Trojan Horse Affair Is 'Tip Of The Iceberg' Of School Islamisation

Ministers have failed to get to the bottom of plans by radical Muslims to take over schools, according to the man investigating the scandal. Peter Clarke said the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot to remove moderate teachers in Birmingham was the “tip of the iceberg”, according to the Telegraph.

The former counter terrorism officer claimed Whitehall officials had tried to intimidate him out of accepting the post as head of the investigation. He refused to name the people involved but said this had made him more determined to lead the inquiry.

The Trojan Horse plot was exposed in March this year, just one month later Birmingham City Council admitted it had received hundreds of complaints about radical Muslims taking over schools. Some of these complaints date back 20 years. It appeared to have taken no action on the complaints.

Clarke was asked on BBC West Midlands whether he agreed with the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, that her department had got to the bottom of the problem. He said: “Of course the Government hasn’t got to the bottom of the Trojan Horse affair, nowhere near it.

“You haven’t got to the bottom of it until you’ve proved or disproved whether there is something similar happening elsewhere [outside Birmingham].

“What I put in my report was the tip of the iceberg. There is a huge amount of material which I didn’t put in. I deliberately focused on what appeared to be the epicentre. There were problems elsewhere which I couldn’t evidence sufficiently in the time available.

“You’ve got to look at the roles of Birmingham City Council and the unions and you’ve got to see where else Tahir Alam [the alleged ringleader] had influence.”

Mr Clarke specifically singled out the NASUWT teaching union for criticism. He claimed they had failed to protect their member Balwant Bains, who was forced out as head of Saltley School. Bains has stated that he was asked to resign by the union in exchange for a compromise agreement that gagged him. He accused the union of drafting the agreement itself.

The NASUWT is now threatening to sue Bains unless he retracts his statements about them. Chris Keates the General Secretary of the NASUWT wrote to him saying that unless he withdrew the allegation “you should be left in no doubt that we reserve the right to take appropriate legal action”. Mrs Keates is married to the former Cabinet Member for Education at Birmingham City Council, Les Lawrence. Mr Lawrence is also the former business partner of Tahir Alam.

Mr Clarke said: “I was surprised, to say the least, at Chris Keates’s position. When I spoke to her at some considerable length, she did not choose to disclose her marriage to Les Lawrence to me. Her view was that the whole thing was the fault of government policy.”

He also cited a number of examples of places were there was evidence of plans to Islamise local schools. At Welford School in Handsworth a group of parents held a stormy meeting with their headteacher after he put up a poster against homophobic bullying. Six Police vehicles were sent to calm the situation down.

As previously reported on Breitbart London, the OldKnow Academy saw its headteacher forced out. The school then held a Muslim only taxpayer subsidised trip to Mecca. The headteacher has now returned but the chairman of the governors at OldKnow still denies there was any plot to radicalise the school.

In the Trojan Horse case radical Muslims got themselves appointed to governing bodies of schools. Over time they insisted on an increasingly radical agenda, culminating in Muslim only events and the depiction of white women as “whores”. 

Since the scandal was first revealed there have been numerous other examples of parents who claim their schools have been taken over. The fear is that authorities are unwilling to act because they fear a backlash from Muslim communities, the same reason cited for allowing paedophile gangs to operate in Rochdale for years.