The Daily Telegraph’s Bruno Waterfeld is no fan (to put it mildly) either of Wilders or Fitna. Here, however, is what he has to say about the poltical background behind the ban:

Home Office officials deliberately, in my view, engineered this “hate speech” storm to play to the gallery and to present the government as a champion of the “Muslim Community”, as it is officially defined by its self-appointed “leaders”, who are usually deeply conservative. In doing so, Miss Smith has further poisoned the well of public debate while damaging Britain’s relations with an important European ally, the Netherlands, for short-term, sectional opportunism. An elected European politician was invited by a British parliamentarian (albeit an unelected one) to speak in Westminster’s House of Lords (albeit a chamber that should be scrapped). There is a convention here, and it is an important one, that governments do not interfere in such contacts unless a threat to security is a clear and present danger. Britain has smashed this convention to bits. It frogmarched a foreign MP off to the cells to win cheap headlines to cement the government’s multicultural credentials with a key constituency, Muslim “representatives” such as the unelected Muslim Council of Britain.

This rings all too true–and is also the likely explanation for the contemptible and craven near-silence of Britain’s Conservative party leadership. Par for the course, alas.