‘I told police that criticising Islam wasn’t illegal. Then they sacked me’
A whistleblower reveals how questioning a focus on Muslim sensitivities led to her being sacked as chairman of a hate-crime panel
"It was in October last year, when two men were killed in a terrorist attack at a synagogue in Manchester, that Elaine (who has asked for her name to be changed) realised the awful truth about West Yorkshire Police. Even after the attempted mass murder of Jews, officers in Bradford prioritised the feelings of Muslims and censored any criticism of Islam.
“I could not believe what I was hearing,” Elaine recalls. “I was taking part in this emergency Teams meeting hosted by West Yorkshire Police that day after the horrific attack on the synagogue. It was chaired by a white female inspector. She was very fair, very strict and didn’t take any nonsense, but she was under constant pressure from the Muslim men in the meeting...
“The whole meeting wasn’t about what it should have been about. [It should have been about], ‘How can we protect the Bradford synagogue and the Jewish population?” Instead, she says, much “[was about], ‘We Muslims need protecting because we are now at risk of anti-Muslim reprisals.’”
“The perpetrator hadn’t been [named] yet,” Elaine adds, but a significant number of those on the call – about 25 people – seemed to think there was a good chance he was Muslim. “Community leaders, people from the council and police... were all insisting we couldn’t possibly know who the killer was or what his motives were. At the same time, [community leaders] were demanding: ‘What are you going to do to protect Muslims? We’re going to be attacked because of this, so the mosques need 24/7 security.’”
Elaine, a whistleblower who has bravely come forward to tell her story to The Telegraph, says there was a “clear contradiction” between Muslim members of the panel claiming “immediate victim status”, as well as their insistence that “we don’t yet know the identity of the attacker”.
As a retired senior academic with a distinguished international record in biosecurity, Elaine was approached in 2022 to serve on West Yorkshire Police’s Bradford Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel, made up of members of the public and local officers. The panel’s purpose was to monitor how the police responded to hate crime reports, but it also covered stop and search, as well as incidents when force was used.
“I think I was invited to join because I had wide experience with intercultural practical matters, and I had lots of committee and policy experience in my professional life”...
Elaine tells me she enjoyed the panel’s unpaid work, which drew on the cultural and diplomatic skills she had developed as a consultant on complex security issues in the Middle East and the higher education sector. Some on the panel could be highly critical of the police, but Elaine was usually supportive, often pointing out what a difficult job officers had to do in one of the UK’s most ethnically diverse areas.
From time to time, however, she did have cause to wonder about the impartiality of the authorities. In the “random” selection of cases that the panel was given to appraise, why did so few feature British-Pakistanis who dominate the inner-city areas of Bradford? If that thought occurred to her, she quickly dismissed it.
In November 2024, Elaine was driving into Shipley when she passed a large electronic sign by the side of the road – the type usually reserved for announcements about speed limits and accidents – flashing the message: “Have you been a victim of Islamophobia?” She emailed a police contact to establish who was behind the sign saying: “I think it’s highly divisive and deprioritises all other sorts of ‘hate crimes.’” She never found out who was responsible.
Another incident would come back to bite her. A man had been charged with a hate crime after he rang a police helpline and ranted to the Muslim operator about the Prophet Mohammed marrying a nine-year-old girl, calling him a “paedophile”. Reviewing the case, Elaine was reminded of the so-called “Quran burner” who had been acquitted of a religiously aggravated public order offence by the High Court following a judicial challenge by the Free Speech Union.
“I thought what the caller had said was deeply unpleasant, and I don’t agree with it, but I didn’t think it was criminal,” Elaine recalls. “In Britain, you are allowed to criticise a religion – it’s free speech, isn’t it?” Elaine feared that the police’s initial response, which presumably was not unique to this man and this police force, was tantamount to Britain having a blasphemy law by the back door.
She arranged to see Chief Superintendent Richard Padwell, the district commander for Bradford, and expressed her concerns during an apparently constructive 90-minute meeting on May 19 last year. Padwell told her that a senior legal panel had agreed with Elaine’s assessment that the comments about the Prophet Mohammed were not a crime, and the man’s charge was downgraded to a non-crime hate incident, with his name being struck from police records.
Padwell said there had been a “very heated” meeting about the case, including Muslim officers. Elaine learnt that Muslims in that meeting had been very angry about the outcome, but had been persuaded to change their minds. Elaine wasn’t convinced the Muslim officers had changed their minds – still, she felt the matter was amicably resolved, and at least justice had been done. What she couldn’t possibly know was that the meeting would soon be produced as evidence to support allegations that she had displayed inappropriate, racist behaviour – and used to terrorise her.
