The home secretary, Theresa May, has said that Britain will not participate in a proposed mandatory EU programme to resettle migrants rescued trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, indicating that some should be forcibly returned.

Writing in the Times (£), May argued that nothing should be done to encourage more people to make the perilous journeys to Europe. “That is why the UK will not participate in a mandatory system of resettlement or relocation,” she says.

The European commission is set to present proposals on Wednesday to introduce national quotas, sharing out refugees more equally between EU member states. The plans are designed to avoid placing a disproportionate burden on the southern European countries migrants land in, such as Spain, Italy and Greece, as they prepare for a renewed influx from north Africa and the Middle East as the weather improves this summer.

May wrote that she disagreed with the suggestion by the EU’s high representative, Federica Mogherini, that no migrants intercepted at sea should be sent back against their will.

May said: “We must distinguish between those genuinely fleeing persecution and economic migrants crossing the Mediterranean in the hope of a better life. While the UK has a proud tradition of providing refuge for those who need it, we must not provide new incentives for those simply seeking to come for economic reasons.”

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, May said the government had consistently felt that any quota system should be voluntary. “These are very often economic migrants, people who have paid criminal gangs to transport them across Africa, to put them into vessels which those criminal gangs know are not seaworthy, where they know there is a risk of people dying,” she said.

The home secretary defended the government’s counter-terrorism bill, which David Cameron will put before the national security council on Wednesday, including plans for extremism disruption orders designed to restrict those trying to radicalise young people.

The orders, the product of an extremism task force set up by the prime minister, were proposed during the last parliament in March, but were largely vetoed by the Liberal Democrats on the grounds of free speech. They were subsequently revived in the Conservative manifesto.

The measures would give the police powers to apply to the high court for an order to limit the “harmful activities” of an extremist individual. The definition of harmful is to include a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, alarm or distress or creating a “threat to the functioning of democracy”.

“There are people out there, sadly, who are seeking to divide us,” May told the Today programme. “We are a government of one nation. We want to bring people together and ensure we are living as one society, but there are those who are trying to promote hatred and intolerance, seeking to divide us into them and us, and undermine our British values.”



May said the definition of extremism would be clearly set out in the legislation and that the bill would cover extremism of all sorts – including neo-nazism as well as Islamist extremism – which were “seeking to undermine the very values that make us a great country to live in, that make us a pluralistic society”.

Jonathan Russell, political liaison officer at the Quilliam thinktank, likened the plans to a game of whack-a-mole, arguing that they targeted the symptom rather than the cause of the problem.

Speaking on the Today programme, Russell said: “The danger here is that we negatively alter the balance here between national security and civil liberties, between counter-terrorism and human rights ... I don’t think it will tackle radicalisation, it won’t change the numbers of people who are attracted to this poisonous ideology, and I don’t think it will attack the ideology itself.

“We need a lot more education in schools, and educating our frontline, our teachers, our university lecturers, our prison officers our police forces, to tackle this before it becomes a problem.”

