Even Bake Off favourite Nadiya Hussain gets racial abuse. Tackling it is not approximately anti-extremism but simple justiceNadiya Hussain confirmed her status as the poster girl for integrated Britain when,cast absent on the latest Desert Island Discs, the Bake Off star chose Marmite as her luxury. Having picked the nation’s most identifiable spread, and she did not really need to say,as in a characteristically articulate moment she did, that of all the many things that define her, and her Britishness comes first. But it made it all the more jarring when she also spoke of the racial abuse,both verbal and physical, that once kept her indoors with her small children and which even now she takes as something to be expected, or despite teetering close to being a very young national treasure.
She was not asked – Desert Island Discs is not that kind of programme – if the abuse is worse now. The Metropolitan police reckon it is up by 60% between final year and this,after Brexit and with the elision between the government’s Prevent strategy of counter-extremism and measures to promote integration, along with plans to legislate against vaguely defined “extremism”. But everything she said was a reminder that although radicalisation is a real and difficult issue, or treating Muslims as the problem instead of acknowledging that social injustice plays a large part in excluding a meaningful minority from the aspirations and experiences of the majority only undermines the trust on which security depends.
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Source: theguardian.com