For three years, Elaine served dutifully on the Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel, eventually becoming chairman. Despite winning a vote to lead the panel, there was a clear reluctance to tell her so and to depose the incumbent (a Muslim man). It was only after repeated nagging over several months that Elaine’s appointment was finally confirmed in December 2024. “It’s my understanding that, when I was chair, Bradford was the only police scrutiny panel in West Yorkshire not to be chaired by a Muslim man,” she says.
It was in her capacity as panel chairman that Elaine was invited to that emergency meeting after the deadly attack at the synagogue. “I was totally gobsmacked by what I heard,” she says. The woman police inspector who was chairing said: “Our activities are intelligence-led. There is no intelligence of any danger to any mosques.” She repeated that fact several times. “But the men kept on about how worried they were, [saying]: ‘Our women are too afraid to go out, and we need police protection and CCTV.’”
Although there was a promise of police presence “for a while” at the Bradford synagogue, in more than an hour’s discussion, the terrorist atrocity in Manchester was barely mentioned, Elaine says. She reckons the meeting was about half Muslim and half non-Muslim, but “even the non-Muslim people, especially those from the council, were taking the Muslim line”.
She was appalled by the “accepted perspective” of the meeting. “They were totally flipping the argument from ‘Jews are at risk’ to ‘Muslim safety must be our focus’. It was shocking,” Elaine recalls. Another meeting attendee insists the focus was on safeguarding Jews, but Elaine says the only voices offering another point of view were the female police officer and a Jewish community representative. “He was very sad, and he spoke eloquently about his fears and the impact on his family,” she adds.
Bradford’s synagogue was founded in 1873 by German Jews who moved to the city for the wool trade. The Jewish man told the meeting that his great-grandfather had been the first rabbi there, but, sadly, the Jewish community was now tiny and felt increasingly unsafe. With the rise in anti-Semitism, Jews might have to leave Bradford altogether.
The next day, the Teams meeting reconvened, but the white female police inspector had been replaced by a Muslim male inspector. (No explanation was offered for the change at the time.) He began by saying that “all places of worship in Bradford” would now be monitored, Elaine says. By then, they knew the identity of the Manchester terrorist, Jihad Al-Shamie, a Muslim of Syrian descent. Surely, the job of the Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel should be to discuss ways to address the problem of extremism within parts of the Muslim community?
Elaine was astonished when it became clear that, despite everything that had been said the previous day, additional security measures would now be put in place for mosques. “So, 24 hours ago, there was no intelligence of any threats to any mosques, and suddenly, we’ve got a 180-degree turn. I’m sure that lobbying had gone on,” she says.
As the meeting went on in the same surreal, evasive vein, Elaine finally decided to say something. “Of course, I was intimidated. I knew that I was sticking my head over the top, but I had such a sense of injustice about the victims and the rest of the Jewish community that I knew I had to speak out. To have stayed silent in order to keep in line with a false narrative about the synagogue attack putting Muslims at risk would have been unconscionable.”
She deliberately chose her words with care, telling the meeting that the people there represented all communities in Bradford. She said they had to address “the elephant in the room. We know who the attacker is and what community he comes from. We’ve got to be able to address this openly, and if we can’t do it here, there’s no hope.”
The chairman of the committee immediately jumped in and started talking loudly over Elaine. She refused to back down, saying: “Chairman, you said that all places of worship in Bradford will be kept an eye on. Does that include churches?” The chairman floundered and waffled “word salad”, eventually saying there was no intelligence of any threat to churches. “OK, that’s fine. It’s just mosques. Thank you,” Elaine recalls herself saying. It rankled that the panel had initially refused to acknowledge that they were talking about securing mosques, not, as the chairman claimed, all places of worship.
Another meeting had been planned for the following Monday, but Elaine didn’t get the usual notification ahead of time. She soon found out why – she had been sacked. An unpleasant letter from Padwell said complaints had been raised by six separate individuals (community members and police officers) who had been on the Teams meeting. He inaccurately quoted Elaine’s comments – “We all know which community is behind the attack” (she doesn’t recall using these words), “There is a need to address the elephant in the room”, and “Just say you won’t be paying attention to the churches” (Elaine says she never used these words, simply posing the question about churches) – which were deemed to be “divisive and inflammatory”.
