Face Coverings (Prohibition) Bill

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Friday 28th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hollobone]

Yes, but in the cases where those specialist police officers are covering their faces, it is for health and safety reasons. Where they are dealing with a terrorist incident and there is a likelihood that weapons could be deployed or explosives could go off, often a balaclava is required as a protective device for the police officer’s face. Everybody understands that. What would be completely unacceptable would be for ordinary beat officers—ordinary police officers whom the right hon. Gentleman, I and other Members see every day of the week—to wear full-face balaclavas.

This parallel between balaclava-wearing and the wearing of full-face veils first struck me when I took my children to a local park. I was sitting in the children’s playground watching my children playing, and this Muslim woman wearing a full-face veil came across the playground with her children and her husband, I suppose, as well. I thought to myself, here I am, sitting in a children’s playground in the Kettering constituency in the middle of England, and here is a woman who does not want anyone else to look at her. I thought to myself that at a very basic level, this is discourtesy. Why would anyone want to hide their identity from everyone else?

I thought, “Well, maybe it is a religious requirement.” Then I found out that it is not a religious requirement for a woman to cover her face, and I wondered how I would feel if, instead of the woman covering her face, it was her husband next to her who was wearing a full-face balaclava? How would that make me feel? Of course it would make me feel very concerned indeed about why a man was walking across a children’s playground wearing a balaclava. I asked myself what I would do about it? I would tell somebody in the park security department that there was a man wandering about wearing a full-face balaclava in a children’s playground.

The right hon. Member for Leicester East is definitely pulling a quizzical face at me, and that is fine. He is entitled to do that, and I can see him doing it because he is not wearing a veil, but perhaps he does not understand that it raises real concerns that individuals can go around covering their faces.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

The other Member for Leicester was also looking askance at the hon. Gentleman, and I am very surprised that he finds the wearing of the veil so discourteous. In the parks in Leicester or even the soft play area on Evington Valley road where I often take my children, we often see women wearing the niqab and it does not offend me in any way, but if I were to see a gentleman wearing a balaclava, I would of course be concerned because a balaclava is not religious dress and it is out of the ordinary.

[Mr Hollobone]

It is not a religious requirement in Islam for a woman to cover her face.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

The hon. Gentleman is right. There are different interpretations of the Koran. None of us here are Islamic scholars so it is not for us to give our judgment on that, but if these women choose to interpret the Koran as asking them to wear the niqab and the veil, who are we to criticise them for it?

[Mr Hollobone]

We are parliamentarians standing up for and speaking on behalf our constituents, who are concerned about these things. I do not think it helps the integration of communities in a multicultural British society when an increasingly large number of people, mainly women, go around covering their faces. That cannot promote community cohesion on any level. Do we really want to live in a Britain where a growing number of people are going around with their identities obscured? I do not, and I know that the majority of my constituents do not.

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[Keith Vaz]

I felt I had to give the hon. Gentleman his fourth chance to intervene, but he has still not answered the question and told the House how many doors he has knocked on in respect of the Muslim community.

Let me speak about Leicester East, which has 21,705 Muslims—20% of my constituents. The constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South has even more than that. He is very proud of them, and we are both proud of the multicultural nature of the great city of Leicester. I have received two separate petitions from constituents, one with 700 plus signatures from mosques across Leicester, including in my hon. Friend’s constituency. Another with 300 signatures comes from Northfields Education Centre. One thousand people have signed petitions opposing what is proposed by the hon. Member for Kettering. That is the largest petition I have received since 1 January this year.

I thank all those residents and mosques for their campaign: in particular, Imam Adam from the Jamia mosque in Asfordby street, Imam Khalil from the Al-Bukhari mosque on Loughborough road, Imam Imtiaz from the Masjid Ali on Smith Dorrien road, Imam Yasin from the Masjid Noor in Berner street, and Imam Mogra from the Masjid Umar in Evington road in my hon. Friend’s constituency—I am sure that after this debate he will be on his way to hold a surgery there. A further 50 constituents have e-mailed me, which is the largest number who have e-mailed on an issue so far this year. They may not have e-mailed in Kettering, but they are certainly e-mailing in Leicester.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I shall not list all the mosques and imams who have got in touch with me, but a great number of my constituents have done so and I have received a number of petitions. If the House divides on this Bill I, like my right hon. Friend, will vote against it. Is not the point that those women who have signed the petitions should have the choice of whether or not to wear the veil, in the same way that a Sikh man in Leicester has the choice of whether to wear a turban, and a Hindu woman the choice of whether to wear a bindi on her forehead? This is about the freedom of choice.

[Keith Vaz]

It is; that is absolutely right. That is why I am so astonished that the hon. Member for Kettering, that great freedom fighter who has made so many eloquent speeches in this House about the overweening power of the state and who has criticised successive Governments because they were introducing legislation to dictate to people what they should do, should be on the wrong side of this argument. I am surprised that he is not with his hon. Friends the Members for Bury North and for Shipley, in saying, “Let freedom reign.” What he is proposing would affect the freedom of the citizens of this country. I am talking about fully fledged British citizens who may choose to wear a niqab or burqa and go about their daily business.

At my surgery in Leicester this evening, out of the 60 people I will see, at least one Muslim woman will come dressed in black in a burqa or hijab, and I will be able to see only her eyes. If I am satisfied on the basis of the issues that she puts before me that as a constituent she is entitled to my help, I will give her my help. I will not do what some have suggested Members of Parliament should do and ask her to remove her veil, because that is her choice.

