Raed Salah’s lawyer Tayyab Ali:
“When there is a matter of public interest, the Public Inquiries Act 2005 allows the minister in government to launch a public inquiry to establish facts behind that public concern, and I think that would be the correct forum, the correct method of an inquiry, and the reason for this is that we have had a number of incidents within our current coalition government whereby one might infer that there is a very serious problem with the government’s relationship to the pro-Israeli lobby, whether it’s the ministry of Defence, whether it’s the Foreign Office, changing the law to protect alleged war criminals, Tzipi Livni, I think it’s very important that any inquiry that we have is a powerful independent inquiry – independent from the very people that it will be looking at, and these people happen to be people such as Theresa May, people that provided information to them, the mechanism that was used to provide information to government departments, the Prime Minister himself, and his relationship to pro-Israel lobbying groups, his relationship – the government relationship – to one of its strongest funders, a gentleman known as Poju Zabludowicz, who I understood supported the Conservative Party quite strongly with financial donations, and also supports – I think a trustee of the Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust – and you have this mixture – a melee – of circular relationships, where money seems to be spent on Conservative party donations, funding for the election campaigns and so on, and now there seems to be a relationship whereby these same actors are having a special relationship with government, and are able to directly influence government policy, such as excluding Sheikh Raed Salah.”
Apparently, this Jewish influence is to blame for “all those individuals” excluded from the UK:
“And the reason why this inquiry is needed in these strong terms, is because all those individuals who have been excluded, cannot challenge in a tribunal their exclusion, they have to rely on judicial review, and as I said earlier, that does not look at the facts in the way as the tribunal looks at the facts. And I think that the only way we are going we are going to get to the bottom of this, as to how Theresa May is making these exclusion decisions, is by an independent, judge-led inquiry commissioned under the Inquiries Act 2005.”
Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North:
“Could I just add to that, that I think the public inquiry under the Public Inquiries Act is the best course of action to take, because normally one would have said that the appropriate Select Committee in Parliament would undertake this inquiry, but I think the issues go far wider than parliamentary procedure, they go to the heart of what’s going on in the Home Office and the way the government makes decisions, so I strongly support that and I will be writing to the Home Secretary accordingly.”
Jeremy Corbyn looks forward to “tea on the terrace” at Westminster with Raed Salah: