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The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘It's been traumatic': the inside story of Tell Mama's break with Labour government
For 13 years, Tell Mama has been the government-funded not-for-profit tasked with recording anti-Muslim hate crime and helping victims get justice. For its pains, staff faced death threats from the far right, a risk so serious it necessitated an office change at the height of the hate. There have been critics too within Britain's Muslim community, who, according to the Tell Mama leadership, were intolerant of the organisation's tolerance. 'Throughout the 13 years, people have been kind of making up what Tell Mama does,' said Iman Atta, who has been the organisation's director since 2016. 'They claim that we're Zionists because we work with Jewish communities, or we're promoting pedophilia because we work with LGBT groups,' she added. Most recently, questions have been raised about how the organisation spent public money, collated its data, and whether it had become too close to the previous Conservative government, which signed off on its funding. This latest challenge has been existential. On 1 April, Atta wrote to Wajid Khan, the new Labour minister for faith, to reject a further six months of funding from the government, citing a strained relationship with his department and the stress caused to staff by 'malicious campaigns' some of which 'emanated from individuals and organisations' chasing the funding that Tell Mama has enjoyed. It means that, at a time of soaring bigotry, there is now no government-funded group carrying out anti-Muslim hate monitoring in the UK and this is expected to be the case into the summer. Atta said Tell Mama would continue to do its work and look for funds from elsewhere but it fully expects to pare back its services. There will be critics of Tell Mama who are celebrating the outcome. Those might include Shaista Gohir, a cross-bencher in the Lords and paid adviser to the Muslim Women's Network, who has criticised the quality of the organisation's data and attacked Atta's 'inflation busting' salary rise in 2024, up to £93,000 from £77,000 the year before. Lady Gohir was also behind a 10-page letter to the ministry raising such questions as why Tell Mama was run as a community interest company (CIC) rather than a charity. She wanted to know why it did not publish full accounts on Companies House and asked whether the co-founder of Tell Mama Fiyaz Mughal, who is Atta's former husband, had received any referrals from the organisation. He is now a counsellor. Sayeeda Warsi, a former Conservative party chair, who as a minister played a role in establishing the Tell Mama model, may also be satisfied. Last year, she followed Gohir to speak in a Lords debate of her 'deep concerns' about Tell Mama's 'finances, governance, associations and connections, including with the now-defunct Quilliam Foundation – which has associations with thinktanks in the United States that are peddling anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia'. For her part, Atta said she found it all difficult to understand. A Palestinian who moved to the UK in 2008, she had been travelling back and forth to Jerusalem to see her mother, who died last in August from complications relating to dementia. She saw the rockets overhead and then would come home to critics asking why she was silent over the Palestinian cause. The atmosphere, she says, has been toxic. But she is fierce in her defence of Tell Mama's record and points to a range of public sources that appear to justify her position. The government had never criticised the level of detail in Tell Mama's data. Reports were published online. The police had spoken of it as being invaluable, and her salary had gone up due to the huge rise in work load in the wake of 7 October attacks. 'I don't have weekends,' she said. Faith Matters, the CIC that runs Tell Mama, was set up more than a decade ago that way so that it could work in a range of social justice areas and not be restricted to one charitable cause. The ministry had full sight of their finances. Atta is particularly indignant about the suggestion Mughal, benefited from counselling referrals. 'We wouldn't, that's a conflict of interest,' she said. As to the alleged, connection to the Quilliam Foundation there was one appearance in 2013 by Tell Mama's founder at one of its events where he was invited to promote the anti-hatred reporting service. 'And that's it,' she said. A spokesperson for the ministry of housing, local government and communities said they were still keen for Tell Mama to continue. 'We offered Tell MAMA £500,000 to continue supporting its expert work in this space for the first half of this financial year, which was declined', she said. 'We are grateful for their work since 2012 and welcome an application again to look at new proposals.' The defence is robust, the government adamant in its support, so why the war of words among high-profile figures who appear to share the same mission of fostering better engagement with British Muslim communities? It was, in Atta's view in some instances, a 'smear campaign', perhaps motivated by a desire by some for the £1m-a-year funding agreed by the last Conservative government. Her detractors deny this. 'I think that's probably me [Atta is referring to],' says Gohir, 'At the end of the day, this has got nothing to do with funding. I mean, of course, now there's an open bid Muslim Women's Network will apply, because we run a helpline already. We already get hate crime calls and discrimination calls, so why not? But that's not why I did this. 