Part 5: A Study in Scarlett

The Trojan Horse Affair

Serial Productions & The New York Times

News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 7.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hamza and Brian learn that the Trojan Horse letter wasn’t the only unsigned letter alleging an extremist operation was afoot in Birmingham. An interview with a couple who lodged complaints against their school starts out cordially, but six hours later, the atmosphere is so tense that not even an offer of tea can smooth things over. And Hamza stops pretending he’s not angry about what he’s hearing.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So, Birmingham City Council told Michael Gove that the Trojan Horse Letter was incredible.
0:09.7	The counterterrorism police had decided it was a hoax.
0:13.5	And yet, Michael Gove used the letter to sanction numerous high-level investigations into potential
0:19.4	extremism in Birmingham schools anyway.
0:22.9	Which raises the question, why did he do that?
0:26.0	Well, little do we know, we'll be staring at the answer for a long time without realizing.
0:32.1	Alright, what do we have to talk about?
0:34.8	Is there anything else we have to put on the wall right now?
0:37.4	Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we do.
0:40.6	We do?
0:41.6	We need to put up there.
0:43.6	About a year before we got the minutes of the four-gove meeting.
0:47.0	Right now when HQ, it was end of a long day reporting, it was so early in the process
0:51.9	that we're still precious about our idea of a murder wall.
0:55.4	We were reading Counterterrorism at the time of the clock report about his Trojan Horse investigation.
0:59.7	I picked out names and leads from there.
1:02.6	And I threw this one out.
1:04.2	Do we have the Birmingham Humanist Association?
1:06.6	No, sorry, but British Humanist Association of the...
1:10.5	We didn't.
1:11.8	What is the British Humanist Society?
1:13.3	What the hell is this?
	...

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