Elaine’s observations, said Padwell, were based on “stereotypical assumptions, pointing blame at a community as a whole”. (“That’s a lie,” says Elaine.) Padwell then supported his decision to remove her from the panel by citing the meeting that he and Elaine had in May 2025 (“A background of previous concerns”), managing to make it sound like it had been some kind of disciplinary hearing (“Regarding your comments… which was one of the reasons leading me to speak to you”). As he knew full well, it was Elaine who had sought the meeting to express her anxiety that a back-door blasphemy law was being used to convict people who had merely been offensive, not criminal. (The lawyers had agreed with her and clearly found nothing racist or hateful in her remarks.)
For the record, Chief Superintendent Richard Padwell is Jewish. Shame on him.
“I was frightened,” Elaine says. “And I don’t frighten easily. I have worked nationally and internationally at a very high level, including lots of work at the UN in Geneva and Washington DC on biosecurity. All my teaching has been about how scientists can protect their work from terrorists and their own governments.
“I’ve been contracted by the Ministry of Defence and the US State Department for multiple pieces of research. I’ve travelled for this all over the world. I even taught biosecurity to Iraqi weapons scientists in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussain for the US state department, for goodness sake! I managed to get the Biological Weapons Convention to change their regular annual agenda to include biosecurity as a standard agenda item. I have worked regularly with Muslim men in many countries and been treated with nothing but courtesy and huge respect.”
Elaine points out that she has taught in the Middle East and former Soviet states. “I’m used to dealing with difficult matters in sensitive situations. Yet, here in Bradford, the most basic, anodyne comments and questions are shut down and accused of hate crime. Supported by the police! What on earth? It is really shocking to realise that our taxpayer-funded police service is, in effect, in the hands of Muslim activists. I am not saying they are all extremists, of course not. But it is totally unacceptable to see the police behaving like this.”
It is utterly outrageous actually. It makes me think of something a senior source at Essex Police said to me: “What you have to bear in mind is what the police fear most is the Muslims kicking off.”
I am not surprised that Elaine was frightened. In his letter, Padwell conceded that her offence (ahem) “is not being recorded as a hate crime”. It might be a tad awkward for the deposed chairman of the Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel to be charged with that one, eh, Richard? What came next, though, is truly chilling. After saying that he would “not be sharing the circumstances of your departure with other community members on the scrutiny panel”, Padwell added: “Nor will I be providing your personal details to those community members who have concerns about comments you made on Oct 2.”
“It sounded like a threat,” Elaine says, and I see this confident, chatty woman across the table suddenly blench at the memory. “Why would he mention sharing my details unless people had asked for them? Who wants them and why? It’s really horrible. It does knock you off balance. It does. Because you know you’re a decent, law-abiding person and suddenly you’re being treated as if you’re the opposite.”
Elaine sent an exceedingly polite reply to Padwell. “I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing how much he’d upset me.” But she immediately contacted the Free Speech Union, who flew into action, lodging a subject access request for Elaine with West Yorkshire Police. They uncovered a number of troubling remarks from “deeply offended” Muslim officers.
“I have serious concerns regarding the comments made and endorsed by [Elaine], specifically those directed at Prophet Mohammed and Muslims. These remarks are troubling given they appear to be largely promoted by Right-wing groups,” complained one. “[Elaine] seems to think the Prophet married a nine-year-old, and it’s ok to call him a paedophile,” said another. A third simply called her “infuriating” for articulating opinions with which the vast majority of Britons would agree. Members of West Yorkshire Police also took issue with “derogatory opinions of the Islamic faith that the [chairman] held, and stated they were influenced by far-Right rhetoric that was particularly upsetting to those of the Islamic faith”.
The qualifications of all of Elaine’s police critics combined would not add up to one tenth of her degrees and scientific doctorates, yet they felt confident dissing this immensely knowledgeable and humane Yorkshirewoman as a “Tommy Robinson” tribute act. One of the complaints about her comments in the meeting, which came from a West Yorkshire Police email address, said: “I don’t know the lady in question... some of the wording used on the meeting today, I noted in my daybook, ‘There is one community that this is coming from’, ‘Just say it how it is, we are not stupid’. It appeared she was insinuating that the hate towards the Jewish community was from the Muslim community only, and Muslims (two billion or so worldwide) themselves.”
A second complaint from a police email address said: “A lady... made some absurd comments which I believe to be outright hate and racism. [She] mentioned that we need to address the ‘elephant’ in the room, which was referring to the Muslim community. [She] mentioned that we should say things as they are, as we all know which community is responsible for the attacks in Manchester, again referring to the Muslim community.”
Another complaint, also made by someone using a West Yorkshire Police email address, said: “[She] made a number of comments that I found deeply troubling... I found her remarks highly inappropriate and concerning.” A fourth email from within West Yorkshire Police, marked “importance: high”, said: “This is the second occasion on which concerns have been raised regarding her behaviour.”
