In a week when BBC bosses unveiled yet another round of swingeing cuts – this time of around 550 jobs in news, nations and TV and radio – you might be forgiven for assuming the Corporation would have more pressing issues on the mind than tackling Islamophobia.
Perhaps naively, I still believe that Britain should be a free country where people are entitled to dislike all and any religion if they so choose
But last Monday, the new Deputy Director-General, Rhodri Talfan Davies, informed staff, via the BBC internal website, that as part of the Corporation’s anti-discrimination training, they will have to do a compulsory ‘Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hostility’ online module.
Davies gave a generous six-month timeframe for this task to be completed – a period that many of my colleagues will be spending fretting about their futures, with further job losses coming down the pike as part of a savings plan designed to save £500 million.
One might consider such training to be advisable were the BBC blighted by anti-Muslim sentiment. Yet in more than two decades at the corporation, I can’t recall witnessing or hearing of a single instance of so-called Islamophobia, not once. I have, however, seen a Muslim colleague reading texts from the Quran at work. No one batted an eyelid.
