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Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

I obviously fully endorse what the Minister said and have no reason to question in any way the decision to proscribe the two organisations, which I too will refer to acronymically—if that is the right of way of putting it—as TNSM and JMB. I have one simple question, which has not yet been asked: if JMB was responsible for the detonation of, I think, 300 bombs in 50 Bangladeshi cities in just one hour on 17 August 2005 and if it is so widely accepted and well documented that TNSM has been actively involved in launching attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan, why is the move to proscribe those two organisations only taking place now? All those events were well known months and years ago and are explicit, overt acts of horrific terrorism. I simply do not understand why there appears to have been such a time lag between those well-documented events and the move to proscribe the organisations. Perhaps the Minister can shed some light on that. With your admonitions in mind, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will refer only briefly to Hizb ut-Tahrir, but it does seem to have emerged as quite a prevalent theme in the debate today. I am perplexed by the position of the Conservatives on the issue. It was raised by the Leader of the Opposition, but there is only one Member—a Whip—on the Conservative Benches at the moment. That is a most peculiar way of underlining a point made in such strident terms by the leader of the Conservative party. Given that the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) quite rightly underlined in the previous debate—about periods of detention without charge—the necessity of having concrete evidence when taking steps in this area, I am still at a loss to know where the evidence is and how it has been marshalled to sustain the claim that Hizb ut-Tahrir should join TNSM and JMB on the list of proscribed organisations. It is not often—in fact, it is exceptionally rare—that I find myself in agreement with the words of the previous, and no doubt widely lamented, Home Secretary, but when he spoke out on the subject in Prime Minister’s questions recently, and pleaded for an evidence-based approach, I thought that he was completely correct. The hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) referred to activities in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. As he knows very well, it is extremely difficult to get authoritative and objectively verified facts from countries such as Uzbekistan as far as the activities of this and other organisations are concerned. I am familiar with that myself, having in a previous incarnation worked in central Asia and in Uzbekistan. The issue of principle is this: if there are organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir that are, if not explicitly, certainly implicitly, anti-Semitic, and which seem to me to stand for a theocratic philosophy that I, as a Liberal Democrat, find abhorrent but which do not explicitly espouse the use of terrorist violence to prosecute their aims, surely the only thing to do is to take those organisations on on their own terms, defeat their ideas, and defeat and expose their ideology for the mishmash of prejudice and misplaced grievances that it clearly is. If the Conservative party is to claim that it is a liberal Conservative party, I wonder why in this case it does not seem to have more self-confidence in the liberal arguments that need to be deployed when confronted by the abhorrent views of Hizb ut-Tahrir, rather than immediately seeking to score what appear to be political points and reaching for the statute book, when the evidence simply does not suggest that that is merited.