Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is still being paid to groups linked to Islamist extremism, more than a year after David Cameron vowed to outlaw the practice.
People associated with one “extremist” group whose grant was terminated after the Prime Minister’s pledge are now being used to induct new staff into the Government’s own Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT), the Home Office division responsible for directing Britain’s anti-terror efforts. Only last week the same individuals were awarded thousands of pounds of fresh public funding.
Meanwhile, the Civil Service has solicited “fast-stream” recruits for the top ranks in Whitehall from a group which has hosted numerous extremists and terrorist supporters, including the al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was linked to a number of international plots before his death last year.
Another body linked to the extremist sect Hizb ut-Tahrir, the public funding of which Mr Cameron condemned as long ago as 2009, is still receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money, to educate primary-age children in Hizb ut-Tahrir ideology.
“The situation is pretty serious,” said Haras Rafique, director of the Centri anti-extremism think-tank, which works closely with government. “It is one thing making political statements, but change only happens when you implement it and that change doesn’t seem to have happened.”
At a keynote speech in Munich 13 months ago, the Prime Minister promised to “turn the page” on the “failed policy” which saw Whitehall engage with and fund “peaceful” Islamist groups in the hope that they could divert people away from terrorism. “This is like turning to a right-wing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement,” Mr Cameron said.
A few groups did have their funding ended after the speech. One, the STREET Project in Brixton, south London, paid for the publication of a booklet by a non-violent extremist group called Salafi Manhaj, which issues regular fatwas enforcing a Salafi, or ultra-literal and conservative view of Islam.
The fatwas call participation in parliament a “sin,” oppose “man-made laws”, such as British law, describe “those who speak in the name of ‘freedom of religion’” as “enemies of Islam” and forbid “a man and woman to be alone together under all circumstances”, unless married. Salafi Manhaj condemns football as “impermissible” because players wear shorts and spectators “turn away from the remembrance of Allah” in a spirit of “repugnant bias and partisanship towards different teams”.
STREET’s website has published advice on clothing and music from anti-Semitic and extremist Salafi clerics. Its founder, Abdul Haqq Baker, an ultraconservative Salafi, was chairman of Brixton Mosque, the mosque attended by the shoe bomber Richard Reid and 9/11’s “twentieth hijacker”, Zacharias Moussaoui, though he says he tried to warn the authorities about them and opposes violence.
However, Mr Haqq Baker appears to have bounced back, founding a new group, West London IMPACT, with the same aims as STREET but based in Hounslow.
Last week, the local council awarded it £10,000 for “counter-extremism” work. Council papers say that it has been given thousands more by the OSCT.
Documents seen by The Sunday Telegraph also show that IMPACT is used to help induct new staff into the OSCT. Along with sessions at MI6, GCHQ, the Cabinet Office and Scotland Yard, the training programme includes a session with the group.
Mr Haqq Baker said last night that he was merely a “silent partner” in IMPACT. He said that the publication of extremists on STREET’s website was a mistake by a staff member who had since been dismissed.
Another group, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), has been used by the Civil Service to recruit new “fast-stream” trainees for its top ranks.
FOSIS has hosted numerous extremist and terrorist speakers at its annual conference and other events, including Azzam Tamimi, who supports suicide bombing, Haitham al-Haddad, who believes that music is a “prohibited and fake message of love and peace”, and Anwar al-Awlaki.
Several convicted terrorists have been officers of university Islamic societies affiliated to FOSIS and have attended its events. FOSIS has been condemned by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, for its failure to “fully challenge terrorist and extremist ideology”.
However, on March 11 last year, a month after Mr Cameron’s Munich speech, Elizabeth Ammon, the senior official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills responsible for counter-extremism in universities, spoke at a FOSIS conference alongside the group’s president, Nabil Ahmed. FOSIS billed the event as countering the “sensationalism and fear-mongering” over student radicalism.
On June 18 last year, two weeks after Mrs May condemned FOSIS and four months after Mr Cameron’s Munich speech, a Civil Service recruitment team attended FOSIS’s annual careers fair to solicit applications for the “fast-stream”, the route for “future leaders” of Whitehall.
The Civil Service also arranged a further “fast-stream recruitment workshop” with FOSIS in October, cancelled only after pressure from Mrs May.
Despite Mr Cameron’s pledge to stop bankrolling undesirable organisations, accounts published in recent weeks reveal that many bodies closely linked to extremism continued to enjoy substantial public funding in 2011. Beneficiaries include the East London Mosque, paid at least £256,000 last year alone and the Osmani Trust, which received almost £600,000.
Both organisations are controlled by the Islamic Forum of Europe, which works to change the “very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam” in a “global” Islamic state under Sharia law.
The mosque has hosted numerous hate and terrorist preachers, including al-Awlaki.
Two schools in London and Slough with connections to Hizb ut-Tahrir are still receiving six-figure sums from the taxpayer, despite Mr Cameron’s condemnation three years ago of a £113,000 subsidy as “completely unacceptable.”
Writing in a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet, the schools’ head teacher and trustee, Farah Ahmed, attacked the National Curriculum for “push[ing] the idea of ‘religious tolerance’”, said English was “one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach and criticised “attempts to integrate Muslim children into British society”.
An Ofsted inspection of the London school in October 2010 found it had “inadequate” teaching, welfare, health and safety and breached numerous regulations. However, in June 2011 Ofsted sent in a different inspector who ruled that the school had made “good progress”