to report their experiences of anti Muslim racism and attacks.
"This at a time of rising anti-Muslim hate is unacceptable," she added.
"The government SHOULD fund community reporting of anti Muslim racism and attacks as they do for British Jews via the Community Security Trust but sadly TM is not it."
Police sources told the Guardian that the information Tell Mama provided it had been "invaluable".
Tell Mama said it had received 10,700 reports of anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2024, showing a sharp increase.
Founder Mughal told the Guardian: "There are going to be more individuals targeted, we know that in the current environment, and where are they going to go?
"This is an injustice at a time where I have never seen anti-Muslim rhetoric become so mainstream."
A spokesperson for the communities ministry said on Saturday: "Religious and racial hatred has absolutely no place in our society, and we will not tolerate Islamophobia in any form.
"This year we have made up to £1m of funding available to Tell Mama to provide support for victims of Islamophobia, and we will set out our approach to future funding in due course."
The announcement comes after the ministry announced the creation of a new working group last month to formulate a definition of Islamophobia and "support a wider stream of work to tackle the unacceptable incidents of anti-Muslim hatred".
The government has also backed a new British Muslim body, the British Muslim Network (BMN), which launched in late February with Warsi's involvement and aims to engage with the government.
Critics have suggested that the BMN lacks credibility, warning that the government could use the network to continue to avoid engaging with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).
Labour has adopted the previous government's policy of boycotting the MCB, the largest umbrella body claiming to represent British Muslims and with over 500 member organisations.
But the BMN's leadership has insisted that it does not aim to challenge the MCB's role, arguing that the government should engage with a "whole range" of Muslim groups, including both the MCB and BMN.
"For too long British Muslims have been made to feel their voices do not matter," Warsi said ahead of the BMN's launch.
"The British Muslim Network is part of a much-needed effort to change that."
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