Thursday 9 June 2011

An 'extreme' prison policy

It would appear that the Coalition's fight against radical and extreme terrorism includes allowing muslim preachers to visit high-security prisons in order to preach 'extremism'.

From yesterday's Hansard:

"Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con): I welcome wholeheartedly my right hon. Friend’s statement and comments, not least because a couple of weeks ago I received a letter from a Muslim inmate of one of our high-security prisons, in which he said:

‘Last week our prison service imam told us ‘not to believe western media’ in relation to the death of Usama bin Laden. The week prior to that the imam celebrated the escape of hundreds of Taliban prisoners from the Kabul jail.’

He went on to list equally inappropriate teachings by prison imams in a total of five prisons. The Home Secretary is right to draw attention to the previous Government’s complacency over the issue. Will she give an undertaking that this will be put right and that we will not be able to say those things next year?

Mrs May: I thank my right hon. Friend for bringing that letter to the attention of the House and, in doing so, raising a very important aspect of the work on which we wish to focus. There is a great deal more to be done in prisons, and a number of steps that we intend to take are set out in the Prevent strategy today. I should be very happy to receive a copy of that letter, if he feels able to share it with me, so that we can look at the specific allegations that have been made, but we intend to work more carefully with prisons, prison staff, the National Offender Management Service and those going into prisons to deal with individual prisoners in order to try to ensure that we do not see the sort of activity taking place that he has identified.
"
Just what the hell is going on here? No doubt this may well not be preventable without breaching Human Rights considerations and if so, further illustrates the ineffectiveness of policies and 'agencies' that allowed (a) the prisoners into the country and (b) the continuation of this practice.

Whilst David Davis blames the complacency of the previous government on this issue, it would be interesting to discover what the Official Opposition Party at that time had to say.

3 comments:

PeterCharles said...

This kind of thing is a simple consequence of social liberalism, political correctness, equality laws, human rights laws and multiculturalism. Any or all of them could have laid the ground for this kind of thing.

As long as we cling to these failed concepts and keep legislating on their backs nothing will change.

And as long as we have an unaccountable political class and Establishment those concepts will continue to reign supreme.

And as long as we indulge in the social democratic post war consensus we are stuck with the political class.

It is unlikely we will ever get rid of the Establishment, it is made up of the untouchable insider traders of politics, finance and government. The mutual back-scratchers, old boy networks, chatter' and glitterati. The people government ministers so unexpectedly meet on holiday in the Med, the nudge and wink with never a thing written down. These parasites will always be with us, manipulating behind the scenes for their own perceived benefit, but if we can bring government to heel they'll be able to do far less damage.

Viva la revolucion!

TomTom said...

Labour permitted Imams access to jails - New Blue Labour simply continued the policy.

Really we should have Brazilians run our prisons and then the Army could shoot the rioters.

WitteringsfromWitney said...

PC: Yup and roll on your last three words! It will come, its one event I'm sure will have to happen!

TT: Not a bad idea!