"Britain capitulates to terror"?

I'm not always at one with Melanie Phillips but her article on the Home Secretary's decision to ban a Dutch member of parliament, Geert Wilders, who has made an uncompromising stand against the Koranic sources of Islamist extremism and violence, and who was due to give a screening of Fitna, his film on this subject, at the House of Lords on Thursday is very disturbing.

As she points out: "This meeting had been postponed after Lord Ahmed had previously threatened the House of Lords authorities that he would bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the Lords if Wilders was allowed to speak. To their credit, the Lords authorities had stood firm and said extra police would be drafted in to meet this threat and the Wilders meeting should go ahead. But now the government has announced that it is banning Wilders from the country."

She goes on to say: "So let’s get this straight. The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism."

This a very worrying development. On the one hand we are deploying our armed forces to fight the kind of Islamic fundamentalism that we see as a threat to our national security and on the other we are repressing the right of our Parliament to hear from a democratically elected politician in a European country. It can't be because we don't want to upset the Muslim voters in Blackburn and other similar seats held by Labour MPs, can it?