We need a national debate on Muslim veils in public places, says minister

 
hijab
Getty
Staff|Agency16 September 2013

Britain should consider banning Muslim girls and women from wearing veils in schools and public places, a Home Office minister has said.

Liberal Democrat Jeremy Browne called for a national debate on whether the state should step in to prevent young women having the veil imposed upon them.

His intervention came after a row erupted over the decision by Birmingham Metropolitan College to drop a ban on the wearing of full-face veils amid public protests.

Mr Browne said he was "instinctively uneasy" about restricting religious freedoms but said there may be a case to act to protect girls who were too young to decide for themselves whether they wished to wear the veil or not.

"I think this is a good topic for national debate. People of liberal instincts will have competing notions of how to protect and promote freedom of choice," he told The Daily Telegraph.

hijab
Getty

"I am instinctively uneasy about restricting the freedom of individuals to observe the religion of their choice. That would apply to Christian minorities in the Middle East just as much as religious minorities here in Britain.

"But there is genuine debate about whether girls should feel a compulsion to wear a veil when society deems children to be unable to express personal choices about other areas like buying alcohol, smoking or getting married.

"We should be very cautious about imposing religious conformity on a society which has always valued freedom of expression."

It is thought that Mr Browne, who is attending his party's annual conference in Glasgow, is the first senior Lib Dem to voice such concerns in public.

However there are signs that his views are shared by a number of Conservative MPs who were dismayed at the way the Birmingham Metropolitan College case was handled.

The college had originally banned niqabs and burkas from its campuses eight years ago on the grounds that students should be easily identifiable at all times.

But when a 17-year-old prospective student complained to her local newspaper that she was being discriminated against, a campaign sprang up against the ban, attracting 8,000 signatures to an online petition in just 48 hours.

Following the college's decision to withdraw it, Downing Street said that David Cameron would support a ban in his children's schools, although the decision should rest with the head teacher.

However the Prime Minister has been coming under growing pressure from his own MPs for a re-think on current Department for Education guidelines in order to protect schools and colleges from being "bullied".

Tory backbencher Dr Sarah Wollaston, said the veils were "deeply offensive" and were "making women invisible" and called for the niqab to be banned in schools and colleges.

Writing for The Telegraph, she said: "It would be a perverse distortion of freedom if we knowingly allowed the restriction of communication in the very schools and colleges which should be equipping girls with skills for the modern world. We must not abandon our cultural belief that women should fully and equally participate in society."

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