One of this blog’s regular contacts and data sources wrote to their local MP about the ongoing scandals surrounding the Tell Mama group. This person has had a reply from both their local MP and from the Dept of Communities and Local Government, which this post will go into in much more detail later.
Firstly, for those who do not know about this Tell Mama group, then to recap the many other Tell Mama stories on this site, it’s sufficient to say that they are extremely troubling to say the least.
Fiyaz Mughal, the founder and driving force behind the Tell Mama organisation has been a constant presence on the public funding teat for all too many years. Mughal has been quite successful in getting money out of the taxpayer and has spunked public money up the wall on such worthless guff as a ‘caring for converts to Islam’ project and a ‘mosque directory’.
None of these projects appear to have been of any real and lasting benefit, except possibly to fill Mughal’s own pockets, or to advance his personal profile and status. Mughal has managed to screw an astounding amount of money from the taxpayer by playing the ‘Islam’ card and schmoozing the naïve multiculturalists and panderers to Islam that exist in today’s Civil Service and non-governmental grant making institutions. Details of the cash that has been squandered on Mughal and his groups can be found in the links at the bottom of this article or by clicking HERE and HERE.
Recently, Mughal, who is known by a number of other epithets, not all of them complimentary and include such terms as ‘Old Fizzy Bollocks’, ‘Mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya artist’ and ‘the corpulent conman’, has become better known for creating and steering the ‘Tell Mama’ ‘Islamophobia’ monitoring organisation. This Tell Mama group came to both public prominence and was the subject of much public ridicule, following their appearances in the media following the Islamic murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in South Woolwich in May 2013. Mughal and his recently created Tell Mama group tried to tell the world that the murder had sparked off a ‘massive wave of Islamophobia’ ,but when journalists, bloggers and others examined Mughal’s claims they mostly turned out to be, not to put too fine a point on it, outrageous lies.
Fiyaz Mughal of Tell Mama
There then followed a predictable and justifiable furore when it was revealed by the Telegraph journalist Andrew Gillgan and others that Tell Mama’s ‘hate crime’ figures could fairly be described as ‘a crock of shit’. The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), the ministry that was funding Tell Mama to the tune of £397K between 2010 and 2013, rapidly tried to save face and declared to the world that Tell Mama’s funding had been cut.
There was a great deal of anger at the time following the Rigby murder, at the outrageous lies that Tell Mama had told. These included classifying online incidents where a person had said something uncomplimentary but sometimes true things about Islam, as ‘an attack’. Basically, in order to ramp up the number of ‘hate crime attacks’, Mughal and his organisation did an act of statistical sleight of hand and put the ‘saying nasty things about Islam’ incidents, into the same column as alleged mosque burnings or physical street attacks.
However the outcome of Tell Mama getting caught telling porkies wasn’t a simple case of activist group gets funding, activist group gets caught lying and activist group gets prised off of the public sector nipple. That is what should have happened, but it didn’t. Unfortunately the DCLG seems to like Mughal and his organisations very much for some inexplicable reason and the funding for Tell Mama was renewed in 2014 seemingly ‘on the quiet’, or at least not in a manner that allowed for easy transparency, if you know what I mean.
Mughal, despite being a morally and politically unfit person to do so, by reason of the reputation that he and his groups have garnered, seems to have been able to gain some influence with DCLG civil servants and also groups funded by DCLG. This has extended to being appointed to the DCLG-funded ‘Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’. This appointment comes despite there being evidence that Mughal has both had friendly associations with known Holocaust deniers and has allegedly used some of these individuals to gather intelligence on individuals which are opposed to Fiyaz Mughal, his stable of organisations, including Tell Mama and other web based front groups such as ‘Religious Reader’.
Since this blog published on the 27th November 2016 an expose of the continuing funding of Tell Mama, which I felt was a political and fiscal scandal of monstrous proportions, a great deal of further public anger has been expressed, especially on social media. A number of people told me personally that they were so angry about the subject of the story that they were going to write to their Member of Parliament querying why this bunch of provably dishonest shysters called Tell Mama were still being funded when in reality they should be in receipt of nothing more than public opprobrium.
