Yahya Birt argues that the Independent Review of “How Government Engages with Faith” by Colin Bloom is disappointing and disproportionately focuses on Britain’s non-Christian religious minorities, with proposed further extensions of counter-extremism measures into Muslim civil society.

The Bloom Review Wants the State to Regulate Britain’s Non-Christian Minorities

First commissioned in 2019, the much-delayed review by Colin Bloom, the faith advisor to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, into the UK government’s engagement with faith communities has been released today. It has a disappointing and disproportionate focus on Britain’s non-Christian religious minorities and fails to consider what faith engagement should look like in a country where Christianity is now a minority faith (46% in the 2021 Census).

There is plenty of praise for faith community emergency responses to the Covid pandemic, on which the Review wishes the government to extend its post-pandemic “New Deal” for faith organisations. It doesn’t, however, remark on who was left out of the £1.3m distributed to 16 Christian, Jew and interfaith groups in its pilot phase last year. There is considerable scepticism among British Muslims that the “New Deal” will just be another iteration of “define and rule”, funding those Muslims designated as “good” and stigmatizing the rest, as seen with previous schemes like New Labour’s version of community funding through Prevent and the current government’s Building a Stronger Britain Together fund.

For a review released under Michael Gove’s ministerial berth, the most eye-catching recommendations focus on tackling the perceived harms of non-Christian faith communities, notwithstanding nods to the importance of faith literacy and the civil society contributions of faith organisations (27% of charities and growing).

These are predictably a further extension of Gove’s counter-extremism policies into Muslim civil society but also into other faith communities, based on the same flawed focus on British values. It uncritically replicates the central canard that political violence emerges from a lack of shared British values, that the causes of conflict can be resolved by dividing Muslims into good or bad, or “Muslim” or “Islamist”. “Islamism” in contemporary Western political parlance simply means those Muslims who currently oppose Britain’s current interests – it has little to do with values and more to do with a post-hoc rhetorical justification of the current national interest.

Notably, Bloom does not say like Shawcross that Islamists have been ignored by the focus on the far right, but rather attention should be given to Sikh or Black Nationalist extremists (all anti-Israel groups). The main body of the review only nods to Hindu extremism in two short paragraphs, while giving over a dozen pages to extremism in British Sikh communities, something which will be more palatable to the Indian government. If there is such a thing as Jewish extremism, the Review does not see fit to address it.

Proposals include a new regulatory body for “out-of-school settings” for religious instruction. The main if not the only target here is Britain’s madrasas alongside Jewish Orthodox yeshivas. The aim is to close the gap to tighten regulation, given that any provision under 18 hours per week falls short of the current definition of “full-time education” used by the Department of Education (most madrasas typically offer between 4‒12.5 hours per week). While madrasas are crying out for curriculum development and teacher training, the Bloom Review supports the argument from the Shawcross Review that “safeguarding” should no longer be central to counter-extremism policy, which it has in fact been the central justification for its deployment in all under-18 educational settings. The hope here is that directing safeguarding concerns at madrasas and yeshivas rather than Sunday schools will allay the Christian concerns that scuppered a prior attempt to regulate these institutions in 2015.

Similarly, the Review seeks to further toughen up counter-extremism policy in prisons, with a particular focus on the training of prison staff, including chaplains, and their theological training in counter-extremism arguments. This is an argument for the primacy of faith in deradicalisation, a premise that is far from proven in the academic literature. Rather, the causes of extremism or moderation are multifaceted, not unidimensional. The Review singles out the low levels of British Muslim recruitment into the armed forces (0.4%, while making up 6.5% of the UK population), without properly considering the highly demotivating aspect that post-9/11 geopolitics posed. After all, Muslim nations have been the major targets of these wars, with huge civilian casualties approaching 400,000 and 38 million displaced people and refugees, according to one study by Brown University.

The Review also recommends granting further powers to the Charity Commission to tackle financial exploitation by faith-based charities, however focusing on faith rather than on exploitation per se risks singling out the charitable faith sector unfairly. Yet the Charity Commission already has adequate powers to tackle exploitation so one does wonder what the focus on faith-based charities is meant to achieve?

Finally, the Review recommends tightening up law and policy around “forced or coercive marriage”, notably in making it a criminal offence for faith leaders to conduct religious or civil marriages without properly ascertaining whether both parties are willing to get married. Again, as there is no evidence that existing laws and regulations are inadequate (notwithstanding a more radical approach to recognise religious marriages like nikah as legally binding in English law that the Review doesn’t consider), one is left wondering what the real agenda is behind the greater regulation of Muslim civil society? In many areas of everyday Muslim faith and practice in terms of philanthropy, religious instruction, or marriage, Bloom is advocating that the state interferes ever more in their daily lives, as if that is somehow always an untrammelled good.

The Review is also notable for what it does not address. In the hour of King Charles’ coronation, it doesn’t consider Britain’s constitutional arrangements on religion. Should Britain become more constitutionally multi-faith in some manner? Does the oft-repeated call for greater literacy in and of itself truly address the emergence of Britain as a Christian minority country for the first time since the seventh century? Should the Church of England remain established, or primus inter pares? Do the minority faiths really want Christians and the Church of England to presume to act as interlocutors on their behalf? The avoidance of these questions by British Christians and policymakers like Mr. Bloom often means that the focus falls instead upon the greater regulation of non-Christian minorities as the primary focus of state concern. It is a rather selfish, unreflective, and racializing form of “bait and switch” that is long past its “use by” date.

Yahya Birt is Research Director at the Ayaan Institute in London and is a community historian who writes about the history of Islam in Britain. His latest book is Our Fatima of Liverpool.

If you enjoyed the article or found it useful please support our work by donating.