PMQs: Questions about Britain's youngest suicide bomber draw tasteless gag from George Osborne

Labour's Hilary Benn pressed George Osborne over the government's anti-radicalisation plans in a cool, calm and methodical examination not normally seen at Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) on 17 June.

The shadow foreign secretary asked the Chancellor, who was standing in for David Cameron at the dispatch box, what his administration was doing to prevent young people from Britain travelling to Iraq and Syria.

"Can he confirm whether the government now has an agreement in place with all of the airlines to raise alerts when unaccompanied minors travel to known Syrian routes and that our police are being notified by the Turkish authorities when British citizens arrive at transit points to Syria?" he probed.

The query came after Dewsbury teenager Talha Asmal, 17, reportedly became Britain's youngest suicide bomber after detonating a device in Iraq. Asmal's family claimed that he was groomed online by Islamic State (Isis) recruiters.

But despite the serious nature of the question, Osborne could not resist making a party-political quip. The Chancellor joked that he was "extremely" pleased to see that there is no Benn in Labour's leadership contest but "plenty of Bennites".

The remark was a reference to Jeremy Corbyn's left-wing leanings, an ideological stance similar to Hillary's late father and former Labour minister Tony.

Gag deployed, Osborne then answered Benn's question. The Chancellor said "everyone was shocked" by the news of Asmal's alleged crime and argued that the government is taking "a number of steps" to tackle radical extremism in the UK.

Osborne explained that the authorities are working with "schools, mosques and other community institutions" and claimed the government also needs "to make sure that our security and intelligence services have the powers they need to track people who are trying to get back into this country."

An assured Benn said the House of Commons should get an update on the airline agreement and "noted that [Osborne] wasn't able to respond to the question on Turkish authorities".

He added: "We know that for some time there has been a growing number of people who have been groomed to travel to Syria and Iraq. Last November, the Intelligence and Security Committee criticised the government for not giving the Prevent programme sufficient priority and concluded that 'counter-radicalisation programmes are not working', why does he think this is?"

But Osborne hit back and said that he did not accept all of the conclusions from the committee's report, arguing that under Labour there was a "confusion between the programmes that supported integration and those programmes that tried to prevent radical extremism".

The Chancellor also noted that the government had introduced a statutory duty on public institutions to implement the counter-terrorism Prevent strategy. "We need to do more in these communities to prevent this radicalisation from taking place in the first place," he added.

The SNP, now the third largest party in the Commons with 56 MPs, concentrated their focus on the delayed Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. Angus Robertson MP, the leader of the nationalists in Westminster, said that the delays to the report are a "democratic outrage".

"I asked the Chancellor if he felt a moral and political responsibility for getting to the bottom of this calamitous war and its consequences," Robertson said.

"This inquiry needs to be published in full – and as a matter of urgency. Abandoning it would be wholly unacceptable. Answers are long overdue, and the continued delays to the publication of this report are a democratic outrage."