'We contacted them, we weren't getting the data, so we were then finding our own data by doing FoIs to police forces, you know, and then when I was writing to government, I wasn't getting my questions being answered. And it's my right as a taxpayer, as a Muslim taxpayer.' Whatever the rights of the wrongs of the criticisms, and Gohir said her question about referrals to Atta's former husband had been a hunch rather than based on any knowledge, it was not this alone that brought Tell Mama to the decision to pull away. What appears to have made the situation untenable was what has all the hallmarks of a classic Whitehall bungle. The last government had agreed in March last year to provide Tell Mama with a further year's grant funding. The money is usually paid in arrears in instalments every three months on receipt of invoices and evidence of work. But it needs a grant funding agreement to be signed. Due to last year's general election, no such agreement emerged from the government in the early months of this financial year. Nothing then emerged through the summer but Tell Mama continued to do its work, without being paid, not least because of the riots after the Southport stabbings. Then on 23 September, Atta received a letter from the ministry saying that a grant agreement had been prepared but the new government wanted to put the contract out to competitive tender for 25/26. It wasn't welcome news after working with the government for 11 years. But it was not necessarily the end. In December, a grant funding agreement was produced. It contained an 'exit plan' in the event that Tell Mama did not win the competitive tender. The government was proposing that Tell Mama be prepared to transfer over their software, hardware and key employees to whatever body took over the function, she said. A 'handover', said Atta. 'I was shocked.' A government spokesperson said this was a misinterpretation. But at a meeting on 23 December, Atta told the officials that the terms were unacceptable, the demands were eventually removed and an apology offered, she said. But as Atta was ready to sign in March, Gohir again raised her concerns in the Lords. Lord Khan put out a statement giving Tell Mama a clean bill of health and praising its work and a six-month grant extension was offered. Atta signed the agreement to allow Tell Mama to be paid for the service over the last year. But she said the alleged 'smearing' of her organisation felt relentless. It felt like she was going through a personal 'trauma', Atta added. It was a relief, she said, to finally tell the minister, who had personally been helpful, that they were declining the offer of further funding and would not be applying for the contract. 'I had team members coming up like: we're just really tired,' she said. 'Because you're getting things on the online world, you're getting the threats, you're getting the far right, you're getting the Islamist extremists, and then you're getting smeared for actually doing your work.'
Arab News
14-04-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Campaigner speaks of journey from housewife to member of House of Lords
RIYADH: The founder of an anti-discrimination charity for Muslim women in the UK spoke at a Riyadh event about her journey from being a housewife to becoming a member of the House of Lords. Baroness Shaista Gohir, OBE, spoke to an audience at the British Embassy about how she was inspired to represent her community and built a charity to help resolve the issues they face. 'When I was putting on the TV, you would only see Muslim men commenting on behalf of the British Muslim diaspora, whether it was Pakistanis or just Muslims generally,' she said, referencing a time when public discussions about Islam in the UK were intensifying after the 2005 London bombings. She described how she contacted some of the most prominent Islamic societies in the country and was 'pretty much rejected by them.' Not put off by the rejection, Gohir went on to found her own organization — the Muslim Women's Network. 'I think they probably thought, I'm a housewife at home, what can she contribute? And I think that's another lesson; I think a lot of people underestimate women. 'If someone's a CEO or a manager or a director, they might think, wow, she did something brilliant, but women at home have a skill set that you can apply that to anything, and if you've got drive and willpower, you can do anything.' The Muslim Women's Network carries out research and advocacy work, aiming to tackle anti-Muslim discrimination in the household and workplace. It offers faith-sensitive counselling services and a helpline, conducts workshops, and guides policy. 'Everything we do is looking at how Muslim women are discriminated against in their families, in their communities and in wider society,' she said. Gohir spoke about how she has managed to influence government policy from the inside after being appointed a member of the House of Lords in 2022. 'In terms of policy influencing, I would say it's a lot easier now that I'm in the House of Lords. 'From the outside, you might write a letter, you might not get a response. You might get a response six months later. 'Now it's a little bit easier because the minister's probably thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm going to see her in the corridors, she wrote to me last week, I better reply to her.' So I get my responses a lot faster.' The women's rights campaigner believes that faith-based discrimination is currently underreported in the British legal system. This, she said, is partly due to an issue with how the police record crimes — if a discriminatory crime is believed to have been race-based, the police may not record it as faith-based. 'I hope that the law will change,' she said, explaining that one of her aims with the Muslim Women's Network is to change the law to include 'dual' reporting that will allow discrimination to be recorded as both race- and faith-based.