But back to the ‘meat’ of today’s article on Tell Mama. As I said earlier, one of this blog’s regular contacts from the Marches area of England, was one of those who wrote to their Parliamentary representative, Jesse Norman the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire. My contact in this area has given me permission to reproduce the reply that they have had from Mr Norman and from Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the DCLG.
Scans of these letters are posted below and I will subsequently comment on them.
Here’s Mr Norman’s cover letter and the reply by Lord Bourne, with my contact’s identifying details redacted.
A nice polite reply from Mr Norman.
The reply from Lord Bourne on the other hand is not quite so satisfactory and I have advised my contact who is also disappointed by this reply, to take this matter further with the DCLG.
His Lordship’s reply glosses over the matter of the public statements made to Andrew Gilligan of the Telegraph presumably by DCLG staff that the Tell Mama group would lose funding because of Tell Mama’s behaviour. His Lordship stated that the group was due to lose its funding in 2013 anyway and that Tell Mama put in another funding application in 2014 which was granted.
Lord Bourne is quite correct in saying that the ‘funding of Tell Mama is a matter of public record’. Unfortunately, due to the notable lack of transparency of Tell Mama’s accounts along with the accounts of Tell Mama’s parent organisation Faith Matters (another Fiyaz Mughal vehicle), it took a Freedom of Information Request by another contact of this blog to find out that large amounts of public money was being splurged on the considerably less than honest Tell Mama organisation.
Such a FOI request should not have been necessary had Tell Mama had the sort of publicly available accounts that an organisation of their stature should have. I find it difficult to reconcile Lord Bourne’s statement in his reply that: “In funding third sector organisations, my Department undertakes financial viability checks, ensures that the organisation is appropriately constituted and requires the grant only to be used for the purposes set out in a legal grant agreement”, with the reality of the set up of the Tell Mama organisation.
As someone who for a while worked in the charitable field and understands some aspects of charity corporate governance, I was struck by some anomalies regarding Tell Mama and funding. Many of these are dealt with by me in more detail HERE but basically Tell Mama do not seem to be ‘appropriately constituted’ or could be considered as being ‘financially viable’. If they have no publicly accessible accounts, no company registration number for being a ‘company limited by guarantee’ and no charity commission number how can they be taken seriously by government or anyone else? There also appears to be no way of knowing through accessible accounts, which many charities and other third sector organisations in receipt of government funding have, how much of the money given to Tell Mama has been spent on useful stuff or which has been wasted or how much might have been diverted to, heaven-forbid, individuals and entities that are not conducive to the public good.
Of course to be absolutely clear, I’m not for a moment accusing Fiyaz Mughal of funding terrorism through diversion of public funds, that would be both patently untrue and indeed libellous. But there may be other groups out there headed by people far worse than Fiyaz Mughal, who may be running Islamic organisations, funded with taxpayers’ money, with similarly slackly constituted, managed and monitored systems to that of the Tell Mama group. In that scenario I could envisage a large amount of our money being diverted to those who wish to kill us or oppress us or do us harm in other ways.
Try as I might, I cannot bring myself to believe that the necessary checks have been carried out by the DCLG on the Tell Mama group. They have no charity number, no company number and no published accounts. Would you give your own money from your own pocket to an organisation which had no way of showing you how it worked, how it was managed or how it dealt with its finances and what they were going to do with your money? I would not and this raises the huge question of why DCLG civil servants did this with our money?
Something is still very amiss here it seems counter factual that funders would not insist on something like company registration, if only to keep the legal side of things straight and surely they would have advised Tell Mama to consider charity registration because of the tax advantages? It’s highly odd that these practises and procedures that are common to many similar organisations including some in the ‘hate crime’ field and which have not been followed by Tell Mama, did not ring alarm bells with those approving of Tell Mama’s funding?
