HOW BURNHAM'S BRITAIN PROTECTS THE ISLAMIST AND PUNISHES THE INFIDEL

The Home Office gave a British passport to a man who stood at Ismail Haniyeh's shoulder as his bodyguard, and Haniyeh ran Hamas in Gaza. He was the son of another senior Hamas official. Egypt had detained him over a tunnel used to smuggle guns and gold into the strip. All of it had been publicly reported before his asylum claim reached a Home Office desk.

Theresa May's department, which in those same years could find and deport Windrush pensioners who had been here since they were children, gave indefinite leave to Haniyeh's bodyguard in 2015, and the Home Office later naturalised him.

He settled into the suburbs of a large English city as an IT consultant and changed his legal name more than once, and the Home Office stamped him through three times, at asylum, at settlement and at naturalisation.

The British security services are not thought to have treated him as a priority as he began working with Hamas operatives on the Continent. It took Mossad and German intelligence to uncover a Hamas plot against Jewish community centres, Israeli diplomats and pro-Israel demonstrations in Germany and Austria, intended to coincide with the second anniversary of 7 October, before the National Crime Agency went to arrest him in London in November 2025.

A German indictment accuses him of moving pistols and ammunition from Berlin to a storage unit in Vienna. He has been convicted of nothing. The Home Office has not said what its officials had in front of them at any of the three decisions, and it has not said because every answer shames it.

In the same week the country learned that Hammersmith and Fulham Council has planned a £70,000 refurbishment, solar panels, loft insulation, new windows and doors, for the five-bedroom council house in Shepherd's Bush where Abu Hamza's wife holds a tenancy for life. The house is worth around £1.7 million.

Anyone reading that would ask how a state can be this incompetent. I have asked it for over eight years in Oldham, and I stopped believing the answer was incompetence a long time ago, because the same state is anything but incompetent when somebody objects.

CLEVELAND POLICE WENT TO STEPHEN GRAY'S DOOR

Cleveland Police sent officers to the home of one of its own retired officers over two Facebook posts. Stephen Gray is 65. He gave that force thirty years, and he and his wife foster children. A neighbour he had fallen out with complained, and the force found Gray's Facebook page without any trouble, turned up at his door and sat him down under caution at Darlington police station.

The Crown Prosecution Service read the posts and found nothing to prosecute. A neighbour filled in a review form under the Victims' Right to Review, and the CPS found one. At Newton Aycliffe magistrates' court in April 2026 one charge was dismissed. On the other, District Judge Steven Hood convicted him under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, called the post grossly offensive and fined him more than £1,000 with costs. The Free Speech Union is funding his appeal.

The post was a picture of bacon and a man in a turban with the line that people who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a nine-year-old. Gray told the court it referred to Muhammad's marriage to Aisha.

It was crude and it was meant to offend, and a district judge in County Durham decided that a joke about the Prophet's marriage is a crime in this country.

The offence on the charge sheet is sending a grossly offensive message. The judge did not say the post was convicted because it was about Muhammad. I say it. Of the two posts, the one he convicted was the one about Islam, and his appeal is where that question will be put.

The Home Office had a Hamas bodyguard's publicly reported history available to it at three separate decisions and has never said whether anyone looked. Cleveland Police had a complaint from a neighbour about a repost and delivered a police visit, an interview under caution, a prosecution and a conviction.

The two cases are nothing alike in law. The effort is what I am comparing, and the state put more of it into a retired officer's Facebook page than it has ever shown for an asylum claim from a man photographed guarding the leader of Hamas.

THE HOME OFFICE TOOK NINETEEN YEARS

The Home Office holds the power to ban any organisation it believes is concerned in terrorism, and how it has used that power tells you what it is afraid of. Hizb ut-Tahrir called for a caliphate on British streets for decades, said democracy was haram and told Muslims they owed this country nothing.

Tony Blair stood up on 5 August 2005, four weeks after the London bombings, and promised the country he would proscribe it. David Cameron put the same promise in his 2010 manifesto and won two elections on it. Two prime ministers took the applause for promising a ban and then let their lawyers talk them out of it.

James Cleverly proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir on 19 January 2024, nineteen years after Blair's promise, and the Home Office's stated reason was that the group had praised and celebrated the 7 October attacks and its members had been filmed chanting for jihad on a London street.

Cleverly told the Commons the group had antisemitism at its core and rejected British values. It rejected British values in 2005, and in 2010, and in every year between, and the Home Office only found that intolerable once Hamas had murdered 1,200 people and the group's own members had put the celebration on everyone's phone.

Hamas itself took twenty. The military wing was banned in 2001. The organisation as a whole stayed lawful in Britain until Priti Patel proscribed it in November 2021, and in those twenty years the Home Office gave asylum, settlement and a passport to Haniyeh's bodyguard.

The same state found a different speed for Tommy Robinson. Kent Police stopped him at the Channel Tunnel in July 2024 under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, demanded his phone PIN and charged him when he refused.

