King’s Speech

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the King’s Speech told us that measures will be introduced to improve the safety and security of public venues and help keep the British people safe from terrorism. When we use the word “terrorism” nowadays, we usually mean Islamist terrorism. MI5 tells us that Islamist terrorism is now the UK’s most significant threat. Yet, if we so much as try just to talk about Islam or Islamism, we are immediately accused of Islamophobia. A phobia is an irrational fear of something, but it is not irrational to fear the modern world’s most violent religious ideology.

I describe it as such because, according to The Religion Of Peace’s website, Islamist terrorists have carried out 46,602 deadly terror attacks somewhere in the world since their twin tower massacres of 9 September 2001, or more than five every day. Just in the week from 6 to 12 July this year, there have been 35 attacks in 12 countries, killing 70 people and injuring 32. There are two broad divisions within Islam, as I am sure your Lordships know, between Sunni and Shia Muslims, with many sub-sects which do not often agree with each other, and the vast majority of these attacks have been on other Muslims.

I understand there is a popular conception that the word “Islam” means “peace”; whereas, in fact, it means “submission” to the will of Allah, or the Muslim God. Devout Muslims should obey the Koran and emulate the life of Muhammad. This is unfortunate, because the Koran contains over 100 verses which encourage Muslims to kill or subdue non-Muslims and, in 627, Muhammad ordered the death of 600 Jews in one afternoon.

The Islamists’ view of this is that peace will be achieved when our planet is ruled by Islam. Islam’s sharia law is already running de facto in the United Kingdom via some 80 Muslim arbitration tribunals. These discriminate harshly against Muslim wives, whose husbands have only to say “I divorce you” three times to leave them divorced and often destitute. The sharia allows Muslim men to have four wives at a time, most of whom are having at least two children, so the Muslim population is going up 10 times faster than our national average. On past trends, Birmingham and nine other English local authorities will be majority Muslim by 2031. The radicals’ plan is to wait until they can take us over through the power of the womb and the ballot box.

Of course, I pay tribute to the vast majority of Muslims in this country who eschew these tenets and live decent and helpful lives in our democracy, but we are left with the problem of what to do about the rest of them. May I suggest, first, that we should start monitoring our mosques and madrasas and imprison or deport our extremist Imams. Secondly, we should encourage the licensing of Imams before they can preach, as do other religions, including, I think, the Church of England. Thirdly, the Government should enact the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, to give our Muslim wives the protection of our civil law. The Bill has had two supportive Second Readings in your Lordships’ House, but the Government fear being called “Islamophobic” by our Muslim men, so will not support it. Fourthly, we should ban the burka in public, as 16 other countries have done, some of which are Muslim majority.

Islam is a vast subject and I cannot possibly do it justice in the five minutes which is our allotted speaking time, but I have written a two-page, bullet-point memo entitled Why Can’t We Talk about Islam?, which has found favour in unexpected quarters, and I will put a copy of it in your Lordships’ Library.