By Chaminda Jayanetti

They call it the art of the possible. In any given scenario, a government cannot just wish away imperfections and invent a perfect world. Its first job is to deal with what’s in front of it. Working with British Muslim community groups is no different in that respect. It’s just taken the British government a long time to work it out.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) does not represent the British Muslim community. No-one does, because no-one can – no single, homogenous British Muslim community actually exists. The hopes, fears, wants and needs of a recently arrived Somali refugee in Liverpool may bear no resemblance whatsoever to those of a white, middle-class convert working in a London law firm, never mind a joint rolling, beer drinking British-Pakistani university student who doesn’t touch bacon. No amount of clerical rhetoric about Islamic unity can alter that fact.

What the MCB does represent is mosques. It is the accepted voice up to 500 mosques in Britain. The list of affiliates encompasses Muslim faith schools, university Islamic societies, and a laundry list of local mosques, Islamic institutions and Muslim community groups dotted around all corners of the country. Barelwi mosques have the British Muslim Forum, and of course many mosques are not members of any umbrella group, but if you want to talk to the British Muslim Establishment – the elders, the imams, the great and the good – you talk to the MCB.

Or not. Last March, in the wake of the conflict in Gaza, Dr Daud Abdullah, the deputy secretary general of the MCB, signed the now infamous Istanbul Declaration – a militantly worded pro-Hamas statement calling on all Muslims to defend Gaza. According to a much-publicised translation of the statement, defending Gaza included:

7. The obligation of the Islamic Nation to regard everyone standing with the Zionist entity, whether countries, institutions or individuals, as providing a substantial contribution to the crimes and brutality of this entity; the position towards him is the same as towards this usurping entity.

8. The obligation of the Islamic Nation to regard the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression, and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the Nation. This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.

The latter point was seen as particularly inflammatory, as Britain had indicated a willingness to send warships to the region to prevent arms smuggling to Hamas. But all in all, the signing of the statement by one senior figure in the MCB, in his own capacity, and to the private dismay of many of his more restrained colleagues, ought to have been a storm in a teacup.

So it would take a minister of monumental buffoonery to allow this storm to smash all the china in the kitchen. Step forward communities secretary Hazel Blears. She demanded the MCB sack Dr Abdullah. The MCB refused. The government instituted a complete boycott on contact with the MCB. It lasted until yesterday.

Blears’ successor as communities secretary, John Denham, possesses infinitely more commonsense than his comic book Blairite predecessor. It’s doubtful he was any happier about the Istanbul Declaration than Blears – but he knew that away from the macho posturing over Gaza, there was important business to conduct, particularly around violent extremism, which could be more effectively conducted with the MCB’s input – the mosque leaders’ input – than without.

In ten months the government’s boycott of the MCB achieved precious little. Dr Abdullah is still in his job. Attempts to jump into bed with ‘preferred’ Muslim groups such as the Quilliam Foundation blew up in the government’s face when it realised these organisations have little standing among British Muslims – not helped by Quilliam saying the government was right to spy on Muslims’ political and religious views. So now the MCB has restated its opposition to anti-Semitism and attacks on British troops, and has agreed to review its internal policies to keep the likes of Dr Abdullah on-message. In return, the government has welcomed them back into the fold. It’s a fudge to enable all parties to walk away sans embarrassment.

What makes this all so absurd is that we’ve been here before, with exactly the same result. In 2006 the then-communities secretary Ruth Kelly attempted to pull the plug on the MCB for not doing enough to tackle extremism. The government instead turned its attention – and its money – to the Sufi Muslim Council (SMC), a laughable black hole of government funding with zero membership or standing among British Muslims, run by government stooges such as Haras Rafiq who wanted Muslims to either keep their faith out of politics, or keep out of politics altogether.

The SMC’s website doesn’t seem to be working. Back when it did, it had no contact phone number (except for press enquiries, of course), no postal address, no email address - how could this possibly be a representative organisation if those it represented couldn’t readily contact it? The answer was simple. It wasn’t. Its irrelevance soon became apparent, and the MCB was allowed back in with the government left with its tail between its legs. A bit like now, really.

