A vacuum at the heart of the government’s counter-extremism policy is leading British Muslims to despair in the face of spiralling Islamophobia, a former LabourCabinet and Home Office minister has warned.

Liam Byrne says that thousands of Islamic State foreign fighters are expected to return to Europe, including Britain, after the fall of Mosul and use Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric to find fresh recruits in a new book.

In his book, Black Flag Down: Counter-extremism, defeating Isis and winning the battle of ideas, Byrne says that any new strategy must reflect current security services’ thinking – which, he says, means rejecting David Cameron’s claims that there is a simple “conveyor belt” that links religious faith to extremism.

The MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill, representing the largest Muslim constituency in Britain, also warns against rhetoric that wrongly claims there is an “epic clash of civilisations” underway between Islam and “the west”.

“In the vacuum, while Islamophobia spirals, British Muslims despair … Many British Muslims feel surrounded by ‘supremacists’. National supremacists who declare you can’t be British and Muslim. And religious supremacists who say you can’t be Muslim and British. One lot deny Muslims their country. The other crowd deny Muslims their faith,” he says in a Guardian article.

He says that Theresa May’s and Cameron’s mistaken “conveyor belt” theory has inspired ministers to draw up such a broad definition of “extremism” that even the archbishop of Canterbury believes would make him a criminal.

A possible proposal to ban groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir as extremist, reflects a lack of confidence in British values, he says.

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