Eight years on from the Trojan horse affair, Birmingham is braced to revisit memories of the difficult period as a new podcast examines the incident for an international audience.
The divisive scandal thrust the city under the national spotlight in 2014 after a fake letter claimed there was a plot to Islamise schools, resulting in a crackdown on a number of teachers. The podcast, created by the New York Times and Serial, will investigate who was behind the Trojan horse letter, and what their motivations were in sparking the national panic.
In late 2013, a photocopy of a letter, which appeared to be correspondence between Muslims plotting to take control of local schools, was sent to Birmingham city council with an anonymous note by someone claiming to have found the document in their boss’s office.
The document was leaked to the press in 2014, and although the letter was quickly debunked as a fake, the accusations took on a life of their own.
Albert Bore, leader of Birmingham city council until 2015, said that at the time of the scandal there had been serious concerns that “there might be an undermining” of Birmingham’s Muslim community “for years to come”.
Bore, who is interviewed in the podcast, said that the council “did not accept” the approach taken by Michael Gove, who was then education secretary.
Bore referred to the appointment of Peter Clarke, the former head of counter-terrorism with the Metropolitan police, who had the task of investigating the scandal, saying: “Two people were appointed to look into Trojan horse, one appointed by the city council and one appointed by Michael Gove. Michael Gove’s person was a former counter-terrorism person. So that underlines where he was coming from.”
The letter resulted in a crackdown, with more than a dozen teachers barred from teaching before most of the bans were overturned.
Bore said the concerns about the scandal’s impact on young people persisted until the story faded away: “Throughout that period, the city council was concerned about the immediate impact upon the Muslim community and particularly young people, and how detrimental it might be to them. Those concerns continued for a few years until the Trojan horse story sunk.”
Similar fears were raised at the time of the scandal, with Labour MP Shabana Mahmood warning in 2014 that children in Birmingham risked having their futures harmed by allegations aimed at their schools.
“There will always be children in Birmingham living with that stigma, day in and day out,” she said at the time.
Samira Shackle, a freelance journalist who investigated the scandal in 2017, said there were potentially two sides to the subject being re-opened. “People who were involved have a sense of being hard done by and wanting the case to be heard,” she said. “On the other hand, I think there is an element of old wounds being opened. Because lots of people in the wider community just kind of want it to go away… the media scrutiny was so intense.
“Regardless of what details come out, a lot of it is still talking about already marginalised areas being spoken about in the framework of extremism and radicalisation, and actually without very much foundation,” Shackle said.
