Copying French ban on burqa would be un-British, says minister

[alp227]

A government minister has signalled that a French-style ban on women wearing burqas is unlikely to be replicated in the UK, because, he said, the idea was "unBritish" and "undesirable".

The immigration minister, Damian Green, said banning Muslim women from covering their faces in public would be at odds with the UK's "tolerant and mutually respectful society".

The move to ban the burqa was backed by France's lower house last week. With public support, it is expected to pass through the upper house in September. The law will fine women who continue wearing the face covering €150 (£117). Men who make women wear the cover will be given a one-year prison sentence or £25,000 fine.

Philip Hollobone, Conservative MP for Kettering, has tabled a private member's bill calling for parliament to act similarly, saying he personally will not meet women wearing either the burqa or niqab but instead will ask them to "communicate with him differently" by sending a letter.

But Green told the Sunday Telegraph: "I stand personally on the feeling that telling people what they can and can't wear, if they're just walking down the street, is a rather un-British thing to do. We're a tolerant and mutually respectful society.

Full story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/18/burqa-ban-unbritish-immigration-minister

[msongs]

1. thus speaketh the infidel nt

[Warpy]

2. It's really an inhumae garment

and I'd feel a hell of a lot better if it were mandatory for the hyper religious males, too.

There are very real public health consequences of the niqab and burqa, that of vitamin D deficiencies that also affect the children born to these mothers. A real effort has to be pushed to make both sexes recognize this, that it's making the women sick and all the children they bear sick, too. Such women need much higher supplementation than the usual pregnancy vitamin pills supply.

Around my own neighborhood, I see new arrivals in abayas, full coverings without the face covered. Over time, they move to the hijab, a simple head scarf. Some of them have even abandoned that. There is nothing like being in a larger country that doesn't share distinctive and restrictive garb to get people to change it.

However, this is neither France nor the UK. There isn't as large a Muslim community here, just enough for one mosque. Likely that's where the real problem comes from, a concentration of people in a small geographic area and plagued by men who have appointed themselves the religious morality police.

I have no idea what the answer is for those countries. Making it illegal is asking for trouble as the hard liners get harder and more brutal toward women who try to unveil. Making it socially unacceptable and a source for derision leads to bigotry against the people, themselves.

Perhaps educating both sexes about the very real health consequences and the common sense restriction of that sort of thing around machinery will do the job, probably not.

However, making it mandatory for the husbands and fathers as well as wives and daughters sure as hell would.

[MercutioATC]

5. Seriously? Health consequences?

If I want to walk down the street wearing a diving helmet, who is the government (or you) to be concerned about my vitamin D levels?

It's really simple. Don't pass laws to protect me from myself. Vitamin D be damned, I should be free to wear SPF 150 sunblock...or a burqa...or a diving helmet if I damn well please.

[mitchum]

3. I think that has more to do with crumpetsucker Francophobia

[SydneyDundee]

7. ..nope...it has more to do with a more civil libertarian attitude in UK society and tolerance than..

your rather glib and pejorative inference.....

[JaneQPublic]

4. British history: Bans against wearing green in Ireland & plaid in Scotland

The English overloards enforced the Penal Laws in Ireland and the Act of Proscription in Scotland, both of which banned the garb traditionally and politically meaningful to those cultures.

But then, that was centuries ago, and we must allow the English to overcome the sins of their past, just as the U.S. has overcome and perhaps learned from the mistakes in our past.

[SydneyDundee]

6. ...and how is this at all connected with this debate?......