Two worshippers were stabbed after leaving prayers in Edinburgh. Andrew Gilligan told Spectator readers no mosque was targeted.

What Andrew Gilligan wrote

The British Muslim Trust is the body the government appointed in July 2025 to monitor anti-Muslim hatred. On Tuesday 6 October The Spectator ran an article by Andrew Gilligan, a former Downing Street adviser, attacking its count of attacks on mosques. On Thursday 8 October the Trust published its report. The next morning The Spectator ran Gilligan again, under the headline The British Muslim Trust’s mosque attack claims don’t add up.

He wrote that the report lists only about 40 of its 78 incidents, and that about a third of those are false (paragraph 3). He called the Trust shoddy and dishonest (paragraph 2). He accused it of massaging its figures to frighten Muslims, and put it in the same bracket as Mend, which he called a delinquent organisation (paragraph 9). He gave no evidence for either charge.

Then he went through a list of attacks on Muslims and argued with the victims.

What the Trust counted

The Trust counted 78 attacks and incidents against 64 mosques between 21 July 2025 and 30 July 2026. That is one every five days. The cover of the report says attacks and incidents. Page 7 says a target includes the mosque’s building, its grounds and the people connected to it. Page 9 says the Trust counted only what it could verify through its helpline, through third parties and in public reporting, so the real number is higher.

Gilligan wrote that on this definition any attack on any Muslim could be counted as an attack on a mosque (paragraph 8). Police in England and Wales recorded 5,132 religious hate crimes against Muslims in the year to March 2026. The Trust counted 78.

He also mocked the Trust for counting incidents the victims saw as hate. That is the test the police and the Crown Prosecution Service use. Their shared definition counts any crime that the victim, or anyone else, sees as driven by hostility to the victim’s religion.

What he did to the victims in Edinburgh

On Friday 19 June two men aged 22 left afternoon prayers at the mosque in Broomhouse, in west Edinburgh. In Sighthill Park they were stabbed several times. Three more men were attacked across the city that evening. A man has been charged with five counts of attempted murder aggravated by a terrorist connection, and the case is before the courts.

Gilligan called it the most serious anti-Muslim attack of the period the Trust covered. In the same sentence he told readers that no mosque was targeted, because the attack started in a park about a quarter of a mile from the nearest mosque (paragraph 6). He did not say that the first two victims had just walked out of that mosque.

The Trust’s report says two worshippers were attacked in a park after leaving a mosque (page 21). That is what happened. Gilligan measured the walk from the mosque to the park. He left out who was walking it.

What he did to the worshippers in Glasgow

From late February, through Ramadan, protesters gathered outside the Al-Mahdi Islamic Centre in Govanhill as families arrived to break their fast. A joint letter to Police Scotland, backed by photographs, said protesters waved rats hanged from gallows at Muslim families going in (page 16). SNACK magazine reported Israeli flags and an effigy of a Muslim tied to a noose. “Some of them were spitting on us,” a woman from the centre told it.

Gilligan wrote that many of the protesters were Muslim Iranians opposed to the government in Tehran, and that the centre’s imam had been filmed weeping at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral (paragraph 4). He did not mention the gallows, the noose or the spitting.

Who the protesters were does not change what the families walking in to break their fast went through. Gilligan wrote about the imam’s politics instead.

What he said the report says

Dalton-in-Furness

Gilligan wrote that the Trust counted a mostly peaceful protest against a new mosque in Dalton-in-Furness, and asked whether the Trust thinks nobody is allowed to object to a mosque (paragraph 5). Page 17 of the report answers him. The Trust says it does not count a protest against a mosque as hate in itself. It counts what was shouted at worshippers and what happened inside the protest.

UKIP’s leader, Nick Tenconi, led the protest, timed for Eid. In a post the report reproduces, he wrote that Dalton’s Christian people were being betrayed by an establishment that panders to what he called Islamist colonisation.

Gilligan also wrote that the Dalton site was not yet working as a mosque. It held its first Friday prayers in February, a month before UKIP turned up outside it.

