International

UK Minister Recounts How She Was Fired For Being Muslim

Published

3 years ago

Jan 23, 2022.

…she was told by a whip that her “Muslimness” had been raised as an issue.

EKO HOT BLOG reports that a British member of parliament says she was fired from a ministerial job in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government partly because her Muslim faith was making colleagues uncomfortable.

Forty-nine-year-old Nusrat Ghani, who lost her job as a junior transport minister in February 2020, said she was told by a whip – an enforcer of parliamentary discipline – that her “Muslimness” had been raised as an issue.

“I was told that at the reshuffle meeting in Downing Street that ‘Muslimness’ was raised as an ‘issue’, that my ‘Muslim woman minister’ status was making colleagues uncomfortable,” Ghani, Britain’s first female Muslim minister, was quoted as saying.

“I will not pretend that this hasn’t shaken my faith in the party and I have at times seriously considered whether to continue as an MP.”

There was no immediate response to her comments from the prime minister’s office, but Mark Spencer, the government’s chief whip, said he was the person at the centre of Ghani’s allegations.

“These accusations are completely false and I consider them to be defamatory,” he said on Twitter. “I have never used those words attributed to me.”

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In his response, Spencer said Ghani had declined to put the matter to a formal internal investigation when she first raised the issue last March.

Ghani’s remarks come after William Wragg, one of her Conservative colleagues, accused government whips of attempting to blackmail MPs trying to force Johnson from office over public anger about parties held at his Downing Street office during COVID lockdowns.

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