1. Will the Leader of the House make a statement on Welsh Government plans to tackle Islamophobia and improve community cohesion in light of the 'Punish a Muslim' letters that have come to light recently? 155

Yes, indeed. Our Muslim communities are valued in Wales, and we are standing with them in abhorrence of this absolutely appalling campaign. We've established structures in Wales to tackle all forms of extremism and hate crime. These come together under our CONTEST extremism board and the Hate Crime Criminal Justice Board.

Thank you for that response. It was tricky whether to ask this question, because, of course, you raise awareness of the fact that these people exist and that they have such hate in their souls. I think the best response has been the Love a Muslim day on 3 April, which has been promoted to oppose the Punish a Muslim day. In my response, I said that I love a Muslim every day as I recently married my long-standing partner. I think it's important that we get ourselves immersed in these cultures as opposed to paying them lip service.

What I want to ask you as a Government is how we can ensure that community cohesion is real and is genuine. I believe that there is much more that we can be doing. We had an open day at the mosques recently here in Wales, which was a good start, but I'm thinking that we need to really get to grips with the hatred that exists, mostly online, and in our communities, with misinformation being passed around about what it is to be Muslim, and how we can target this in Wales in the most positive possible way, because I think that, with positivity, we can ensure that this message gets across. Some people may say that these types of messages are patronising, but I don't think, if we genuinely believe as Assembly Members that we want to create a positive community cohesion strategy here in Wales, that that's something that we cannot do.

So, can you exemplify to us how you are going about that, how AMs in their everyday working lives can be positive in outlining that, and how we can get to grips with tackling these types of attitudes robustly to make sure that they are not said again and that they are not acceptable forms of abuse?

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.

Being a Muslim, I know what I'm going to say. This is—. Minister, this Islamaphobia is actually putting people—leading towards violence, marginalisation, exploitation, powerlessness. Islam is the second largest religion in the United Kingdom, and the people here are 99.999 per cent very peaceful and law-abiding citizens here, and contributing to the community and the country at the same time. The worst scenario is only a handful of people who acted wrongly—I accept that; Muslims in the name of Islam—like Europe and London and Manchester and everywhere. But the community at large should not be punished. That is—I think we politicians have failed. We need to understand. I know, since 1970—you're trying to do race relations rules and regulations and laws since 1974. Minister, have we achieved it? It's gone from bad to worse.

Islamaphobia is a minor thing. What we're saying is it's treated badly, insulted and even physically hurt the local people, our young. We are the fourth and fifth generation here. We are not the first generation coming from any third-world country or eastern Europe. Our grandchildren haven't seen our forefathers' land. They know this is their land. And when people tell them, being Muslim—your hijab being taken out, and a woman of a different colour is run over by a car and two young boys have been killed on the name of Islam in this country. It's totally, totally unacceptable.

I think the Government—. I know Welsh Government is doing a wonderful job, but the fact is, in the centre also, the whole United Kingdom must be united on this issue. We're not taking it bit by bit. We must make some rules, educate the media—the media is the worst part of this whole scenario. They are not making any articles. 2017 was the worst year in the history of the United Kingdom for hate crimes: 80,000, Presiding Officer, 82,000 nearly, hate crimes are recorded in this country. You imagine how many every week. So, are we really serving the community with the peace, love and affection that we preach, and political education to all of our communities? No. Where we are wrong—. We politicians have failed. We do not listen, we do not go in the right direction. We do not mix—. What we have done—. The Welsh Government alone cannot tackle this. We need all the communities to go side by side.

Only last month, which Bethan just mentioned, Muslim mosques in the United Kingdom opened their doors, in the severe weather, to the people who are homeless and without food. And those doors were open only for that particular reason, not for that—only for the sake of love as a human being. Forget religion here—not Islamaphobia, not anything else. So, we should go in the right direction. Muslims are trying their best. I was one of those who endorsed that, 'Yes. Open the doors of all mosques. Let the people in the streets go in the mosque in this severe weather', and I'm glad people did it. And they looked after them. We are trying our best, but I think you must go hand-in-hand with each other, shoulder-to-shoulder with each other. I think if there's anything that this country needs—. I'll be the first, and Muslims will be the first, to protect this country; I can assure you that. But media, as I said earlier, and other education systems, which Bethan earlier said—. We must educate the system and this is the time. Please do not wait too long, because it's nearly 50 years and we haven't achieved. We have to do something, Minister, in the next five years—at least in our lifetime. Thank you very much.

