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Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

I congratulate the Minister and the Government on proscribing al-Ghurabaa and the Saved Sect. Those organisations are the successors to al-Muhajiroun, whose founder, Omar Bakri Mohammad, was involved in the commission and preparation of terrorist acts and recruitment for jihad. He trained young men, whom he sent to fight in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Jordan. He was also directly responsible for the recruitment and training of two young Britons, Asif Mohammad Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, whom he sent to their deaths in a suicide mission in Israel. His ideology is foul, and his organisation deserves to be proscribed. Its successor organisations also deserve to be proscribed, and I congratulate the Government on doing so. I regret, however, that Hizb ut-Tahrir is not on the list of organisations being proscribed today. Last year, the Prime Minister outlined the case for the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and, as so often happens when the Prime Minister talks about Islamist terrorism, I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with him. Why have the Government not proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir? Did the Foreign Office and the Home Office fall out over this matter, as has been reported in the New Statesman? Will the Minister specify the nature of the discussions between those Departments on this matter, and let us know why that proscription has not proceeded? Given that Hizb ut-Tahrir has been proscribed in Germany by Otto Schily, the interior Minister in an SPD-Green Administration, the proscription of the organisation would hardly be a reactionary move. Indeed, the desire for its proscription is endorsed by all those who believe that liberal, multi-ethnic democracies need to be protected from extremists who fly under flags of convenience. I suspect that I might be rare in the House—although I note that the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Galloway) is here—in that I have had the privilege, if that is the word, of being invited to address a Hizb ut-Tahrir meeting in the past. I did not know that Hizb ut-Tahrir had organised the meeting when I was invited to address it. Because I did not know that, and because Hizb ut-Tahrir operates under a cloak of secrecy, I was rendered complicit in an exercise in radicalising young Muslim men. I saw how the organisation operated, and how it sought to divide young Muslim men from the rest of our fellow citizens. I recognise that it acts as a conveyor belt to extremist activity, as the Prime Minister has pointed out. The hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) pointed out that Hizb ut-Tahrir bore similarities to Trotskyist organisations, and so it does, in that it operates under a number of identities in order to achieve its totalitarian aims. However, it is far more dangerous than Trotskyist organisations ever were in this country. The Prime Minister made a speech to the Foreign Policy Centre earlier this year, in which he said:"““The extremism””—" which we all need to counter—"““may have started through religious doctrine and thought, but soon, in offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, supported by Wahabi extremists and taught in some of the madrassahs in the middle east and Asia, an ideology was born and exported around the world.””" For those who do not know the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, I shall spell it out briefly. Its ideology is Allah—