Anchor Shiulie Ghosh presents the first programme of Al Jazeera’s English channel. (Reuters)

London, Nov. 15: To a pretty Bengali girl with the name of Shiulie Ghosh fell the honour of launching Al Jazeera’s new English-language Arab television service today with the promise that it would be “setting the news agenda”.

“It’s November 15th, a new era in television,” said Shiulie, well known to British audiences as a familiar face on ITV News.

Shiulie is not the only well known journalist to have been hired by Al Jazeera, which so upset the Americans during the Iraq war that its offices in Baghdad was “accidentally” destroyed by US soldiers.

The Arab channel has also managed to upset the Iraqi government as well as other Arab regimes.

Al Jazeera is bankrolled by the wealthy Emir of Qatar who wants the channel to have a global presence — which, incidentally, was also the ambition of India’s Zee network.

But its boss, Subhash Chandra, has sought to achieve this by scrapping its news operation in London and substituting cheap entertainment made in India.

Al Jazeera has chosen to travel a different route.

It is hiring big names from British television, among them celebrity interviewer Sir David Frost, 67, who is sometimes accused of giving his subjects an easy ride, and Rageh Omar, called the “Stud” after his reporting for the BBC during the Iraq war from Baghdad.

Al Jazeera intends bringing a different and more sympathetic slant on Muslim news.

Elsewhere in London, Muslims were very much on the Queen's mind, as the British monarch presided over the ceremonial opening of parliament and laid out her government's legislative programme for the next 12 months.

And although she did not utter the words, 'Muslim', 'Islamic' and 'terrorist', they were very much at the heart of the 'Queen's Speech',

'At the heart of my government's programme will be further action to provide strong, secure and stable communities, and to address the threat of terrorism,' said the Queen.

Although foreigners may not realise it, the one thing the Queen does not do is write the speech. She merely reads out what has been written by her prime minister.

By this time next year, Tony Blair will be gone and probably replaced by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

So this is Blair's last Queen's Speech, and over the few months he has left at 10, Downing Street, he will do his best to convince his sceptical praja that the invasion of Iraq was justified and that his government will do more to protect the country from Muslim extremists, some of them, sadly, home grown.

At the moment, police can pick up and question a suspected terrorist for 28 days before a charge is laid. Blair and Brown are now minded to increase that to 90 days - which is a little rough if the person held turns out to be completely innocent. On the other hand, the police argue that so cleverly do today's Islamic terrorists (such as ex-Hindu boy Dhiren Barot) hide their tracks that they need more time to decipher computer hard drives and such leads.

Hence the Queen said: 'My government will put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system, support the police and all those responsible for the public's safety, and proceed with the development of ID cards.'

At the moment, some Muslim terrorists want to blow up Britain and turn it into a sharia state with a green flag flying over Downing Street but they resist attempts to be sent to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

The Queen again: 'A bill will be introduced to provide the immigration service with further powers to police the country's borders, tackle immigration crime, and to make it easier to deport those who break the law.'

Following Manmohan Singh's summit with Blair in London last month, the two governments have pledged to share intelligence and work together to curb terrorism. The British are slowly beginning to understand that some of the terror groups ranged against India are the same terror groups planning to cause havoc in Britain.

Last night, the BBC's Newsnight programme did an expose on a militant group, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which is active on university campuses and which Blair initially wanted to ban before changing his mind.

Newsnight revealed that a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir has infiltrated the Home Office and holds a sensitive job with the ministry's Immigration and Nationality Directorate in Croydon, south London.

The Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: 'This is a shocking revelation given Tony Blair's insistence that this group should be proscribed.'

Dr Abdul Wahid, a spokesman for Hizb-ut-Tahrir, appeared on Newsnight and said: 'Our organisation has nothing to do with criminality, it has nothing to do with community tensions.'

However, when the Newsnight crew were filming a bunch of Hizb-ut-Tahrir activists outside a south London mosque, one of them threw a punch at the cameraman.

This revealing footage, screened on Newsnight, was not helpful to Hizb-ut-Tahrir cause.