Contribution
I am grateful to be called. I welcome the Minister to her place. It is a great job—I enjoyed it, and I have no doubt that she will, too. Though she may have shorter fingernails at the end of the day than she started with, it is worth it for the opportunity to serve with some of the finest people in our Government. The intelligence services and the police that she will be working with are truly exceptional, and it is worth putting on the record the gratitude of the whole House for what they do.
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the death of my friend Jo Cox, and many of us have been wearing white roses in memory of her. When we last met, Jo and I were in one of the Committee rooms working on a report together entitled, “The Cost of Doing Nothing”. What we were talking about in that report was the action in Syria, the way in which the extremism in that country had torn it apart and how we had not acted in ways that we felt we should have done. I welcome very much what the Government are doing today, because they are demonstrating another response: they are not willing to stand aside and watch as the country gets torn apart in different ways. I will make criticisms in a moment, but I would first just like to place on the record my gratitude for the way in which the Government have approached this legislation. I agree with the broad sweep of it; I just wish they had given it a little bit more time, and I understand that the Minister will almost certainly agree with me.
Unusually, I would like to praise the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards). He made an absolutely outstanding speech and spoke brilliantly, not just for this whole House but for the country, on the threat to a particular community, which is actually a threat to us all. It is absolutely true that in too many ways the Jewish community are the canary in the coalmine of any society. When we see Jews under threat, when we see Jewish homes frightened, when we see Jewish sites vandalised—as sadly we are seeing too much—we know what is coming, and what is coming is not pretty.
But let us get back to the Bill because, while it is welcome, it makes that tragic error that we often make in this place—I know we made this error in our time as well—which is to seek the rapid answer rather than the complete one. In doing so, the Bill misses very slightly the challenge that is bound to come, because I am afraid that we do know what will come. By the way, I will no doubt support the Minister when she decides to use the powers, because she will be well advised by the teams we both know so well, but we know that when an organisation is designated, it will lawyer up, go to court and challenge her, and we will find ourselves going around the houses.
This is where I confess a failure of my own. One of the organisations that I sought to work on was the Islamic Centre of England. That organisation has the same connection to Islam that Christian organisations that claim the crusader cross, and that far-right baggage, have to the church of Christ. Let us be absolutely clear: it is a vile political organisation dressing itself up as a religious movement—there is nothing religious about it all—yet that organisation enjoys charitable status, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) identified, and sadly, despite irregularities in its business and the way that it operates, it is still able to operate.
Let me list a couple more such organisations. Darul Hikma has praised Qasem Soleimani, the late head of the IRGC, whose death is certainly not mourned here, and it praised 7 October and the IRGC. The Abrar Islamic Foundation has praised Hezbollah and Hamas, and has run antisemitic and homophobic events. There are also the Ahl al-Bait Society Scotland—sadly, this reaches across the whole of the United Kingdom—Ahlulbayt Islamic Mission and Al-Ikhlas. They have all run, in various different ways, sessions praising the IRGC and supportive of Qasem Soleimani, which is entirely against not just the interests of the United Kingdom, but very particularly the interests of the Muslin community in the United Kingdom. Let us be absolutely clear about what the natural consequence of this will be: it will stir up sectarian and religious hatred. As the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley mentioned, we are first seeing the effect in the Jewish community—of course we are—but we all know where this will lead.
There are those of us who value all communities in our society, as I know the Home Secretary does, and who want Islam treated exactly the same as any religion. I think we Catholics are the only ones who are still lawfully discriminated against, but given that that excludes us only from the monarchy, I think we can be pretty comfortable with our position. Those of us who want to see all religions treated equally know that we simply cannot have poison poured into a few ears and pretend that does not happen.
I mentioned PressTV today, as well as the vile rumours being spread about the Prime Minister and others by Russia Today, among others, to show that we need to be conscious of what we are dealing with. Let us be quite clear: this is not a freedom of speech issue. This is no more a freedom of speech issue than the invasion of a hostile army is a right-to-roam issue. This is fundamentally about the deliberate actions of a state organisation—either the Russian, Chinese or Iranian state—to undermine us and tear us apart.