Three out of a total of six complaints were made by West Yorkshire Police staff within the space of two-and-a-quarter hours on Oct 3, the day of the meeting and the day after the attack on the synagogue.
West Yorkshire Police insist “legal advice supported our view that... the attendee’s comments did not demonstrate impartiality and had breached both the Terms of Reference and Code of Conduct. As such, she was removed from the role.”
You know, there are times when you bury your head in your hands and wonder, “What kind of country are we living in?” This is one of those times. As Lord Young of Acton, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, says: “You couldn’t ask for a clearer example of two-tier policing. West Yorkshire Police seems more concerned with protecting the feelings of Muslim community leaders than protecting Jews from terrorist attacks. It’s little wonder public confidence in the police is declining.”
Lord Young is right to place Elaine’s case in a much wider context. Historically, West Yorkshire Police has faced multiple accusations of appeasing Muslims at the expense of the wider community. Like turning a blind eye to rape gangs to avoid provoking “community tensions”, aka upsetting Muslims. (Bradford has, quite remarkably, largely escaped scrutiny for industrial-scale depravity by Pakistani-origin men, and may yet turn out to be the worst of all.)
Meanwhile, West Midlands Police recently disgraced themselves by using falsehoods about Maccabi Tel Aviv football club to ban them from a match in Birmingham which would – oh, yes – provoke “community tensions”. The Islamists in the local community got what they wanted and the Jews stayed away. In London, the Metropolitan Police have allowed the pro-Palestine marchers to get away with murderous chants and now, too late, denounce the attacks their tolerance encouraged.
In Bradford, a senior officer in the very police force that was denounced for not protecting a Batley Grammar School teacher from Islamist intimidation and threats, has punished Elaine for drawing “inappropriate” attention to “the elephant in the room”, even as it becomes a herd of raging pachyderms. Among members of the public, there are growing anxieties about sectarianism influencing public life, not least in areas like Bradford, where segregation is rife and there have been heated rows between councillors over the war in Gaza.
In her highly critical 2024 report into West Yorkshire Police’s handling of the Batley Grammar affair, Dame Sara Khan stated that the teacher was “not treated as a genuine victim, despite facing serious intimidation and threats”. (Shamefully, the poor man is still in hiding with his family.) She said police were focused on managing community tensions rather than firmly defending lawful expression and the safety of staff. The police response “showed a failure to understand the seriousness of freedom-restricting harassment”. This is Dame Sara’s term for intimidation that pressures people into silence or self-censorship.
Isn’t that exactly what Elaine experienced in the aftermath of the Manchester synagogue attack? She was not supposed to discuss the one thing that mattered.
West Yorkshire is, notably, the force whose Chief Constable John Robins said last year that he wants discrimination against white British job candidates to be legal in order to boost the number of ethnic minorities among his officers and across the country. Elaine’s insight shows how much sensitivities towards ethnic minorities are affecting the force and its decision-making. Meanwhile, religious language has become commonplace in meetings and around the force’s headquarters, to her bafflement.
“I mean, can you imagine if a load of Christian fundamentalists were walking round police HQ saying: ‘Hello, brother. Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let’s read the Bible every two minutes.’ There’d soon be something said about it, but the police are too scared of seeming racist to object.”
One grain of hope, perhaps, lies in the fact that Reform UK and the Conservatives – both of which have been challenging the state’s capitulation to Islamism – stormed to first and second place in the Bradford local elections on May 7. Those who hate the separatism in places like Bradford, and the refusal of public institutions to tackle it, are not going gentle into that good night.
Sadly, Elaine is far from alone. “We’re seeing huge numbers of people being punished for criticising Islam or Muslim cultural practice,” says Benjamin Jones of the Free Speech Union. “Since Keir Starmer came to power, it has increased times four. And that’s before the new anti-Muslim hostility definition.”
“It beggars belief that we have come to this through the craven tolerance of successive governments,” says Elaine. She says she knows that she will probably be recognised from this article and that may put her in danger. But, in Yorkshire, they make their women strong like their tea, thank goodness.
As we get up to leave, I give her a hug and I feel so damn sorry. Sorry she lost the role you she was doing so well. Sorry that the state doesn’t share the view that Jews should be the ones protected after an attack on a synagogue. Sorry that defending the right of someone to make comments critical of Islam (or any other religion) is called hate. Sorry that she coped splendidly with Saddam’s weapons scientists, but was brought down by a toxic and cowardly Chief Superintendent."
