Passing the Dinner Table Test

Chris Allen

doi:10.1177/2158244013484734

Abstract

Through establishing the All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia and Cross-Government Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred, the Coalition government has afforded significance to Islamophobia. Focusing on definition, evidence, and politics, this article considers British governmental policy approaches to tackling Islamophobia over the past 15 years. Tracing religiously based discrimination from the 1980s to the publication of the Runnymede Trust’s 1997 groundbreaking report into Islamophobia, this article explores how the New Labour government sought primarily to address Islamophobia through a broadening of the equalities framework. Against a backdrop of 9/11 and 7/7, a concurrent security and antiterror agenda had detrimental impacts. Under the Coalition, there has been a marked change. Considering recent developments and initiatives, the Coalition has seemingly rejected Islamophobia as an issue of equalities preferring approaches more akin to tackling Anti-Semitism. In conclusion, definition, evidence, and politics are revisited to offer a prospective for future British governmental policy.

Highlights

Since the 2010 general election, the Coalition government has brought the issue of Islamophobia much more firmly into the political and policy spaces than its New Labour predecessor
This can be seen in the establishing of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Islamophobia, the CrossGovernment Working Group (CGWG) on Anti-Muslim Hatred (CGWG), and in a more populist fashion, in the suggestion by the cochair of the Conservative Party—Baroness Sayeeda Warsi—that Islamophobia has passed “the dinner table test” (Guardian, 2011): that the expression of anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic sentiment has become socially acceptable through conversational civility
To what extent is it evidence that the Coalition, unlike its New Labour predecessors, is happy to “do God” (Guardian, 2010)? Irrespective of the drivers, Islamophobia is firmly established on the political and policy radar; interesting given that since the publication of the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia’s (CBMI) report by the Runnymede Trust in 1997—the first British policy document relating to Islamophobia—policy responses to the phenomenon have been scant, indirect, and somewhat implicit

Summary

Introduction

Keywords Islamophobia, anti-Muslim hatred, British government, discrimination, religion Since the 2010 general election, the Coalition government has brought the issue of Islamophobia much more firmly into the political and policy spaces than its New Labour predecessor.

Results

Conclusion