Tories' favourite think-tank sued by Muslim group
Policy Exchange is a right wing think tank - yes, I know that's an oxymoron - with close ties to David Cameron's Conservative Party. They are about to face legal action for accusing British mosques of distributing extremist literature.
Here is that exchange:Last October the BBC's Newsnight had been due to run an exclusive report on the findings of an article written for Policy Exchange by Denis MacEoin entitled The Hijacking of British Islam. Mr MacEoin argued that extremist literature was widely available in British mosques and shops adjoining them, that much of it was funded by the Saudi Arabian government, and that the Finsbury Park mosque was a major perpetrator of such distribution.
But when Richard Watson, the reporter covering the story, and Peter Barron, then editor of Newsnight, examined the report in detail, they found that five receipts used as incriminating evidence looked fake.
Mr Barron, who did not reject the report's broader conclusions, chose to focus the programme's coverage on doubts about the authenticity of the receipts.
His team claimed to have found "suspicious inconsistencies" among them. These included: forensic evidence suggesting one receipt had been forged while another two that purported to be from different places were written by the same hand; and that there were basic mistakes in the addresses printed on three receipts.
The alleged discoveries, and the editorial decision to focus on them, led to a furious 10-minute exchange between Jeremy Paxman and Dean Godson, research director of Policy Exchange. Mr Godson accused Mr Barron of "disastrous editorial misjudgement" and "appalling stewardship of Newsnight". Mr Barron responded forcefully the following morning on his BBC blog.
Since then, the Al-Manaar Centre has carried out its own investigation, as a result of which it has retained Carter Ruck which is understood to be drawing up a complaint against Policy Exchange.
The director of the Al-Manaar Centre, Abdulkarim Khalil said last night: "This report is still in circulation and has been very widely read. We are determined to clear our name." Nobody from Policy Exchange was available for comment.Godson is well known for favouring the politics of America's neo-conservatives and when he was fired - along with Conrad Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, - from the Daily Telegraph the incoming editor, Martin Newland, described him like this:
"I soon came to recognise we were speaking a language on geopolitical events and even domestic events that was dictated too much from across the Atlantic. It's OK to be pro-Israel, but not to be unbelievably pro-Likud Israel, it's OK to be pro-American but not look as if you're taking instructions from Washington. Dean Godson and Barbara Amiel were key departures."This is the same Policy Exchange "think tank" who recently produced a report (PDF) stating that the Tory Party should abandon efforts to regenerate all of the towns in the north of the country and should instead encourage northerners to move south.
Considering that it was the Tory party of Margaret Thatcher who removed most of the country's manufacturing base from the north during the eighties, which led to incredible hardship in that region during that time, this is simply an astonishing suggestion. First they take your job and now they are literally telling northerners to "get on their bikes".
Cameron, who has been anxiously trying to convince people that the Tories are no longer the "nasty party", has been forced to come out and say that this suggestion is "insane".
And I would have to agree with Cameron. Manchester has been rebuilt in the past twenty years and Liverpool is currently the European City Of Culture, so I don't know what part of the north this report is referring to.
Now, we have no way of knowing whether or not the lawsuit will be successful or not, but, at the moment, it would appear as if Newsnight made the better call here. And, if Policy Exchange researched their work into mosques as shoddily as they appear to have examined cities in the north, this court case doesn't bode well for them.
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