The 38 he says are missing

Gilligan told readers the report lists only about 40 of its 78 incidents (paragraph 3). Pages 12 and 13 say 27 of the 78 come from the Trust’s first report, A Summer of Division, published in November 2025. That report names all 27, with the mosque, the town and the date (pages 10 to 14). Gilligan cited it himself in his Tuesday article. The new report names 36 more by place. Between them, the two reports name 63 of the 78.

What he did with the fires

Nelson Street

On 9 October Gilligan repeated his Tuesday point that one of the Trust’s mosque attacks was on a building labelled as a synagogue (paragraph 7). The report, published the day before, says so itself on page 19. It calls the fire an antisemitic arson attack on the former East London Central Synagogue, closed since 2020, which a local Somali Muslim group was buying to use as a mosque. The group had paid a deposit, and the report says it was hit with a large volume of online hate after announcing the purchase.

The Trust told its readers exactly what the building was. Gilligan wrote it up as if the Trust had hidden it.

Blackburn and Batley

At about 11.30pm on Saturday 13 June a fire was set at the rear of Masjid-e-Quwwatul Islam on Stansfeld Street, Blackburn. The mosque says part of its building was damaged, and police treated the fire as suspicious. Gilligan wrote that the fire was at a derelict building next door (paragraph 7). He gave no source.

About three and a half hours later, in Batley, witnesses reported an arson attack on Al Hashim Academy, a mosque and school on Cambridge Street. Police say someone set fire to rubbish outside a building under construction nearby. Gilligan called it rubbish near a building site.

Two mosques had fires set at or near them in one night. Gilligan’s test is whether the flames reached the prayer hall.

The plots, and the people

Gilligan wrote that a plot is not an attack: it is an attack that was foiled (paragraph 7). Take him at his word. Counter-terrorism police disrupted two alleged plots against mosques, which on his own definition are two attacks that were foiled. Teenagers in Cardiff face criminal proceedings over an alleged plot against a mosque and Muslims celebrating Eid (page 14). A 14-year-old has been charged over an alleged plan to target two mosques in Sutton (page 22).

He wrote that three more were not attacks on a mosque at all (paragraph 6): an abusive letter to an imam in High Wycombe, a campaign of online abuse against a Brighton mosque scholar, and a Facebook post falsely tying a Belfast imam to ISIS. The Belfast post went up on 10 June, during the race riots in which, the Trust says, a Belfast mosque faced a serious threat (page 26). Page 7 says a mosque includes its people. An imam is the mosque.

What his own case comes to

Gilligan disputes 13 of the Trust’s incidents. Strike out every one of them and 65 remain. That is a mosque, or the people in it, targeted every six days instead of every five.

That one day is the gap Gilligan wrote two articles about.

Who is answerable

The Spectator published both articles. We have set out Gilligan’s record before.

Calling the Trust dishonest and lumping it in with Mend is the smear. It gives readers a reason to stop looking at the list.

What we are asking The Spectator to do

1. Take the 9 October article down by Friday 23 October 2026.
2. Publish a correction, as prominent as the article, saying that the first two Edinburgh victims had just left prayers at the mosque, that the Dalton mosque was already holding prayers, that the Trust’s report does not count protests as hate in themselves, and that its two reports name 63 of its 78 incidents.
3. Say whether Andrew Gilligan or The Spectator contacted any of the mosques named in the article before publishing it.

Two men were stabbed walking out of prayers in Edinburgh. The Spectator should stop telling its readers that had nothing to do with a mosque.

Sources: Andrew Gilligan, The Spectator, 6 and 9 October 2026 (paragraphs numbered from the top of the 9 October article); British Muslim Trust, A Year of Division: One Mosque Attacked Every Five Days, 8 October 2026, and A Summer of Division, November 2025; Home Office figures via Hyphen, 8 October 2026; Crown Prosecution Service, hate crime definition; 5Pillars, 21 February, 19 March, 15 June and 23 June 2026; SNACK magazine; Yorkshire Live, June 2026; JTA, 5 May 2026.