Both the person who supplied me with Lord Bourne’s reply and myself find it deeply dissatisfying. It raises for me more questions than it answers, especially how on earth an organisation set up like Tell Mama managed to get so much funding seemingly on trust?
The rest of the letter and in particular the section on the importance of fighting ‘hate crime’ seems to be standard boilerplate multiculturalist guff, which basically sets out the government’s position that ‘hate crime is bad OK’. It’s nothing really special. However, the third paragraph of the letter is slightly more interesting. It refers to a reply in the Lords from a Conservative Peer, Baroness Williams of Trafford to a question asked on the 26th May 2016 by the controversial Israel-hating Peer, Baroness Jenny Tonge. In the written question to the Government, as recorded by Hansard, Baroness Tonge asks for an ‘independent enquiry into Islamophobia’. In reply Baroness Williams said:
“Everyone in Britain has the right to feel safe and at ease in the place where they live. There is no place for hatred against people because of their race, gender, ethnic origin, faith, sexual orientation, age or disability. This includes anti-Muslim attacks which are unacceptable in Britain.
The Government is already taking a number of steps to counter Islamaphobia and does not intend to carry out an independent inquiry. We fund Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) to encourage reporting of these crimes and to support victims. We have also set up the first cross Government Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group to raise awareness of Islamaphobic attacks. In addition, the police began to disaggregate hate crime by religion in April 2016. This will help the police to build community trust, target their resources and enable the public to hold them to account.”
Maybe we should be a little thankful that the Government are not planning to carry out an independent inquiry into ‘Islamophobia’. After all, the chances are that the membership of such an inquiry panel would likely include some of the very sorts of people who should never serve on such a committee of inquiry. I can just imagine that an ‘Islamophobia inquiry’ committee would probably comprise the likes of Baroness Tonge, the Muslim Council of Britain or even Fiyaz Mughal himself. It would be a committee comprised of Israel haters, chancers, naïve interfaith types, quangocrats and dishonest Muslim groups and individuals, many of whom would have a political and pecuniary interest in falsely talking up the amount of anti-Islam ‘hate crime’.
However, reading between the lines of the reply by Baroness Williams, it seems that the Government may be funding Tell Mama in order to be seen to be doing something about a wave of ‘Islamophobia’ that rarely if ever seems to appear in Britain in any meaningful or serious form despite immense provocations to the general British public from the followers of the ideology of Islam. These include such things as Islamic extremists who kill British soldiers, violent Muslims who intimidate Jews, Gays and Christians and the Islamic Rape Gangs who continue to target British children.
There appears to be a sort of symbiotic parasite/host thing going on with the Government and the Tell Mama group. By funding Tell Mama, the Government can hive off the troublesome business of dealing with the phantom of ‘Islamophobia’, keep the noisy and violent Muslims and their ‘community leaders’ happy and tick a ‘diversity’ box. For the Government, funding Tell Mama must look like a bit of a bargain, but for the rest of us whose money it is being spent, it’s not such a good deal.
I have no argument with the statement of Baroness Williams that everyone in Britain should be able to live their lives without fear, after all, it’s a basic right that those who cause no trouble should receive no trouble. However I would argue whether it’s good value to throw money at Tell Mama, a group with a long standing and proven record for dishonesty and exaggeration, which has exploited the mentally vulnerable. Tell Mama is an organisation whose principal staff and officers have questionable associates, and which has failed to shake off the taint of falsified statistics, despite co-opting other groups such as the Community Security Trust to help burnish Tell Mama’s tarnished image. I ask you is chucking our money at this dodgy group really the best way to help people, including Muslim people, live in peace and without fear?
The Government are making a grave mistake with their ongoing funding of the Tell Mama group, primarily because of Tell Mama’s history of falsifying ‘hate crime’ figures. The Government are also being mistaken by putting so much trust in Fiyaz Mughal, a man who has continually proved through his work with Tell Mama, Faith Matters, Religious Reader, ‘Muslims Against Anti-Semitism’ and other dubious front groups, that he is patently so little deserving of such trust.
