The police and Crown Prosecution Service should arrest and prosecute people who voice support for proscribed extremist groups and terrorism, Tory Party chairman Richard Holden has said.

Speaking to the JC, he insisted that “anybody who's inciting hatred, and especially inciting violence, needs to be dealt with, charged and prosecuted”.

Holden, who sits in the Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and was first elected to Parliament in the “red wall” seat of North West Durham in 2019, said the law enforcement authorities should be more “proactive” in dealing not only with extremist chants and speeches at anti-Israel protests but also with imams who gave inflammatory sermons in mosques.

Since the October 7 massacre, the JC has published numerous examples, which have included expressions of outright support for the terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. In many cases, those responsible have gone on to post videos of such sermons on social media.

This, Holden said, gave such talks “an extra dimension, which makes them even more egregious… if people are supporting terrorist groups, if they're celebrating horrific terrorist acts of violence, [they] should be prosecuted with the full force of the law”.

However, he insisted that since the weekly protests began in the wake of the massacre, “the police have learned from some of the early marches, where they perhaps didn't act as quickly as they could have done to take people out and arrest them at the day. I think we've now seen actually hundreds of arrests from some of those marches and more prosecutions are coming.”

Holden was sharply critical of the BBC, saying he was dismayed at bias in some of its reporting and its continued failure to describe the massacre as terrorism.

“Our national broadcaster should have been referring to the attack on Israel as a terrorist incident since the day it took place, and the fact that they still don't genuinely baffles me, because it so clearly was,” Holden said.

Referring to the BBC Arabic service, which the JC has exposed repeatedly for broadcasting of antisemitic statements both on air and its website, Holden was scathing about its apparent failure to follow BBC policy guidelines: “We've seen issues with the BBC Arabic channel over the last few years.

“But it's quite clear, there is an overall BBC code, and this is incredibly important, not just for the BBC as an institution but for our country. It an important symbol of Britain out in the rest of the world, so it is vital that those standards are maintained to the highest levels.”

Holden attacked Labour for failing – after days of indecision – to block Diane Abbott from standing again in her constituency Hackney North, following her now-terminated suspension from the party whip for writing a letter to the Observer that suggested Jews were not victims of racism.

“It's quite clear that the comments that she made in that letter were incredibly offensive”, Holden said, “and the idea that somebody who has over 30 years’ experience in the frontline of national politics would not know that those comments were antisemitic is just unbelievable. She basically said that anti-Jewish racism didn't really exist.”

Asked about the JC’s disclosure that at least five Tory candidates in last month’s local elections had shared or posted extreme sentiments, including a video by a leader of the proscribed terrorist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir and prayers for Israel to be “wiped out”, Holden said this was a “totally fair question”.

But he went on to say that with thousands coming forward as potential council candidates, “you'd expect there to be a handful of people who need to be dealt with and investigated. And obviously if there's wrongdoing to be found, those people will be got rid of.

“People might think that, there's never any antisemitism from Conservative members, but that's not true. There is a small number of incidents every year and those are dealt with quickly and properly; sometimes it's expulsion, sometimes it will be the provision of training.”

He insisted that “the issue that the Labour Party faced was different. It was systemic… And yet what we what we're seeing today is Diane Abbott, who wrote a clearly antisemitic piece just over a year ago being let back.”

Holden said Labour leader Keir Starmer’s handling of the case showed that “when he's trying to win over certain parts of the Labour Party ahead of a general election, rather than doing what he's claimed he would do, which is be clear, open, and transparent, it's the same old Labour Party we saw under Jeremy Corbyn”.