What is it going to take for the British government – any British government, of any party – to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood?

It was revealed today that the UAE is now limiting the number of students it will enrol at British universities because of the prevalence of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) influence on campuses. The UAE pays for most of the higher education of its citizens, and until now many UAE students have come to Britain. But having spent many years alerting the UK authorities to the ever-growing influence of the MB on campus, and having seen no evidence that anyone in a position to act is taking any serious notice of those concerns, the UAE has now decided that enough is enough and that it has no choice but to stop paying for students to come to Britain because the risk – indeed, the likelihood – of their being radicalised here is too great.

Little about the threat it poses is unknown

The UAE’s decision that Britain is, in effect, too far gone as a breeding ground for Islamist radicalisation is a damning indictment – albeit only the latest – of our ongoing, wilfully blind and dangerous refusal to tackle the extremism in our midst.

The MB, which is a sort of ideological clearing house for Islamists, has a skilled modus operandi. It does not operate in its own name but sets up front organisations which can appear to anyone uninformed about how the MB operates to be legitimate, independent bodies. These vary from small individual groups to student associations to national bodies.

Little about the threat it poses is unknown, which is why it is all the more negligent that no government has yet acted against it. One of the MB’s key tactics is to encroach so deeply into organisations and public bodies (usually with the appointment of its fronts as outside ‘advisers’ and groups involved in ‘consultation’) that they are essentially taken over, even when the actual decisions are taken by others. This is, for example, what seems to have happened when West Midlands Police barred Israelis from attending a football match at Villa Park, having effectively taken their instructions from local ‘community groups’. The police made the actual decision, but it was taken because of the influence of outside groups on the police.

As prime minister, David Cameron commissioned a report on the Brotherhood which was published in 2015. As he put it then:

Parts of the Muslim Brotherhood have a highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism. Both as an ideology and as a network it has been a rite of passage for some individuals and groups who have gone on to engage in violence and terrorism.

Individuals closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK have supported suicide bombing and other attacks in Israel by Hamas, an organisation whose military wing has been proscribed in the UK since 2001 as a terrorist organisation, and which describes itself as the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Muslim Brotherhood-associated and influenced groups in the UK have at times had a significant influence on national organisations which have claimed to represent Muslim communities (and on that basis have had a dialogue with government), charities and some mosques. But they have also sometimes characterised the UK as fundamentally hostile to Muslim faith and identity; and expressed support for terrorist attacks conducted by Hamas.

Aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and activities therefore run counter to British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, equality and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.

The report said that MB typically preferred non-violent, incremental tactics, but that it was prepared to countenance violence on occasion.

The MB and its front organisations are banned in most Arab states because they are well aware of the danger it poses. Most of the MB’s offshoots are prescribed as terrorist organisations in the US and President Trump has now begun the process of designating MB chapters themselves as ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’ and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Both France and Germany have started to focus on the MB threat. We are now, as Lord Godson put it in the House of Lords last week, an outlier in doing nothing. The UAE knows this.