Extremism Debate

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Department: Home Office

Extremism

Michael Fabricant Excerpts
Monday 9th June 2014

(10 years, 5 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Baroness May of Maidenhead Portrait Mrs May
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My hon. Friend has made an extremely serious point. It is important for us all to work towards inclusion, integration and full participation in society and in no way to attempt to enforce a separation of groups. Indeed, the danger of the previous Government’s Prevent strategy was that it was not able to work effectively on inclusion precisely because of the way they had set it up.

Michael Fabricant Portrait Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
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A couple of years ago, I visited a Buddhist centre in my constituency, and the Abbott told me how, before the last general election, the members of the centre were driven out of their Birmingham base by radical Muslim extremists. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, sadly, there are elements of the Muslim community who are extreme? These extremists put fire bombs and excrement through the letterbox of the Buddhist centre. Is it not right that this Government should target their efforts to ensure that that sort of extremism is stamped out?

Baroness May of Maidenhead Portrait Mrs May
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I deplore the actions that my hon. Friend has described today. Nobody should be driven out of their home or their centre by such actions. It is absolutely right that we address extremism; we need to address it in all its forms. We have changed Prevent so that it deals not just with violent extremism but with non-violent extremism and extremism in all forms. I mentioned earlier that there were two terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom last year. I have referred to one of them, which was the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. We also saw a far right extremist murder Mohammed Saleem. We must never forget that extremism can take many forms.