Passport powers to curb child extremists
Parents will be given powers to have their child’s passport cancelled if they believe they may travel to the Middle East to join a terrorist group, the Prime Minister has announced. David Cameron set out a five-year plan to end home-grown extremism in a speech in Birmingham. He announced a series of measures to confront “head-on the poisonous Islamist extremist ideology” and criticised segregation between communities, promising new steps to promote integration and to ensure minorities learn to speak English.
PARENTS will be given powers to have their child’s passport cancelled if they think they may travel to the Middle East to join a terrorist group.
Setting out a five-year plan to end home-grown extremism, David Cameron announced a series of measures to confront “head-on the poisonous Islamist extremist ideology”.
The Prime Minister criticised segregation between communities, promising new steps to promote integration in schools and housing estates and to ensure minorities learn to speak English. He rounded on internet providers, broadcasters, universities and the National Union of Students, demanding they do more to help tackle extremism.
The Prime Minister said in his speech in Birmingham that ministers will in the coming days introduce a new scheme to “enable parents to apply directly to get their child’s passport cancelled to prevent travel”.
“I know how worried some people are that their children might turn to this ideology – and even seek to travel to Syria or Iraq,” he said. Around 700 Britons, including many students and teenagers, have so far travelled to Iraq and Syria to join Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). Mr Cameron said it “cannot be right” that youngsters in this country “can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths”.
He indicated that schools in the most divided areas of the country will be made to share buildings and teachers to ensure that children from religious backgrounds mix. There will also be re- forms of social housing to ensure that there are no longer segregated estates, and a review by Louise Casey into boosting opportunity and integration, including “how we can ensure people learn English”.
Mr Cameron accused internet service providers of being prepared to track people when it was “right for their business” but not when it was “right in the fight against terrorism”, and urged them to go “much further” to “protect their users from the scourge of radicalisation”. He issued “a challenge to the broadcasters” to give a platform to liberal Muslims, not just “other voices” who “may make for more explosive TV”. The comments were seen as criticism of the BBC, which has come under fire for giving airtime to hate preachers such as Anjem Choudary.
The Prime Minister also accused universities of choosing to “look the other way” to extremism on their campuses due to “a mixture of misguided liberalism and cultural sensitivity”.
He attacked the NUS for “allying itself ” with the Muslim advocacy group Cage, one of whose officials earlier this year described the Isil terrorist nick- named Jihadi John as a “beautiful young man”.
Mr Cameron said the Government will publish a new counter-extremism strategy in the autumn, setting out a range of measures for what he called the “struggle of our generation”.
This will include action to “expose” extremism and to refute conspiracy theories which accuse the West or Jews of seeking to destroy Islam or claim that Muslims are trying to take over the UK.