Earlier this week, Lord Singh the Director of the Network of Sikh Organisations, held the government to account following publication of their four-year hate crime action plan – Action Against Hate. The forty-page document contains not one example of hate crime affecting non-Abrahamic faiths, nor commitment to a single government funded project to deal with the problem. This is in stark contrast to the focus in the report on Abrahamic faiths, along with a firm commitment to implement taxpayer funded projects designed to combat hate crime faced by these communities, particularly Muslims and Jews.
Lord Singh asked Her Majesty’s Government: “Why their report Action Against Hate: The UK Government’s plan for tackling hate crime, published in July 2016, does not report on the incidence of hate crimes against non-Abrahamic faith communities.”
Disappointed with the Minister’s initial response, Lord Singh went on:
“My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response but it does not address my concerns over the narrow and biased thinking in a report that details 45 examples of hate crime against Abrahamic faiths but not a single example of the many, well-documented mistaken-identity hate crimes suffered by Sikhs and others—and this in a report emanating from a department with specifically designated officers to consider hate crime against the Jewish and Muslim communities but not anyone else.
He added, “Would the Minister agree that that omission is more due to ignorance than deliberate discrimination? Would she further agree that those who preach the need for religious literacy should first themselves acquire some basic religious literacy, and apologise to those they have offended in such a way?”
Minister of State, Baroness Williams of Trafford made some vague references to “common issues across the strands of hate crime”, and without specific examples said “we also accept that there are issues which affect communities specifically.”
On the question of religious literacy she said, “We have talked about this in the past. People such as the media have a role to play in improving their religious literacy.”
The NSO has been raising the inequalities in the government’s approach to hate crime for some time. Lord Singh has highlighted the wider affects of ‘Islamophobia’ on a number of separate occasions, and earlier this year the NSO released FOI figures obtained from the MET, which revealed that 28% of victims of ‘Islamophobic hate crimes’ recorded by the MET in 2015, were in fact non-Muslim or people of no recorded faith.
The Minister has agreed to meet with Lord Singh to further discuss community concerns.
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