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Prime Minister’s Questions – Hizb ut Tahrir and Balls’s balls-up
Posted by Tory Rascal (@toryrascal)
Wednesday, 25th November 2009
Today’s PMQs were probably the most fascinating – and telling – for some weeks. After the traditional litany of the fallen and a solemn statement about the flooding in Cumbria, the PM found himself facing an emollient David Cameron, keen to find out what more the Government could do to support Cumbria’s recovery. Despite Cameron’s calm and apolitical questions, Labour backbenchers couldn’t help themselves from braying as though he had called for the abolition of trade unions.
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Following that, Cameron seemed genuinely to catch the Prime Minister off guard. Michael Gove had written to Ed Balls to ask about two schools set up by the Islamist ‘kill the Jews’ organisation, Hizb ut Tahrir. HT had claimed £113k from a Labour council to set up the schools. Brown, it was clear, had not heard a thing about it from the villainous Ed Balls, who sat nearby staring on impassively as his complacency was exposed.
So, as Gove looked on like a rebellious schoolboy contemplating a prank on the headteacher, Brown fumbled and floundered. HT wouldn’t be proscribed, he said, as though that was a good thing. As Cameron pointed out, HT had called for Jews to be ‘killed wherever they are’, and another, similarly dodgy Islamist organisation – Islam for UK – had also not been proscribed. Where does this leave the Government’s proscription system?
This is a serious issue, which, sadly, was not pursued by the Tories to the fullest extent possible. HT gets away with a lot by carefully avoiding calling for violence (although advocating death for Jews might seem a little… heated, to say the least). Islam for UK, similarly, does not call for violence – but it refuses to condemn the 7/7 and 9/11 attackers, calls for the subjugation of women, and calls homosexuality a ’sign of destruction’ of the UK. They might not be overtly violent, but their attitudes must directly contribute to the radicalisation of impressionable young people. Put it another way – they’re not proscribed, but do we want them to be using public money to indocrinate children with their extreme and anti-British views?
Brown is never weaker than when he is surprised, as we saw with the election dithering after the Tories surged ahead in the polls back in 2007. Today he must have been close to losing his temper, blindsided by a justifiably jubilant Opposition who had simultaneously exposed his inability to realise how concerned people are about Islamism, and undermined the Brown-Balls relationship. Stressed and strained, all he could do was warn Cameron, sternly, that he might ‘regret’ some of his remarks about the anti-semites and homophobes whom the Government basically refuses to condemn.
I fear Ed might find himself at the wrong end of a hurled Nokia fairly soon.