Yes, well, there's nothing that I—. I really feel that there's not much to add to that. I couldn't agree more with everything that you said. We are doing a large number of things here in Wales. We work very closely with the four police forces and the hate crime criminal justice board to make sure that we do have robust systems and legislation in place to investigate the hate crimes that you've been highlighting, and, more importantly in some ways, to support the victims and to make sure that the perpetrators are brought to justice. But there is a much wider effect here, and, absolutely, the whole issue around people just perceiving themselves as people. 

Of course, the vast majority of people of the Muslim faith are peaceful and nice neighbours, in the same way as the vast majority of people are nice neighbours. Every community has people in it of which that community is not proud, and every community has people in it of which the community is very proud. All communities have the same. I think you've heard me saying in this Chamber before—I spent a large part of my young life going all around the world with my father, who had terrible itchy feet and needed to move on a lot, and we were always overwhelmed by the acceptance with which we were received into different communities, different faiths, different cultures. There was never any kind of problem at all, and I don't see any reason at all why that can't be reciprocal here in Wales.

There are some real issues around some of the policies that we have. We are working very closely with the UK Government to make sure that the UK Government's current stance on immigration doesn't have any unintended consequences. So, I have a group of people with whom I meet very regularly, and we have a Home Office representative there, and we raise issues where a particular policy may be having an unintended consequence in terms of community cohesion, for example. So, we do have very open channels of communication between us and the UK Government around making sure that we don't do things that exacerbate the kind of myth that you rightly highlight.

But, Llywydd, I think it's very important for us to state very firmly that we think this is abhorrent and that we very much, like all of our communities, equally, here in Wales, want to ensure that all of those communities live together peacefully and without this kind of abhorrent campaign against them.

Can I also join in the condemnation about this despicable hate mail? It was clearly designed to stoke fear in the Muslim community and, to some extent, I'm afraid it has been successful in that, and I think it's absolutely right that we stand shoulder to shoulder with Muslims here in Wales and across the UK in demonstrating our love and care for them in their communities. We've got to be able to overcome the prejudice and hate, and it's wonderful that we have an ambassador for the Muslim community here in the Assembly in Mohammad Asghar, who is passionate about these issues.

You referred earlier on, leader of the house, to religious education in our schools, and the role of our schools in helping to educate the next generation about the merits of tolerance and respect here in society. One of the things that has been raised in this Chamber in the past is a concern about the new curriculum reforms that are taking place in Wales and the status that religious education might have within the new curriculum in order that it can actually help to deliver these appropriate messages within our schools. So, I wonder to what extent you've discussed the risks that the current consideration of the new curriculum might have to ensuring that some of the good work that's already taking place in our schools isn't diminished by the changes and that it's actually enhanced.

Can I put on record as well that I had a very good friend, a Christian friend, who I used to work for, and he used to have this mantra that Islam should spell for everybody, 'I sincerely love all Muslims'—the letters of Islam? I think that we would do well to listen to his call to love all of our neighbours, regardless of their faith. For me, I think that the best that we can all do in this Chamber is, yes, to join in the condemnation, but also to take some positive action to love those Muslims in our community, to recognise the tremendous contribution that Muslim congregations in their mosques make, as well, to society in Wales at large, and to use this hate mail as an opportunity for good, so that we can help to recognise their achievements.

Yes, indeed, and, again, I've nothing to really add to that. That's a very potent way of putting it. I think the thing I mentioned was actually a module in the Welsh baccalaureate that is called 'Challenging extremism' that we teach as part of the modules that you can select in the Welsh baccalaureate. I have had some discussions with the Cabinet Secretary for Education about the way that we teach citizenship and various other things. I have to say I've not had a specific conversation with her about religious education, although I'm very happy to do so. But we have had a number of conversations about the way that we teach citizenship and healthy relationships and tolerance and community cohesion, but I'm more than happy to include religious education in that conversation that I have very regularly with that Cabinet Secretary. The reason we have that very regularly is because we very much want to make sure that our children grow up in a spirit of tolerance and acceptance and good community relationships—good relationships with all of their neighbours.

To quote Jo Cox, the MP, 'We have more in common than that which divides us.' And, as I say, my own experience around the world has shown that, actually, all communities are very much the same. We all have myths around family relationships and so on, but, when you actually talk to somebody who appears to be from a very different culture to yours, you find that their myths are very similar, because actually very many human beings are all very similar. And, as I said in my earlier response, all communities have people of whom they are very proud, but also, I'm afraid, people that they are not so proud of. So, you're absolutely right. We need to stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who has experienced fear and feels excluded because of this hateful campaign, and make sure that we both support the victims but also bring the perpetrators to justice. 

Thank you, leader of the house.