Already reeling from the decision by West Midlands Police to ban supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv from their upcoming game against Aston Villa, anyone troubled by the failure to tackle extremism in Birmingham has new cause for concern.

That’s because a local chapter of Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP) has emerged. The TLP is an Islamist political party in Pakistan that openly calls for the violent destruction of Israel and the murder of those it deems guilty of blasphemy, including members of the minority Ahmadi Muslim sect. The Ahmadi creed emphasises moderation and non-violence, but followers are regarded by both Shia and Sunnis as heretics. Yesterday the TLP was banned by the government in its home country, yet its message is now spreading in the UK.

According to Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of the anti-Muslim hate crime group Tell Mama and a long-time extremism adviser to the last Tory government, the Gaza war has given the TLP new influence in Britain, spread via mosques, hardline imams and social media. Its numerical strength is hard to gauge, but in Birmingham, where most Muslims are of Pakistani heritage, its impact is being felt. “People there look at Pakistani websites, just as Jews take note of what’s being said and done in Israel,” Mughal says. “And the point is that the TLP isn’t merely Islamist. It supports the use of violence.”

Counter-extremism experts have been concerned that the TLP has been trying to build a base in Britain for several years. The evidence for this includes a TLP Twitter account aimed at British Muslims and asking for donations from them which has now been shut down. In March 2024, a report commissioned by the UK government said it was behind what it called “anti-blasphemy extremism” and described its spreading influence as “alarming”.

More recently, there was a TLP protest held outside Birmingham’s Pakistani consulate last Friday, four days after a pro-Palestine TLP rally turned violent in the Pakistani city of Lahore. In the earlier riot, five people were killed, including a police officer.

A video of the Birmingham event posted on YouTube shows speakers engaging in extremist rhetoric and incitement to violence. One described Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as “dogs of hellfire”, stating: “We the British Muslims say the only solution and the only peace for the people of Palestine is a one-state solution.” The goal, he said, must be to turn back the clock to the time before the 1948 Naqba and the creation of the Jewish state. He added that TLP founder Khadim Rizvi had “called everyone to the battlefield” to honour the Prophet Muhammad. All the while, the police were nowhere to be seen.

The TLP’s record suggests that it would be unwise to disregard rhetoric of this kind. It has frequently offered strong support to murderers such as Mumtaz Qadri, who assassinated the Punjab governor Salman Taseer in 2011 because he objected to the pending execution of the Christian woman Asia Bibi for blasphemy.

In 2016, Tanveer Ahmed, a taxi driver from Bradford, murdered the Ahmadi shopkeeper Asad Shah in Glasgow. The judge who sentenced him to life described this as “a barbaric, premeditated and wholly unjustified killing of a much loved man”, perpetrated purely because of his faith. Yet the following year, recordings of messages from Ahmed were smuggled out of HMP Barlinnie and played to thousands of people at TLP rallies in Pakistan, where Rizvi paid Ahmed glowing tributes, saying he had “surprised the whole of Europe”. Most worryingly of all, Ahmed described Rizvi as his ideological “mentor”; when he was sentenced, he shouted an Urdu slogan often chanted at TLP rallies, which translates as “here I am present, O Prophet.”

The TLP believes women should have no role in public life, and the group’s views on other social issues are equally extreme. For example, it has called for harsh penalties for homosexuals and those guilty of other “immoral behaviours”, and the replacement of Pakistan’s civil legal system with one based entirely on Sharia law.

“I’ve been calling for a UK ban on the TLP for many years,” Mughal told me. “Yet it seems the current administration has so far failed to consider the risks. We have to close down their extremism because if we don’t, it will lead to more innocent people being killed on our streets.”

When I asked a West Midlands Police spokeswoman if they had any comment on the protest and the risks it might embody, she said they were unaware of it. So why, given the decision to ban Maccabi football fans, was the TLP allowed to disseminate extremist views? Thus far, there has been no reply.

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David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

DavidRoseUK

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