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Anti-Islamophobia group Tell Mama should face inquiry, says Muslim peer
A leading Muslim peer has called for an inquiry into the Islamophobia monitoring group Tell Mama over concerns about a 'lack of transparency' on how it is spending public money. Shaista Gohir, the chief executive of the Muslim Women's Network UK, has also accused Tell Mama of failing to provide detailed data on anti-Muslim hate crimes, being 'silent' when politicians have targeted Muslims, and questioned whether the Tories used it as a vehicle to monitor extremism. Tell Mama denied the claims and described the idea it was secretly being used to tackle Muslim extremism as a 'slur'. It said it regularly reports 'according to the government's due processes' and that no issues had been raised with the group by officials. Lady Gohir said the public had a right to know how taxpayers' money had been spent by Tell Mama. 'We need an inquiry because, if you look at the questions, they're very simple: how much was spent on salaries? How much was spent on consultancy fees?' Tell Mama has been the government's key partner in monitoring anti-Muslim hatred for 13 years, but its government funding was abruptly paused earlier this month, leading to fears it would close at a time when anti-Muslim hate incidents have increased. The faith minister, Wajid Khan, said 'ministers do not have concerns about financial, structural or governance issues in respect of Tell Mama'. Nonetheless, the government said it would launch an 'open bidding process' for the contract to monitor anti-Muslim hatred and to support victims, opening Tell Mama up to competition for the first time. It did not answer questions from the Guardian as to why. Parliamentarians from both houses have privately told the Guardian of their concerns about Tell Mama. Gohir, a cross-party peer, had been raising questions in parliament and in letters to communities ministers under the previous Conservative administration for more than a year before the funding wrangle. Sayeeda Warsi, the former chair of the Conservative party who was involved in Tell Mama's founding, described the group on X as 'unfit for purpose'. But others have rallied to its defence, including the life peer Kishwer Falkner, who raised the issue of its funding in the House of Lords last month, asking for reassurance that 'moderate Muslim groups' were worthy of support. Tell Mama has received £6m in funding since 2012 and has now confirmed that, after extensive negotiations with the government, it has secured funding for work completed in 2024-25, with more offered. The service is run by a community-interest company, Faith Matters, so it is not bound by the same stringent rules as charities when it comes to publishing an itemised breakdown of its spending. Tell Mama's chief executive, Iman Atta, said the organisation would be 'happy to cooperate with anybody regarding the use of public funds'. Faith Matters, founded in 2007 by the former Liberal Democrat councillor Fiyaz Mughal, specialises in interfaith work and conflict resolution. In 2012, it launched the Tell Mama project. Mughal remains Faith Matters' director. Atta denied Gohir's assertion that the organisation was silent when Tories made negative remarks on Muslims, citing past challenges to figures such as Boris Johnson, and insisted Tell Mama did not do any work to tackle Muslim extremism and that it had never received any funding from Prevent, the UK's counter-terrorism strategy. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said it was 'committed to providing a comprehensive service to monitor anti-Muslim hatred and provide support for victims' and would 'soon be opening a call for grant applications to ensure we can meet the challenges communities face today', to which Tell Mama is welcome to apply. Atta said: 'We hope that whichever organisation is successful in the open-grant process is able to continue this work with urgency, dedication and commitment', at a time when 'far-right movements' and 'incidents of anti-Muslim hatred are on the rise'.
