B

Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 12 March 2026

Debate

Anti-Muslim Hostility: Non-statutory Definition

Contribution

I welcome the action plan and pay tribute to all the work that has gone into arriving at it. In 2019, the then Conservative Communities Secretary, James Brokenshire, said: “The government is wholeheartedly committed to ensuring that Muslims are not targeted for hatred, persecution or discrimination”. The Government’s press release at the time said that they agreed that “there needs to be a formal definition of Islamophobia to help strengthen our efforts against anti-Muslim hatred”. In recognising, as the Minister has set out, that this definition is not about preventing free speech but about protecting individuals, can I ask her to articulate how this plan and this definition would operate on exactly the same principle as the widely adopted working definition of antisemitism, and that those who claim this is an Islamophobia law or a blasphemy law—which is widely being put out there now, very destructively—are simply spreading disinformation and sowing division? Hate speech is not free speech.

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