Downing Street Backtracks on Appointing its Chosen Anti-Muslim Hatred Advisor Who Suppressed Conservative Neo-Nazi Ties – After Byline Times’ Inquiries

The Government abruptly reversed plans to appoint a former government-funded contractor as a new Independent Advisor on Anti-Muslim Hatred after receiving notice of a Byline Times investigation exposing how he shielded Conservatives from scrutiny over ties to racist far-right extremists.

Senior ministers in Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet planned to announce the appointment of Fiyaz Mughal, founder and former director of Tell MAMA (‘Measuring Anti Muslim Attacks’) on Monday.

The organisation has received a total of £7 million in funding from the Government since 2012.

However, high-level sources confirmed to Byline Times that Downing Street suddenly cancelled Mughal’s appointment following this newspaper’s inquiries to the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).

On Friday 8 March, the Government was given the opportunity to comment on Byline Times’ story that Mughal had suppressed a Tell MAMA-funded report exposing Conservative Party relationships with anti-Muslim and antisemitic political parties tied to neo-Nazi networks.

Later that day, a Government spokesperson responded with the following statement: “I would point you back to the minister’s words in the House: ‘We plan to appoint a new independent advisor on anti-Muslim hatred, and we will update the House shortly’.”

But, approximately an hour after sending this statement, Downing Street blocked Mughal’s appointment, Byline Times can exclusively reveal.

Sources confirm that No. 10 was “desperately scrambling” to shortlist more credible alternative candidates for the appointment that could be announced at short notice in advance of a raft of other announcements on extremism targeted largely at Muslim communities and anti-war protestors.

Although on Friday Downing Street was adamant that it could not appoint Mughal, sources told Byline Times that it is not clear whether the role will be replaced and, if so, who with.

This evening, the Daily Mail reported that Mughal quit the role before it had started because of “attacks from both the far-right and Islamists”. The newspaper said it was an “embarrassing blow for Communities Secretary Michael Gove”.

Mughal was due to replace a role previously played by Imam Qari Asim, who in 2019 was appointed by the Government as an Independent Advisor on tackling Islamophobia. Asim was removed from that position in 2022 without being replaced.

“I was neither given an office nor any resources to undertake any work to define Islamophobia,” Asim told Byline Times. “I couldn’t even get the terms of reference for my work from the Government.

“I was very clear that Islamophobia is not about sanctioning any critique of the faith Islam, but rather about protecting Muslims who are intimidated, discriminated, abused and even assaulted, simply because of their faith.”

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An Alarming Investigation

In 2012, Fiyaz Mughal founded and launched Tell MAMA as a project run by his other organisation, Faith Matters, which is registered as a community interest company. Both projects have received funding from the Government.

Since 2012, Tell MAMA has received more than £6 million from the Government. It is receiving an extra £1 million this year.

From 2016 to 2018, it received more than £225,000 from the Home Office’s ‘Building a Stronger Britain Together’ programme run by the Office for Counter Extremism.

In February 2016, on behalf of Tell MAMA, Mughal used some of this funding to commission me to conduct an investigation into far-right movements in the UK and Europe involved in anti-Muslim hatred. The Tell MAMA-funded investigation was due to be published as a four-part series on its website.

I delivered the 15,000-word draft report of the investigation in May 2016. The material was subsequently edited and reviewed by Tell MAMA staff and Mughal agreed that the series would be published both online and as a single report which could be sent to the media.

I was so alarmed by my findings that when I had submitted the first draft to Tell MAMA, I had suggested we work to ensure that Muslim and Jewish communities were brought together to understand how the mainstreaming of the far-right is endangering both.

“I think the Board of Jewish Deputies and Community Security Trust, as well as relevant agencies in the US and EU, would be keenly interested in (and rightly alarmed by) these findings,” I wrote to Mughal.

In an email on 11 May, he wrote: “Brilliant on all counts Nafeez – we also want to do more with you in the future if that is okay – but let’s make this a huge bang and I will also send you a press hook for you to feed into so that we can get to nationals.”

My findings were shocking.

By tracing the trans-Atlantic connections and historical heritage of far-right political parties across Europe, I discovered that the vast majority of parties rising up in the polls had explicit Nazi sympathies and affiliations, and often even little-understood Nazi heritage.

Many of these parties campaigned on a footing of loudly denouncing antisemitism and publicly distancing themselves from Nazism. Yet my investigation had exposed their direct ties with active neo-Nazi networks.

These were political parties that were becoming increasingly mainstream – including the German AfD, the Austrian FPO, Geert Wilders’ PVV, the Belgian Vlaams Belang (VB) Party, the Danish Peoples Party (DPP), Le Pen’s NF, Nigel Farage’s UKIP, and the True Finns (PS).

Other political parties with Nazi heritage or sympathies my investigation exposed, including Holocaust denial and antisemitism, were Lega Nord in Italy, MS5 in Italy, the Sweden Democrats, the Czech Party of Free Citizens, and Poland’s Congress of the New Right.

Many of these political parties were, however, increasingly engaged in anti-Muslim hatred and prejudice. My investigation showed that these political networks were making deliberate efforts to rebrand themselves by distancing from their Nazi heritage. They wanted to rehabilitate their influence on the centre-right.

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The Striking Omission

On 7 June 2016, Mughal emailed me asking if we could meet me in person. A final version of my report had been edited and approved by Tell MAMA staff. We met at King’s Cross station a few days later.

After congratulating me again on the investigation, Mughal’s enthusiasm for the project appeared to have dipped. He did not want to publish the second part of the series titled “The Conservative Party aided and abetted German fascists with Nazi roots”.

Mughal explained to me that it wasn’t because he didn’t believe the findings were not accurate or important. He said that if Tell MAMA published them, it would create serious problems for his relationship with the Government and the organisation’s funding.

His solution was for Tell MAMA to publish the series except the section highlighting Conservative far-right ties.

Meanwhile, my own platform, INSURGE intelligence, could publish the entire investigation with an acknowledgement of Tell MAMA’s role in commissioning the project.

Mughal insisted that he was fully behind the project and we discussed a full report launch in Parliament as well as a social media campaign to raise awareness. I had little choice but to agree and did not feel I couldn force him to publish the material on the Conservative Party.