Why does the Left consider it Islamophobic to want to expel the cancer of extremism from Britain?

The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. It’s crystal clear to the British public we have a serious issue with Islamist extremism. From Batley, where a school teacher remains in hiding after receiving death threats for showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, to Barnet, where Mike Freer MP has been hounded out of office for his pro-Israel views, we have consistently seen it rear its ugly head in recent years.

Just this week we saw the strength of the alliance between the hard-Left and Islamists on full display, with George Galloway’s brand of sectarian politics proving a decisive vote-winner in Rochdale.

Alarm bells should be ringing. But even now, after one of the darkest days in our democracy – when Parliament caved to threats of violence from a mob of Islamist and far-Left extremists – there remains a state of denial in our political and media establishment. Many are worried that they will be smeared as ‘Islamophobic’ for exposing Islamist extremism, even though doing so is in no way anti-Muslim.

I’ve long called for honesty and action. Throughout my time in Government I was confronted with growing extremism and fought it.As Communities Secretary, I banned meetings and withdrew taxpayer funding from public bodies associating with groups with links to extremism including the Muslim Council of Britain or MEND. I worked with counter-extremist experts, such as Sara Khan, to protect our fellow Muslim citizens from hate, not illiberal Islamist doctrine.

As Immigration Minister I grappled with the link between uncontrolled mass migration and extremism.The smugglers instruct illegal migrants to throw away their documentation in the Channel which makes assessing the threat each individual poses inherently challenging. Upon inspection a not-insignificant number crossing in small boats turn out to be national security threats that require surveillance from our security services. While most arrivals don’t pose a direct threat, they are from countries that are statistically more likely to possess values and beliefs – whether towards women, free speech or democracy – at stark odds to our own.

I resigned because of the seriousness of this issue when the Prime Minister chose not to support the most robust measures to stop the boats. Under the amendments I championed to the Rwanda Bill we would be immediately detaining these people upon arrival, not bailing them to hotels only for them to abscond. And it’s why I have urged the Government to treat the border crisis as a national security emergency.

Since the conflict between Israel and the Hamas terrorists began, our security agencies have warned of a significant increase in radicalisation. They are now warning a terrorist attack is ‘likely’. And despite the rise in far-Right activity, the threat still overwhelmingly comes from Islamists.

The only thing we should be focusing on now are solutions.

It’s clear that the Prevent programme isn’t working as it should and requires reform. Islamists make up 75 per cent of the security services’ caseload, but a culture of political correctness has meant roughly a quarter of referrals are for those espousing Islamist views.

Our intelligence services are stretched and so rightly apply a high threshold before engaging. That means plenty of less dangerous – but still hateful – extremists don’t qualify. Our police are meanwhile forced to focus on the extremists displaying an active threat, leaving keyboard warriors and other hate preachers under less scrutiny. But given the current climate is a petri dish for radicalisation, we need forensic scrutiny on both.

We must immediately end the two-tiered policing that has consistently let extremists off the hook. Appeasement has only emboldened them. I’ve seen stronger enforcement against football fans than extremists valorising terrorism and calling for ‘Jihad’ in London. Would the police have intervened to prevent ‘from the river to the sea’ being emblazoned on the Palace of Westminster if it was a racist far-right slogan? I strongly suspect so.

This goes to the heart of our democracy – currently the rule of law is being violated because a cohort of extremists are perceived to be above it.

It is a damning indictment of the failures of multiculturalism that many espousing profoundly hostile and illiberal views are British citizens. This is the consequence of people living parallel lives in segregated neighbourhoods, rarely mixing with people from different communities.

But for those here on temporary visas spewing hateful, anti-British views should have them revoked.These people have abused the privilege of a visa and have no place here. As Immigration Minister I led this work, revoking visas of vile anti-Semites and Hamas supporters. But since I left, the Home Office haven’t been able to confirm that a single additional visa has been revoked on these grounds. We need to significantly expand the revocations unit within the Home Office and robustly defend our liberal values.

But stronger law enforcement alone will not solve this problem. To forge a more cohesive and united society we must end the disastrous experiment with mass migration. That task is virtually impossible when more than a million people arrive in the country every year.

Before I resigned as Immigration Minister I fought to secure the biggest ever reductions to legal migration. They need to be implemented immediately and followed up with significant further interventions. The age of careless and naive mass immigration to the UK must be consigned to the history books.

Delaying this necessary action only allows the cancer of Islamist extremism to grow. We urgently need laser-focus on delivering the cure.