Universities ‘Must Ban Hate Preachers’ Says May

Universities will be forced to ban hate preachers under new rules issued by the Home Secretary. The announcement, reported in the Daily Mail, was part of a package of measures she revealed yesterday to tackle the growing threat of jihadis here in the UK.

Mrs May used her speech at the Royal United Services Institute to outline a series of proposals which will be included in the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill.

And she said that if the Tories won the next election, she would reintroduce the Communications Data Bill – dubbed the “Snoopers’ Charter” because it would allow for intrusion into everyone’s activities online, including social media. MI5, MI6 and GCHQ insist they need extra powers to track down terrorists, crime gangs and paedophiles on the web.

In a drive to stop young people from being radicalised by Islamist fanatics, schools, colleges and universities will be ordered to put in place anti-extremism policies.

The measures come against a backdrop of alarming Ofsted investigations including one which showed six private Islamic schools in London’s Tower Hamlets’ had curricula that left pupils unable to tell the difference between Sharia and British law and had children thinking that if they studied art they would go to hell.

And the top counter-terrorism officer in London’s Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, said the threat from radicalised Muslims would be a concern “for years to come”.

In addition, a Whitehall source revealed that a beheading in a shopping centre or a brutal attack on Britain’s streets by a “lone wolf” was “almost inevitable”.

Mrs May said the threat to Britain from fanatics was “greater than it had ever been” and warned an attack by extremists who had trained with militants in Iraq or Syria was “highly likely”.

She refuted claims the proposals were just a knee-jerk reaction to a heightened state of alert, saying the police had foiled 40 potential terrorist attacks since the London bombings in July 2005.

Included in the bill would be measures to make it an offence for insurance companies to pay ransoms to extremist groups and would give border guards the power to seize passports and for terror suspects to be forcibly relocated or put into internal exile.

Her proposals were criticised by human rights groups, including Liberty, whose leader Shami Chakrabarti accused politicians of resorting to “high talk and rushed legislation in an attempt to look fought in the face of terrorism.”

She said the bill, to be put before MPs tomorrow, was “another chilling recipe for injustice and resentment.”

Against the backdrop of the Home Secretary’s speech, the University of East London has banned a Muslim preacher from the campus for saying that homosexuality was like a disease. The event was called off when concerns were raised that he would insist on gender segregation.