Farrakhan review

The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, will conduct a personal review on the long standing ban on the entry of the controversial campaigner Louis Farrakhan. The American black separatist leader was excluded from entering Britain in 1986, by the then home secretary, Douglas Hurd, after talking publicly in the United States about Adolf Hitler as a "great man, a wickedly great man" and Judaism as a "dirty religion".

Mr Straw said in a letter to the Labour MP for Tottenham, Bernie Grant, that his review would look at the balance between the freedom of speech and the undesirability of giving a platform to offensive views. Mr Farrakhan's case had last been looked at in July, when the advice was that some of his comments could, if repeated in Britain, contravene the Public Order Act 1996.