🚨 The Government has imposed a de facto Islamic blasphemy law by the back door — and almost certainly allowed Islamist extremists to influence the process. At the start of the year, the Free Speech Union revealed that all five members of the Government’s working group had troubling links to Islamist organisations, including the Muslim Council of Britain and MEND. Successive governments have had a policy of non-engagement with both since 2009, citing concerns about their views. A Freedom of Information request by Shadow Justice Secretary @NJ_Timothy revealed that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) had said it deleted all responses to the Working Group’s consultation, which informed the drafting of the definition. That appeared to conflict with the Government’s own data policy, which requires key information of historical importance to be retained for 20 years. The Free Speech Union sent MHCLG a pre-action protocol letter, threatening judicial review unless the department disclosed who had been given the opportunity to influence the definition. After considerable delay, MHCLG has written back to @SpeechUnion and admitted that they had located ‘at least one available copy of the dataset’. This is a shocking revelation — and raises serious questions about the handling of the process. Angela Rayner must come clean. Why did officials originally claim that the data had been deleted? If it has been deleted, and subsequently “recovered”, why did this happen, and why did they attempt to hide behind data protection legislation? Did the Government allow extremists to influence the drafting of a definition that has had a chilling effect on free speech — and then mislead the public about what happened to the consultation responses? The public deserves to know the truth.