MEND Welsh Parliament Elections Policy Pledges

Racial and Religious Equality

• Commit to adopting the definition of Islamophobia produced by the APPG for British Muslims: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”, and apply this definition in conjunction with the guidelines that MEND has produced.
• Commit to supporting working with Muslim grassroots organisations to produce a robust strategy for targeting social media offences and hate speech online.
• Commit to developing and implementing comprehensive training programs for communities and public bodies to recognise and report instances of hate speech online.
• Commit to financing mosque security and allocating security funding in a manner that is proportional to risk, in line with what is already correctly provided to Jewish religious institutions.
• Commit to supporting mosques, faith institutions, and minority community groups in accessing their entitlements under Covid-19 voluntary and third sector resilience funding, particularly with regards to ensuring that such organisations are aware of the funding available to them and the mechanisms through which to apply.
• Commit to supporting the Race Alliance Wales’ recommendations to improve the gathering, monitoring, disaggregation, and use of ethnic data in policy and practice, including in policy areas such as policing, education, healthcare, housing, and the labour market.

Youth and Education

• Commit to prioritising Health and Wellbeing within education and enlisting grassroots Muslim organisations to assist in developing teaching materials to educate young people on the dangers of Islamophobia.
• Commit to supporting academic freedoms and initiatives to decolonise education, whilst including an emphasis on colonialism, shared histories, and the contributions of minority communities in building our society as a compulsory component within the new Welsh curriculum.
• Commit to tackling the production and reinforcement of unconscious bias through educational syllabi by investigating the presentation of minority groups in teaching materials across all subjects.
• Commit to facilitating greater cultural and religious literacy in schools by implementing awareness and anti-racism training for all staff in conjunction with representative grassroots organisations.
• Commit to developing robust strategies for prioritising transformative approaches to addressing Islamophobia and racism through restorative justice processes within the education sector. This must be accompanied by training programmes for teachers focussed on proactively tackling bullying based on race, religion, disability, or sexuality. Such training must include increasing the confidence and willingness of teachers to enforce policies and procedures and to report incidences to the appropriate authorities where appropriate.
• Commit to supporting faith school provisions in the state sector for Muslims and other faith communities.
• Commit to increasing the diversity within teaching, particularly at senior leadership levels, including through mentorship programs for junior BAME staff.

Labour Market

• Commit to supporting underrepresented groups and tackling religious, racial, and gendered discrimination in the workplace through targeted interventions at all stages of recruitment, retention and promotion, including through the use of name-blind applications and targeted interventions aimed at tackling the triple penalty faced by Muslim women specifically.
• To prioritise and extend the principles of sustainable development contained within the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 to the private sector in order to achieve a “more equal Wales”. This should include strategies to support employers in diversity and inclusion (such as recognising and accommodating religious festivals and observance within the workplace, including the provision of halal meat, prayer rooms, and flexible work hours during Ramadan), as well as strategies to promote the regular reporting, monitoring, reviewing, and publishing of pay gap data across the public sector in order to tackle racial, religious, and gender pay gaps in Wales.

Crime and Policing

• Commit to increasing diversity at all levels of seniority within the police and at all levels of the criminal justice system, including through positive intervention and mentorship programs for BAME members.

Political Engagement

• Commit to proactively engaging and consulting with credible organisations within Welsh Muslim communities to facilitate civil and political participation for under-represented groups.
• Commit to ensuring that all political parties outline their strategies to improve diversity within candidate selection ahead of all Welsh Parliament (Senedd Cymru) elections.

Minority Rights and Integration

• Commit to ensuring that public body workers are trained in the needs and challenges facing families with refugee or asylum seeker status and equip them to assist both families and local communities to integrate them and reduce the risks of exclusion.

COVID-19

• Commit to an independent root and branch investigation into the socio-economic impact of COVID on minority communities, including examining areas such as education, economic impacts, the deployment of police powers, and increased health risks.