Islamophobia Awareness Month — [Peter Dowd in the Chair]

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 3:05 pm on 24 November 2021.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Yasmin Qureshi Yasmin Qureshi Shadow Minister (International Development) 3:05, 24 November 2021

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I am grateful to my hon. Friend Afzal Khan for securing the debate during Islamophobia Awareness Month.

I want to set something straight on the record. Bolton South East does not need the help of other MPs to deal with the issues of taxi drivers. I deal with them, meet them regularly and do not need to set up an APPG for them. I am interested to know why no Conservative MP in Greater Manchester ever wants to join an APPG on Greater Manchester, which is much wider. No Conservative MPs will join that. That was rather a silly comment from James Daly in making that point. To repeat, my taxi drivers do not need any help from anyone else.

Returning to the topic of the day, I want to talk about international Islamophobia. In Myanmar, decades of hate speech and persecution culminated in 2017 with more than 700,000 predominantly Muslim Rohingya people having to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh after a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing; and our Government did nothing about it. In China, close to a million Uyghur Muslims are believed to be interned in so-called re-education camps. There, too, Islamophobia is rife across the country and our Government have done nothing about it.

In India, with every passing year, Islamophobia has become more normalised and mainstream. Narendra Modi was a member of the RSS, a neo-Nazi group, and his Bharatiya Janata party is making India into an authoritarian, Hindu national state. Regular, unprovoked attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs have become routine in India, along with the destruction of mosques and the taking away of Muslims’ human rights.

Last month, the BBC reported that a video had gone viral on social media showing a terrified girl clinging to her Muslim father as Hindu mobs assaulted him. That is not a one-off. That kind of violence is overwhelming. I have never heard a word from the Foreign Office or Government Ministers on that issue. When they talk about wanting to deal with Islamophobia, I would like to hear from the Government.

In Europe, Muslims are being made the other. Constantly in France and other countries, every time there is a General Election, they bring up the subject of Muslims, take women’s veils and bring in new Laws that say that Muslims are forming a counter-society. Again, we hear nothing in this country from the Foreign Office. I would like our Government to do something about that.

general election

In a general election, each constituency chooses an MP to represent it by process of election. The party who wins the most seats in parliament is in power, with its leader becoming Prime Minister and its Ministers/Shadow Ministers making up the new Cabinet. If no party has a majority, this is known as a hung Parliament. The next general election will take place on or before 3rd June 2010.

laws

Laws are the rules by which a country is governed. Britain has a long history of law making and the laws of this country can be divided into three types:- 1) Statute Laws are the laws that have been made by Parliament. 2) Case Law is law that has been established from cases tried in the courts - the laws arise from test cases. The result of the test case creates a precedent on which future cases are judged. 3) Common Law is a part of English Law, which has not come from Parliament. It consists of rules of law which have developed from customs or judgements made in courts over hundreds of years. For example until 1861 Parliament had never passed a law saying that murder was an offence. From the earliest times courts had judged that murder was a crime so there was no need to make a law.