Let’s not cheerlead for the MCB though. It may be big, but it’s not beautiful. Some of its affiliates have links to deeply unsavoury groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. It jumps up and down about Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, but when there is no Western bogeyman to rail against, it is virtually silent – on Kashmir, on the barbarity wrought by the Taliban, on Darfur (with the exception in the latter case of Ibrahim Mogra and, ironically, Dr Abdullah). Rather than engage seriously with problems such as segregation in northern English cities or poverty and unemployment among young Muslims, the MCB has in the past been too willing to squabble over such no-brainers as whether to attend Holocaust Memorial Day.

Theologically, it has a definite conservative stance. With the recent exception of Inayat Bunglawala, few have spoken up for the rights of gay Muslims in this country not to be ostracised from their religion. Pro-caliphate preachers would find a happier home in the MCB than would, say, British Muslims for Secular Democracy. The number of Muslim women involved in running the MCB is minimal, even if it does count various Muslim women’s groups among its affiliates.

But these flaws – for they are flaws in the eye of any progressive or socialist, be they Muslim or otherwise – simply reflect those of the British Muslim Establishment that the MCB represents. Ignoring the MCB won’t persuade Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari to strut his stuff to Frankie Goes to Hollywood in the name of gay rights until he’s allowed into No 10. Or at least it didn’t last time.

Ultimately it’s for those in the Muslim community to force change from within – not for the government to impose it from above. This is happening, but slowly – British Muslims for Secular Democracy does good work, but was set up at least five years too late. Perhaps the task of forcing change on a national level has been too daunting – and too expensive – for people to take on. The local level is a better place to start.

There are wider points here. First is the question of identity politics. As John Denham recently discovered, deprivation, inequality and disenfranchisement are based on class before anything else, including race and religion. That it’s taken a Labour government 13 years to work out that class matters simply shows how far that party has strayed from its reason to exist.

But there will always be matters that have a religious community tinge to them, be they purely religious affairs like capacity building in mosques, problems related to a combination of religion and culture – female genital mutilation, honour killings – or of course extremism and terrorism.

Often when dealing with these matters, the government knows who to turn to at national level, but has to then hope that the national body is actually reflective of those it claims to represent. Does the MCB reflect the entirety of British Muslim life? Does the British Muslim Forum? How about both put together?

It goes further. Does the Church of England, when dabbling in politics, really reflect the views of all those who claim it as their faith? Does the National Union of Students have a clue what Britain’s students think? Are the Automobile Association’s press releases formulated after consultation with drivers? And on and on. And that’s before we even get to all those people who don’t fit into any neat category at all.

A succession of acronym-laden organisations troop in and out of government departments to tell ministers what their members want. If they know what their members want, that’s great. If they don’t, the government’s buggered – and so are the members. National organisations talk to national government, but does it have any impact on the ground? Did the conversations that inevitably took place between the government and the MCB to pave the way for yesterday’s truce have any real relevance in the Muslim estates of northern English mill towns? Of course not.

What we have is a two-way breakdown of communication between politicians and public. Beyond Downing Street website petitions, there’s no clear route for local opinion to filter up to national government. If the system worked, local councillors would feed local people’s views to council leaders, who would feed them up to regional and national level. Local MPs would tell Westminster frontbenchers what their constituents were telling them. This happens to an extent with local ‘hot potato’ issues – airport expansion, for example. But otherwise, the system fails. Don’t believe me? Name your local councillor – go on, any of the three. You might be able to name your local MP, but when did s/he last seek your views on a national issue, either directly or through local party members?

The government can fret over whether to talk to the MCB, the BMF, the SMC. It can talk to QWERTY if it likes, for all the difference it will make if it doesn’t have a line of communication to find out what is going on at local level, in all communities and none, around the country. Extremists like the British National Party are far more adept at jumping on local concerns than the national government is – the government is left panicking, reacting, cooking up hurried speeches about ‘white working class’ fears over jobs and immigration. The radicals recruiting outside the local mosque can exploit young Muslims’ anger over British foreign policy while the Sufi Muslim Council tells the national government that British foreign policy has nothing to do with it.

The government will rightly talk to the MCB, the Board of Deputies, the Hindu Council UK, thinking that by doing so, it’s pulling the biggest levers in Britain’s communities. But until politicians sort out political representation and communication from local to national level, the government – Tory, Labour, whoever - will soon find those levers are not connected to anything much at all.