Islamaphobia

Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 2:55 pm on 14 March 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:55, 14 March 2018

No, absolutely right, Bethan. You've made an enormous number of very good points there, and, as I said when I was answering a question on the business statement yesterday to Julie Morgan, we are encouraging people to make sure that they come forward and report the fact that they've received some of these really hateful letters. And we're actually encouraging people to try and do that in a way that doesn't damage any evidence that might be found on the envelope. So, the police are taking very seriously tracking down the people who've done this. So, that's the first thing to say in this very specific instance: to make sure that people do come forward, report it, with the envelope if possible and touching it as little as possible in order to preserve that evidence. We understand that they appear to have been sent from the Sheffield area of England and appear to have been targeted at random post boxes. It's particularly hateful and it's obviously designed to make people afraid.

You're absolutely right that that's not something we can tolerate in any way at all, and, in fact, we very much want to do the very positive things that you've been saying, and we do do a lot of those. So, a lot of our mosques had the open mosque day very recently, and the central mosque in Swansea's actually having another in a couple of weekends' time. They're very well attended, actually. It's really great to see how many different members of the community go along to the mosque and get familiar with it and get to meet a lot of people, which I thought was a great thing. There was some great food as well, actually, which is worth mentioning.

But we do do a lot of very formal things as well. It's important to have the community informality, if you like, of loving your neighbours, loving all of the people who you live with in your community, but the Government needs to do some very formal things about this as well. One of the things that we most want to do is make sure that we teach the right things in schools. So, we teach community cohesion, tolerance and respect for others in our schools. For example—this is just one example—we teach a challenging extremism module through the global citizenship challenge in the Welsh baccalaureate, and that's been very popular. I've been to a couple of very stimulating discussions where people are discussing exactly that.

We also fund a number of things around supporting people who have encountered hate crime. But, in the spirit that you asked the question, in terms of the positive things that we do, we encourage our faith communities forum to have dialogue between the Welsh Government and all of our faith communities, which, obviously includes various communities inside the Muslim religion as well. One of the myths, of course, is that somehow Muslims are a homogenous group of people who are all the same, and we all know that they are as diverse a faith as Christianity is diverse. So, it's very important to make sure that you reflect the diversity across different faith groups in our groups as well. We seek to do that, and we're very aware of that.

I'm aware that the UK Government has published today the integrated community strategy Green Paper for consultation, and the consultation ends on 5 June. So, we'll be looking carefully at that to make sure that the implications for Wales are well understood and that we can take them into account. But actually, to be honest, we make representations where they don't match up with our policy, so we will be looking at that very carefully as well. But as you can see from these letters coming from the Sheffield area of England, this isn't something we can tackle alone; this has got to have a pan-UK and, actually, I would argue, a pan-European element to it, where we make sure that people feel welcomed and respected inside our communities. I very much regret that recently we have had a hardening of attitudes around a lot of misunderstandings around, for example, refugees, asylum seekers and migrants and so on, which I think has not helped with the community cohesion agenda. But I am very heartened, when I go out to visit schools, to hear youngsters talking about it, because they speak very differently, and that's some of our policies coming into effect. 

Having said all of those things, though, I would be more than happy to discuss with you any other ideas you have that you think we can implement because we're very open to implementing anything that we think will work, and different things work in different communities because they have to be matched to that community. So, we have got EYST—the Ethnic Youth Support Team—running a pan-Wales programme, and one of the lessons from that is how individual those programmes need to be, depending on the nature of the particular community that you're talking to. So, I'd be very happy to have that dialogue with you on an ongoing basis.