This week's Queen's Speech made a pithy reference to the Government’s commitment to tackling radicalisation: “Legislation will be introduced to prevent radicalisation, tackle extremism in all its forms, and promote community integration." Fleeting though it was, this declaration is far from innocuous. It is the firing of the pistol at the start of what is to be a potentially disastrous phase in the battle against hardline ideologies.

Much of what we know of the content in the new Counter Extremism Bill is, on the face of it, to be applauded. The Government has hinted at new powers which will safeguard children from extremist preachers and teachers, putting this duty of care alongside that of sex offenders, serial drug offenders and criminal records. This is sensible and long overdue.

It may also consult on new powers to enable it to intervene "where councils fail to tackle extremism", in the wake of the Trojan horse scandal. All of this is perfectly workable.

But there is another, more disturbing, aspect of the bill which must undergo our scrutiny and, I hope, opposition: the introduction of banning orders.

These “extremism banning/disruption orders” would not criminalise the act of hate speech or promotion of terrorism – they are, of course, already illegal under the Terrorism Act 2006 – but instead criminalise the intent to spread hate speech or promote terrorism, if ministers reasonably believed that to be the case.

In pictures: Extremists in the EU Show all 6 1 /6 In pictures: Extremists in the EU In pictures: Extremists in the EU France: Marine le Pen Marine Le Pen, 45, took over the Front National (FN), the party that her father founded, in 2011. He himself described her as “a big, healthy, blonde girl, an ideal physical specimen." She claims to have cleaned up the FN and succeeded in pushing her anti-European, anti-euro and anti-immigration agenda into the EU political mainstream AFP In pictures: Extremists in the EU Germany: Udo Voigt He will be the first German neo-Nazi to enter the European Parliament. The former army officer, born in 1952, was jailed in 1995 for inciting racial hatred. Formerly the leader of the far right National Democratic Party (NPD), Voigt was convicted in 2009 after he was caught handing out flyers at the World Cup which argued that a black player was not entitled to play for Germany, whose national team – the literature argued – should be made up only of white players. AFP In pictures: Extremists in the EU Denmark: Morten Messerschmidt Leader of the Danish People’s Party, which won 27 per cent of the vote. His party has rammed 20 laws relating to immigrants and asylum-seekers through the Danish parliament, giving it the most anti-foreigner legislation in Europe. His party calls Islam “a fascist ideology” and rails against “East European criminal gangs”. One party strategist said “blood ties” to Denmark should be required for citizenship, though the statement was quickly retracted. EPA In pictures: Extremists in the EU Hungary: Krisztina Morvai A senior member of Jobbik, the anti-Semitic and anti-Roma party on Hungary’s far right wing. In 2009, she attracted international publicity after declaring: “So-called proud Hungarian Jews should go back to playing with their little circumcised dicks.” In 2009, she cancelled an interview with a British newspaper, declaring in tones of outrage: “I am a decent politician and the mother of three children, yet you in the west keep portraying me as a Nazi and a Fascist.” AP In pictures: Extremists in the EU Italy: Mario Borghezio MEP for Italy’s notoriously racist Northern League, he has relentlessly attacked the nation’s first black cabinet minister, Cecile Kyenge, minister for integration, claiming she would import ‘tribal traditions’ into the Italian government. Other elected members in the party called her “an orang-utan” and suggested that someone should rape her, so she would understand how the victims of Somali rapists felt. He attracted attention by lobbying for the creation of an EU archive of UFO sightings. Getty In pictures: Extremists in the EU Greece: Eleftherios Synadinos Fabulously mustachioed retired lieutenant-general in the Greek army, he was one of Golden Dawn’s top candidates in the European elections, at which the overtly neo-Nazi party obtained more than 9 per cent of the vote. With its black-shirted assault squads, the Hitler photos and the party’s swastika-inspired logo, it has been accused of being a criminal organisation. Its website declares: “We aren’t the quiet birds of peace time, we are birds of the storm and the hurricane.”

These orders target those who operate in what the police now call the “pre-criminal space”, expanding the definition of people who could be incarcerated from those who do bad things, to those who think bad things.

You’re a criminal if you think bad things? We should shudder at this kind of Orwellian dictum.

Do banning orders help us defeat extremism? Most certainly not. The absolute cornerstone of liberal democratic society is the right to free speech. This aspect of the bill – together with a broader trend of UK institutions such as universities, attempting to simply forbid irritating or offensive views – is a very dangerous precedent.

Bigotry cannot be legislated out of existence or banned; it is ludicrous to think that it could. In defeating extremist views, we must do everything possible not to become as totalitarian as the totalitarian ideologies we are seeking to dismantle.

You cannot defeat ideas and you cannot pretend they are not there. What you can do is deconstruct them, emotionally and intellectually, and let the audience decide.

Take, for example, the British National Party (BNP). As social justice warriors triggered, screamed and raged about the national disgrace of having Nick Griffin on the BBC politics show Question Time, his fellow panellists and the wider British public prepared to confront him.

Just months after Griffin’s television appearance, the BNP was effectively stripped and rendered intellectually bankrupt – all because they were brought out into the open and challenged. The people saw, the people judged, and the people destroyed them.

We must do the same with all elements of extremism. Arbitrary bans force them underground and into darker manifestations, but fighting them in the open allows us to bring to bear all of our critical faculties and dismantle their arguments.

That is why it is so crucial that we rally around and invest in opposition groups who are ready and willing to take extremism on in the open.

We cannot legislate our way out of this, just as we can’t securitise our way out of terrorism. We need a counter cultural insurgency to sweep these people off their feet and blast them into irrelevance.

History will not remember us fondly if we continue to tacitly allow extremism to flourish in the name of political correctness and history will positively condemn us if we, the liberal democratic west, attempt to shut down debate and ban ideas. We cannot feed the victimhood, ‘nanny state’ agenda any further.

By banning viewpoints, create a ‘forbidden fruit’ syndrome, where charismatic recruiters can sweep in and drum up hatred. We at Quilliam know this to be true: many of us once subscribed to hard-line ideologies and relished every opportunity we saw when the Governments clumsy reforms and bureaucracy crashed down. It gave us the ammunition and reasons to justify our resistance and fire to our cause.

And it is for that reasons that we must pressure the Government to amend the current version of the Counter Extremism Bill.