MUSLIM COUNCIL OF BRITAIN 🙄😔🙄

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The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) will no longer be allowed to identify and endorse military chaplains after it emerged that it had a formal arrangement with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to do so despite a government-wide ban on engaging with the group. ''

The Telegraph understands that ministers ordered the MoD to cut ties with the body after this newspaper revealed last week that the MCB was endorsing imams to become chaplains in the armed forces. The department is now investigating how the arrangement came about.

Senior Tories described the arrangement as "shocking", given the ban on Whitehall engagement, which was reinforced in a letter to all departments in 2020, by Robert Jenrick, the then communities secretary.

The ban was initially brought in under Gordon Brown when he was prime minister in 2009. Speaking in a House of Lords debate on Israel and Gaza last month, Lord Godson, the Conservative peer, said: "The previous Labour government under Gordon Brown rightly cut contact with the Muslim Council of Britain in 2009, after its then deputy secretary-general signed the Istanbul declaration, calling for attacks on Royal Navy vessels enforcing a UN weapons blockade on Hamas-run Gaza." Lord Godson urged Lord Ahmad, a Foreign Office minister, to "reaffirm" the Government's "non-engagement policy".