Baroness Warsi calls for 'Trojan Horse' probe
Sayeeda Warsi, a former Conservative Party co-chair and the first Muslim woman to hold a British cabinet post, called on Friday for an independent investigation into the 2014 'Trojan Horse' fiasco.
Reputations ruined, careers destroyed, a community maligned & children stigmatised. An ind enquiry into the #TrojanHorse saga is now a must. https://t.co/Jay9SWbBHl
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"A mountain of evidence now suggests that this alleged Islamist plot may have been little more than a lurid figment of the neo-Conservative imagination," wrote Oborne.
A government investigation, launched after an anonymous letter reported a campaign dubbed "Operation Trojan Horse", found evidence of a drive to impose Muslim cultural norms in some schools in the central city of Birmingham, said Michael Wilshaw, head of the Ofsted schools inspectorate.
The scandal rocked Britain. A report into the matter found no evidence of extremism but said that there were “a number of people in a position of influence who either espouse, or sympathise with or fail to challenge extremist views".
Oborne’s column pointed to the dropped case against five schoolteachers who had lost their jobs. Government lawyers had put themselves in an "abuse of justice" and the proceedings were dropped.
Critics of the scandal have previously called the investigation a witch-hunt and said that the anonymous letter that triggered the probe into the matter was a hoax, although Birmingham's education commissioner Sir Mike Tomlinson last year stressed he felt the letter was genuine.
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