In November 2025 District Judge Sam Goozee acquitted him and found the stop unlawful, because what Robinson stood for and his beliefs had been the principal reason for it and not any suspicion of terrorism.

Seven months after that ruling, on 13 June 2026, the Metropolitan Police stopped him at Heathrow under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act, a power Parliament wrote for spies and saboteurs working for foreign governments.

The Met's own statement says he was stopped on his return from Russia via Turkey, questioned, his devices seized, and released. Russia is where the Met says he had come from. It has never said that was the reason, and it does not need to, because Schedule 3 requires no suspicion at all.

A power that needs no suspicion was used on a man a court had just found was stopped for his beliefs, and the Met has charged him with nothing and has never said what hostile activity, if any, it was looking for.

Nothing from his phones has been made public. He faces an unrelated jury trial in October 2026 on harassment charges, which he denies. A court had told the police in plain words that using terror powers on this man for his opinions was unlawful, and seven months later Mark Rowley's force used a different terror power on the same man.

Nobody on the receiving end gets any of it back. Robinson does not get back the hours, or his phones for as long as the police chose to hold them. If Gray wins his appeal, the officers still came to his door and the interview under caution still happened. No conviction was required. Everyone watching has learned which subjects get you stopped at an airport.

STEPHEN PARKINSON TOOK A BURNT QURAN TO THE HIGH COURT

The Crown Prosecution Service prosecuted Hamit Coskun for burning a book, and when he cleared his name the Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, went to the High Court to have the conviction put back.

Coskun burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate and was convicted at the magistrates' court of a religiously aggravated public order offence. He appealed, and at Southwark Crown Court a High Court judge, Mr Justice Bennathan, sitting with magistrates, threw the conviction out. Parkinson then appealed the acquittal by way of case stated, and on 27 February 2026 two more High Court judges dismissed his appeal. Parliament abolished blasphemy in 2008, and the DPP's office spent a year trying to prosecute it under another name.

Parkinson's lawyers did not ask for a blasphemy law, because no prosecutor can say the word out loud. What they argued was that burning the book, with the words Coskun shouted and where he shouted them, was disorderly conduct in itself.

The Crown Court bench had already said it was not. The DPP would not take that answer, and the CPS spent public money carrying one reading of the public order law all the way to the Administrative Court after a court had rejected it.

Parkinson is the man accountable for that decision, and it was taken in the year a Hamas bodyguard was living on a British passport.

Then the government adopted its definition of anti-Muslim hostility in March 2026. The definition says on its face that it protects Muslims as people and not Islam as a religion, that it does not override the law, and that lawful criticism, debate and ridicule of Islam remain protected.

Ministers point to those lines every time they are asked. The wording does no damage on its own. The damage starts when a police force, an employer or a regulator writes a political definition that Parliament never voted on into its own records, and the first force to do it had done it by June.

South Wales Police aligned itself with the definition and then paused. The Free Speech Union says the force had issued officers guidance under which any discussion of Islam that went beyond what an officer judged legitimate would be logged as an antisocial behaviour incident, and that the force backed off after the FSU threatened judicial review.

South Wales Police enforcing its own Islamophobia definition that will have a chilling effect on free speech

South Wales Police is enforcing subjective guidance on Islam that will chill free speech. The FSU is demanding withdrawal and threatening judicial review.

Free Speech UnionMax Thompson

The force's own account, in a letter to the FSU and in its FOI response, is that the pause followed consultation and was pending national police guidance. Asked under FOI for the guidance itself, the force said it held no information. If officers were issued a memo, where is the force's copy? South Wales Police has not answered that. What it has said is that it stopped, after a pressure group threatened to sue.

THE OFFICERS WHO WANTED THE WORD GONE

The National Association of Muslim Police includes serving officers with warrant cards, and it asked British policing to stop using the word Islamist. It is police officers and police staff lobbying the police, from inside, to stop the police naming the movement whose bomb at the Manchester Arena in 2017 killed 22 people, seven of them children, on a night out.

Policy Exchange's earlier report recorded the three words the network objected to. Islamist. Islamism. Jihadist. Its report of 21 September 2026, Mixed Messages, found that NAMP and the force-level Muslim police associations had moved from supporting employees into contested political questions, platformed controversial figures, lobbied to change police language and policy, and been given access to official policing structures across many forces.

The National Police Chiefs' Council answered that staff networks do not determine operational decisions or policy, which rest on law, evidence, risk and harm. NAMP does not command British policing and I am not saying it does. It is officers with a seat at the table asking their own chiefs to remove the only word that lets an officer name the movement without accusing the faith, and the NPCC's answer is about who signs the decision. Nobody asked who signs the decision. The question is who is in the room when the language is chosen, and Policy Exchange has answered it.

The word Islamist is declared hostile, police-affiliated bodies say the word itself produces hatred, and the government adopts a definition of anti-Muslim hostility.

A police force aligns itself with that definition and writes its own instructions on criticism of Islam. A retired officer is convicted for a joke, an activist is stopped at an airport under counter-terror powers and a man who burned a Quran is pursued to the High Court. At every step the state says criticism remains free.

