Today and over the past 10 days or so, the vast majority of people in the Muslim community in the United Kingdom, which numbers between 2.5 million and 3 million people, will have been apprehensive about what the Bill holds for them, how they will come to look at it and in what way they must play a part in delivering this policy and moving it forward. There will, of course, be those who will try to capitalise on that. They will say, “This Bill is about putting you down. It is about doing things to you because you are not regarded as full UK citizens or as belonging to society in the UK.” Those are the people we have to look at and deal with.
I stand before the House as a member of the Muslim community who believes that those people do not speak for me. The ideology that the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) spoke about is very warped. I refuse to call it a Muslim or Islamic ideology, because in no way does it encompass the beliefs that I have. To me, Islam translates as submission; it is not about torturing people and it is not about killing people of different faiths. Recognising the three great Abrahamic faiths, which belong to the book, and calling any of them kufr is certainly not justified in any way. These people will use whatever little snippet they can grab hold of, try to turn the whole thing upside down, and use that as a recruiting sergeant for their ideology. They did not have the right to cruelly butcher Alan Henning. My respects go to his whole family for what they have suffered. There is certainly no justification for that in any religion of Islam that I support, believe in and will continue to believe in.
Before I consider the issues before us, I pay a huge tribute to the police, not just in Birmingham and the west midlands where I belong, but across the country, and to the security services, which have done a tremendous job over the past decade or so to protect us all from the plots that have been mentioned by the Home Secretary and others. That is what they do, day in, day out, and they deserve huge gratitude.
As for the Bill, the first issue that I wish to raise concerns the strengthened powers of temporary restrictions on travel and the suspension of passports. A number of Members have dealt with that point, so I will try to make my remarks fairly brief. The shadow Home Secretary had a significant amount to say about it, and the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) made some important remarks about it. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) also made some good points about whether legal aid would be granted to the people in question. We need to look more deeply at the proposal, because, as a number of Members have mentioned, it will leave us in a legal quagmire. I only wish the Government had taken some more time to consider it. Unless we are prepared to do that, the problems will not be dealt with properly.
On the subject of passports and people coming into the country, I do not believe that we currently have sufficient border agency staff to deal with the problem.
We need to move forward on that if we are to solve it in any way. It was said earlier in the debate that 500 people have travelled to Syria—a figure that I do not necessarily agree with—and that at least half of them have returned. If so, where are they? If we had proper passport control and exit controls, perhaps we would know. Not only are we missing those people coming back, but we are missing a huge opportunity to learn from them how they were radicalised, what their points of contact were and what happened. We miss that opportunity at our peril. I welcome the fact that the shadow Home Secretary said that she wanted to reinstate 1,000 border control personnel to fill that gap, because it is important that we deal with the problem.
I turn now to control orders, if I can call them that. I was in the Chamber when TPIMs were first discussed, and the Government did not really want to listen to the Opposition or the shadow Home Secretary. Unfortunately, we are back here now discussing control orders under different guises and different names, and there are different protestations about what we are supposed to be doing. Control orders are a difficult legal issue, but when people are significantly radicalised, it is important to try to resolve that problem. We have to start tackling it so that we can stop those people spreading their evil ideology and recruiting more people through their presence in the community. We need to find a proper answer, and we have not had the wherewithal to do that—as has been said, two people under TPIMs escaped.
The Government need to consider security arrangements overall. The new budget for the security services is welcome, but the cuts to the police and the forthcoming further cut of 30,000 people will not help. If we are saying that TPIMs are important for the safety and security of our citizens, surely we must consider how we can best put them into effect. Without the personnel on the ground, it will be difficult for us to do that.
I deal now with Prevent. My right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) made a fantastic point about the work that she has done, particularly when she was in office as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. I remember a meeting that we had about some of these issues just before she left office. The issue that I raised at the time was ideology. On the subject of Prevent and how these problems are dealt with, slashing the budget from £17 million to £3 million did not help, nor did giving the responsibility to the Department for Communities and Local Government, which was not bothered about how we dealt the matter or how we moved forward, and which did hardly anything in that respect. We need to consider how we deal with radicalisation through Prevent.
I welcome the measures placed on schools, colleges, universities, prisons and young offenders institutions. Those measures will go some way. I had to deal with the “Trojan horse” schools in Birmingham, and found myself in a very lonely place. Everybody criticised me. Colleagues on the Opposition Benches were not happy with what I said. I had known for some time that there were issues that had to be dealt with. The difficulty for me was that they were not in my constituency, but in the end I got involved because I thought enough was enough. Somebody had to get involved and deal with them.
There were clear signs of what was happening in the classroom. I had taken an interest in such matters before. I spoke to head teachers of those schools, former
head teachers who had been excluded from those schools, deputy head teachers, senior teachers who had been excluded from those schools, parents and governors who had been pushed out of those schools. I even spoke to students in those schools. Practices that went on were, for example, boys and girls not being allowed to sit together, and the girls being pushed to the back of the classroom so that they would know their place.
I spoke to one of the parents, who said everything was fine and none of that happened. I asked whether any of her children went to the school in question. She said that both her son and her daughter went there. I asked her to ask one of them. She asked her son. He said, “Yeah, Mum, that happens normally.” The mother asked, “Why don’t I see it?” Her son said, “When you come to school, there’s a different arrangement from what we normally do in class.” On parents evening, the parents were shown the school acting normally, but when they were not present the girls were made to sit at the back and the boys in front.
The schools had a specific interpretation of music and art and photographs of the human form or living form. The children were even told that if they had photographs of their parents or grandparents at home, or photographs of other family members, perhaps deceased, that was not right and was a crime under Islam. That is what was happening. Many people might see it as non-extremist radicalisation, but if a school has a child for eight years and passes on such teaching, what happens when the child leaves and goes to college with that ideology fixed in their mind? We need to think about how we deal with these issues and move forward.
As part of Prevent, we should recognise that we have a generation of lost young people—a small minority, as the hon. Member for New Forest East said, but still far too many.