---

Terrorism and Community Relations

It has been a pleasure to listen to the debate, and I thank the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) and his Select Committee for their report, which I found extremely interesting. The debate has also been interesting. This forum, which perhaps offers us an opportunity to discuss such matters in a slightly more leisurely and relaxed way than we could in the main Chamber, is especially valuable. I hope that I may be forgiven if I do not run through the individual contributions, as perhaps it is customary to do. I valued the contributions on anti-Semitism made by my hon. Friends the Members for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) and for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis). It is a subject that has concerned me considerably and I have participated in other debates about it. We have to acknowledge that, whatever its origins in Britain, it went very quiet until it was resurrected on the back of the hostilities in the middle east. That is one of the issues that we may have to consider at greater length another time. I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington). He is a rare thing among Conservatives in that he has a substantial Muslim population in his constituency—to that extent, our party is at a disadvantage, which we must address. One or two other colleagues have such constituencies, but he was able to bring his expertise to bear based on the fact that he has to manage community relations on an active basis. I am conscious that, although I have a growing Asian community in my constituency, including Muslims, I do not have the distinctive communities that have been discussed in this debate. My experience comes from the fact that, some three years ago, I was asked to do community cohesion for the party, as well as to undertake my other responsibilities as a Front Bencher. As that has involved trying to ensure that my party is open to participation by members of all black and ethnic minority communities, it has involved me in a great deal of travel up and down the country and a considerable amount of exposure to diverse communities. It has been a rewarding process. My comments on the report stem from that, and in so far as I may have derived misleading impressions from what I have seen I will stand to be corrected. One of the things that I was struck by is that the report starts on the basis of the Cantle report, which is a proper place to begin. The Cantle report highlighted what may seem to be a statement of the obvious: despite years of multicultural endeavour by Government, with money being poured into areas, initiatives, statements and legislation, the process by which communities of different cultural and religious backgrounds are progressing together appears to be full of negative impacts and, in effect, we are becoming a segregated society. That was my impression in some of the areas that I visited. Notwithstanding the ritualistic efforts made at governmental and local government levels to address the problem, in many cases, that does not seem to permeate lower than those levels. The neighbourliness that underpins any society, multicultural or otherwise, is not present. If people are not communicating with their neighbour because they come from a different religious and cultural background, the essential building block of society is not present. My experience is that that is a prevalent phenomenon. Indeed, one of the first signs of an improvement is when one finds oneself talking to someone who, having made a number of critical comments about another ethnic or faith community, excludes the person living next door because they have had some form of human contact with them. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be happening sufficiently frequently in Britain today. I picked up on one of the consequences of that when I attended a Muslim students' conference in the midlands some time ago, when I sat on a platform in a room in which there was segregation between men and women, which did not surprise me. During the discussions, I picked up on their astonishing anger, alienation and distorted perceptions about the world in which they live. After the events of July, when the Minister of State started on her extremely worthy perambulation throughout the country to meet Muslim communities, I was recorded as having expressed criticism about whether that would be effective, a view that has been echoed during the debate, because of the nature of the people whom she was likely to meet. I said that, because of the phenomenon of anger, alienation and distorted perceptions, I found it explicable that suicide bombers should emerge from such a community. The reaction was interesting. I thought that I might be criticised greatly by Muslims for making a comment that seemed critical of their community. I received no such response. The reaction came from the other end of the spectrum on the basis that what I said in some way justified suicide bombing. To me, that encapsulated some of the difficulties that we experience when trying to have rational discussions about the problem. The hon. Member for Leeds, North-West (Greg Mulholland) commented on that earlier. The Select Committee report rightly highlighted the question of whether terrorism has had a negative effect on community relations. Unfortunately, it is overwhelmingly obvious that it has. That is not because it has made Muslims more alienated from British society. Indeed, many Muslims have made a great effort to bridge the gap. One issue that worries me in particular is that the voice of the rest of the community is not necessarily being heard in its attitude of hostility and dismay at the presence of a community in Britain with which it cannot interact. I am referring to a great challenge. Because such matters are not politically correct, they are not spoken about openly. That brings me back to the fact that political correctness might be making it more difficult for us to deal with the problem. I do not whether it is because Conservative MPs are regarded as being less politically correct, but my mailbag and the responses that I receive from people in my constituency suggest that the Muslim community in Britain now has a considerable problem with its image in the wider community. We must deal with that. It is unjustified because the number of people who are likely to be suicide bombers is infinitesimal and such people would be denounced within the Muslim community. One of the reasons that the problem is so acute—in a sense, it is a circular argument—is that the lack of contact between Muslims and the rest of society is so great that these issues are fertile territory for the problems to be exacerbated once terrorism begins. We must break that vicious circle. Since the events of July, the Government have been making real efforts to tackle the problem. I hope that the Minister took my criticism in good heart when I expressed concern that they were looking too much at Muslim leaders and community leaders, and not enough at some of the underlying issues. I am conscious that she has gone to considerable efforts to get to know other communities and the young, in particular, with whom so many of the problems lie. The other problem is that some of the actions of the Government—I am going back over an historical process—are not making matters better. The Government seem to have adopted a twin-track approach. First, they clamped down on security. That resulted in the Terrorism Bill, about which I have serious reservations. Secondly, they tried to reassure the Muslim community that Islamophobia would be tackled and that Muslims would be provided with protection. That has resulted in the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. I am not sure that we are going in the right direction. Far from the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill quietening discourse, to the wider community, it seems rapidly to be turning into a talismanic totem for a small minority. The statistics clearly show that, even among the ethnic minorities in Britain, Muslims remain a small group, yet they seem somehow to be driving an agenda of change that others resent. I never know when I read The Daily Telegraph whether I am reading fantasy or fact. None the less, one often reads of local authorities that appear, for instance, to have been coerced into removing piggybanks from their offices because of a Muslim objection—not, I suspect, an objection approved by the religious authority. Professor Sir Zaki Badawi would have laughed his head off when he heard about it, yet at the official level we appear to be dancing to those tunes. That is not helpful. Far from contributing to the building of good relations, it seems to be digging the ditch of incomprehension deeper and deeper.