OLDHAM ALREADY SHOWED WHERE THIS ENDS

I have watched this before, from the inside of the town it happened to. Oldham's council, its police and its safeguarding boards decided that naming the men who were raping and trafficking the girls was more dangerous than the men themselves, and they held that line for years.

Baroness Casey's national audit found the same pattern across the country. Questions about the ethnicity of the men were avoided, organisations stayed away from the subject for fear of appearing racist or raising community tensions, the national data was inadequate, and the local data from Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire showed clear overrepresentation of suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage. The Home Office paper that ministers used for years to dismiss all of this did not say what they claimed it said.

Yvette Cooper stood up in the Commons in June 2025 and announced a statutory inquiry with the power to examine offender ethnicity and religion and to ask whether authorities failed because they wanted to protect community cohesion, and more than 800 dropped cases were identified for review. That is the state admitting, in its own words, that its institutions decided a pattern was more dangerous to name than the men inside it.

I have argued for eight years that the men who went to prison were a fraction of the men who raped those girls, that the customers, the men the children were sold to, were never charged, and that the councillors who needed the biraderi's votes protected the men the biraderi protected. I believe they sold the children for votes. Casey does not go that far and I have never needed her to. Her finding is that fear of the words stopped the institutions doing their job, and that is the finding that matters, because the same institutions are being taught to fear a new word.

The councils and police forces that would not say Pakistani are being told not to say Islamist. The people telling them are inside their own buildings, and the people who will pay for it are the same people who paid last time, the ones with no biraderi and no seat at any table.

THE STATE IS NOT NEUTRAL

Set out in one column what the state extended. Refugee status, indefinite leave, citizenship, a secure tenancy in a £1.7 million house, nineteen years before proscription for a group that wanted the caliphate, stakeholder status for a police network, sensitivity about a word. In the other column is what it directed at objection. A police visit, an interview under caution, a criminal charge, a fine, phones seized at an airport under counter-terror powers, a case revived under the Victims' Right to Review, police guidance the Free Speech Union says would have had lawful speech recorded, an acquittal fought to the High Court.

Not every Muslim is protected and not every critic is prosecuted. I am not claiming that. I am saying that across immigration, housing, proscription, policing and prosecution, the state is at its most careful when Islamism is in front of it and at its least careful when the people objecting to Islamism are. This is a choice, made by named people, every time.

HOW TO STOP THIS MADNESS?

1. The Home Secretary must publish what the Home Office checked on Haniyeh's bodyguard at asylum, at settlement and at naturalisation, and must review every grant of status to anyone with a documented Hamas role.
2. The Director of Public Prosecutions must state in public that offending a religion is not an offence he will prosecute, and must concede that Stephen Gray's conviction is unsafe and not oppose his appeal.
3. The chief constables of Cleveland, Kent and the Metropolitan Police must account for who authorised the visit to Gray's door and the two stops on Robinson, and what the second stop found.
4. The National Police Chiefs' Council must end the consultation of staff networks on what an officer may call a threat. The government must withdraw the anti-Muslim hostility definition.

Unfortunately, the poitical opposition is too scared of being considered racist or anti Muslim and will not speak strongly enough on these matters. Which is why, with each small surrender, a far greater defeat of our democracy and way of life takes place.

Andy Burnham held the police and crime commissioner's powers over Greater Manchester for nine years before he walked into Downing Street in August 2026, over the force whose own figures Casey used to prove the overrepresentation and over the town where I watched it happen.

On the morning after the passport story broke he went on the BBC and gave the country his verdict on one British activist, a man accused of slashing a dinghy with a French rescue official aboard, who has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. It was hard to conclude, the Prime Minister said, that the man was anything other than someone who has racist views, and his was the worst kind of hateful behaviour.

Nobody has heard the Prime Minister's verdict on the department that gave a Hamas bodyguard a passport. He must give it, and he must say whether he would rather his police were reading a retired officer's Facebook page or reading the asylum file of the next Haniyeh bodyguard.

The girls in Oldham were left to men the institutions refused to name, and the Jewish families of Berlin and Vienna were the targets of a plot German prosecutors allege, whose accused gun-runner was carrying a passport the Home Office handed out. The ones who got the police at the door were the people who objected.

This is the Britain that Burnham is building.

My name is Raja Miah MBE. For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.

Now the harder fight begins.

Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.

As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability.

Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.

Despite every effort to stop us, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.

At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.

The pressure to protect a serving Prime Minister will be immense. The institutions that failed these girls will have every incentive to avoid putting the country's most powerful politician under oath. Much of the media will once again find reasons to look the other way.

That is why this campaign cannot slow down now.

For too long this has been a one man operation. It needs to become something much bigger. We need the resources to build a genuinely independent investigative organisation with:

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Over the last 3 months we have secured over 1,000 paid supporters towards our target of 2,000. That is an incredible achievement. Every new supporter strengthens this campaign, increases our voice and makes it harder for those in power to ignore the evidence.

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Raja Miah MBE