It’s an utter disgrace that large sums of public money are still being wasted on the Tell Mama group. They are being funded despite there being ample evidence of this group being unsuitable to receive huge chunks of our cash, a total of £980k since 2008, across all Mughal-related projects, to spread often dishonest hysteria about how Muslims are victims of ‘Islamophobia’. All this is going on whilst government funding for more worthy projects and causes are being cut. It’s sobering and indeed anger-inducing to think that the money, OUR money that is being thrown at Fiyaz Mughal, could have bought something far more worthwhile than some pro-Islam propaganda, dishonest hate crime statistics and some dubious studies into ‘Islamophobia’ conducted by Tell Mama’s tame academics.
For what the public has paid for Fiyaz Mughal’s vanity projects since 2008, the aforementioned £980,000, Britain could have paid a year’s wages for 32 British infantry soldiers, trained approximately 40 teachers, trained 14 nurses on a three year course, provided 12,250 standard manual wheelchairs, or even granted 65,000 home care hours for sick or disabled Britons. When you look at it like that, the waste of our money on the Tell Mama group and other Fiyaz Mughal projects looks more and more disgraceful, immoral and wrong.
Links.
These contain much that explains the above article and has extra information about the scandalous Tell Mama organisation, its questionable behaviour, opaque finances and much more.
Inside Fiyaz Mughal’s money making machine
The funding of the Tell Mama group a scandal of monstrous proportions
Fiyaz Mughal, friend of Holocaust deniers, sits on board of UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
Parliamentary question asked by Baroness Jenny Tonge and answered by Baroness Williams of Trafford
A Kafircrusaders piece outlining the vast amount of money that Fiyaz Mughal has managed to screw out of the taxpayer over the years.
The Tell Mama group is a project of one of Fiyaz Mughal’s other vehicles the ‘Faith Matters’ group. For the purposes of completeness please find below a link to the Companies House documentation for the Faith Matters organisations
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06082225/filing-history
Tell Mama lose Government funding due to fake hate crime reports
New English Review article on the mendacious grievance mongering Taqiyya artists of Tell Mama
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/160311/sec_id/160311
Tell Mama exploit catastrophically mentally ill transsexual in order to gain sympathy with the Crown Prosecution Service
Tell Mama’s ‘Tame academics’ of Teeside University’s Centre for Fascist, Anti-Fascist and Post-Fascist Studies. They do studies, based on Tell Mama originated data and then write reports that are then relied upon by Tell Mama themselves
http://www.tees.ac.uk/sections/research/design_culture_arts/facist_centre.cfm
True Vision website ‘hate crime’ reporting statistics
http://www.report-it.org.uk/home
Tell Mama information sharing agreement with True Vision and NPCC
http://www.report-it.org.uk/files/isa_-_npcc.pdf
True Vision spreadsheet on ‘hate crime’ figures
http://www.report-it.org.uk/files/reports_made_to_true_vision_201516.pdf
More Tell Mama dishonesty. Tell Mama continue to promote this story as true even though the alleged victim was fined for wasting police time by lying about being attacked
http://tellmamauk.org/early-morning-assault-in-birmingham-leaves-young-female-fearful/
Tell Mama in league with the press censors of Hacked Off
Faith Matters website
Tell Mama website
Fiyaz Mughal’s dubious and probably completely ineffectual ‘Muslims Against Anti-Semitism’ group
Here you will find an article by the Jewish Defence League calling Jewish groups who work with Mughal as ‘betrayers of the Jewish community’. It also draws attention to the hollowness of Mughal’s ‘Muslims Against Anti-Semitism’ group
http://www.jdl-uk.org/2013_03_01_archive.html
Tell Mama’s Fiyaz Mughal dragging man through the courts for the ‘offence’ of telling a joke
Tell Mama makes false claim about massive rise in Islamophobia
‘What do they know’ data on Tell Mama’s funding
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/tell_mamafaith_matters_funding
Faith Matters latest financial accounts
Freedom of Information Act enquiry into the funding of Tell Mama
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/tell_mamafaith_matters_funding