I am not an Islamic scholar—as the hon. Gentleman is not—but I took the trouble of asking a couple of Islamic scholars this morning about the authority for Muslim women dressing in the way that they choose to dress. The Koran instructs both Muslim men and women to dress in a modest way. The clearest verse on the requirement for the hijab is in chapter 24, verses 30 to 31, which ask women to draw their khimar over their bosoms. Two other verses in the Koran concern women’s dress. Verse 31 of the Surah an-Nur contains two commands that particularly relate to women’s dress. The first is that women shall cover all of their beauty except

“what is apparent of it”

around men who are not related to them. The second is that women should extend their head coverings to cover the rest of their body, should they choose to do so. Verse 59 of the Surah al-Ahzab commands that women shall wear long, loose outer garments when they go out from their houses. These two verses, taken together, set out three parts of the hijab or modest dress—the headscarf; modest clothes that together with the headscarf cover everything but what has been exempted; and, for outdoors, a modest outer garment to cover the clothes.

The hon. Gentleman is involved in so many important issues of state in this House; he is a great authority on the European Union; and he is here at 2.30 pm almost every day to speak about all these great issues. I often come to listen to him, and we are on the same side on the question of a European referendum—but I will not go into that as it is not mentioned in the Bill. I am therefore astonished that he should want to interfere in the issue of the clothing of Muslim women, and that he feels—somehow—that the fact that a woman chooses to wear a burqa undermines the multicultural nature of this country. What makes this country great is that we have people here from all over the world whose children were born here—like my children were—and who love this country and believe passionately in the values of multiculturalism.

The Minister spends every day of his working life talking about the cultural diversity of our country, which includes the work that is done by the Muslim community. He will be among the first to tell the House when he catches your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, that what won us the Olympics was being able to show London as a mirror to the world. So many different languages and religions all come together in London, and there will never be an Olympic games like ours anywhere on planet Earth. London is special, Leicester is special and Manchester is special, and that makes this country special—[Interruption.] Bradford is special, I should add, as the hon. Member for Shipley leaves the Chamber. It is important that we are careful with the precious gift of multiculturalism that we have been given.

The hon. Member for Kettering may think that this is a modest Bill, but it has provoked enormous controversy in my constituency and among the 2.7 million Muslims nationwide. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) will know, because she has a large Muslim community in her very diverse constituency, our constituents are at Friday prayers as we speak, so it is unlikely that they are watching this debate, although we will of course send them copies of Hansard afterwards because we want them to see what we have said on their behalf. The fact is, however, that what makes this country special is diversity.

I know that the hon. Gentleman feels that he has done no wrong in introducing his Bill. He is of course an elected Member of Parliament, and he can talk about whatever he wants to talk about in the Chamber. That is another reason why this country is so special. But he has caused controversy, and I am worried about him, because he is normally a very fair and balanced person. I will not go down the route of how many doors he has knocked on, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I do not want to upset you again, but I think we shall find that, very unusually, he has taken the views of only one section of his constituency. I doubt that he spoke to a single member of the Muslim community about the Bill before presenting it to the House, because if he had done so, he would have been aware of the concerns that would be raised in that community.

I think that I dealt with the issue of security in response to a number of points made by the hon. Gentleman and by the hon. Member for Shipley. As for the position in the courts, when a judge has required a person to remove a veil that person has, so far, done so. As the hon. Gentleman said, the legal profession is concerned because some of the stuff that goes on in court is not just about voice, and may be about demeanour. I am not suggesting that it is somehow possible to look at someone’s face and know immediately whether that person is telling the truth. After all, the hon. Gentleman misjudged my face earlier: he thought that I was making a funny face, but it was actually my normal face.

I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but our current system already covers it. In November last year, the Lord Chief Justice initiated a consultation with the judiciary and the Bar to see what they thought about the issue. However, the hon. Gentleman has been unable to cite any case from the tabloids, or from the internet worldwide, in which someone has been asked to remove a face covering and has refused to do so. The only security-related case that can be cited is the one involving Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed, who put on a burqa and left a mosque in Ealing. Ibrahim Magag did not put on a burqa when he went out of his house and hailed a taxi in order to leave the country. It is not as if that is happening every day; it is very exceptional and very unusual. I therefore do not think that the security issue should concern us in the context of the Bill.

Let me make three more points. First, although this may not have been the hon. Gentleman’s intention—he may have presented his Bill because he wanted a wider debate on the issues, or because his constituents were concerned—the Muslim community feels very strongly that it discriminates against members of their faith. As I have said, 20% of my constituents are members of the Muslim faith. Although I am a Catholic, I represent people from different religions, and if someone comes to me and says, “This discriminates against me as a Muslim”, I believe that person.

Secondly, there is the far more fundamental issue of the violation of a woman’s right to choose what she wants to wear and where she wants to wear it. Thirdly, there is the general point that we should be extremely careful about intervening to tell our citizens what they should wear in this country. There can be no end to that: we shall be on the slippery slope. The hon. Gentleman does not like political correctness—his whole political life has been opposed to it—but he is paving the way for more legislation providing for it.

I think that if the hon. Gentleman reflects, he will realise that rather than putting his Bill to the vote, he should withdraw it and engage in the consultations in which he ought to be engaging in Kettering and throughout the country. If members of the Kettering Muslim Association will not talk to him, I shall invite him to come to Leicester and talk to members of the Federation of Muslim Organisations there. They will tell him exactly what they feel about the subject. I urge him—I beg him—not to force the Bill to a vote. Let us accept that it will not help us to retain the wonderful multicultural country in which we live.

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[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

I will be brief, because my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) is keen to say a few words. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) spoke eloquently on behalf of Leicester, so I do not need to repeat the points he made. I entirely agree with everything he said.

If this House divides on the Bill, I will vote against it, because it has caused considerable distress to many of my constituents. I have had petitions from various mosques and e-mails from many constituents expressing upset and outrage. They fear that the United Kingdom will follow in the footsteps of France and Belgium and ban the niqab. They do not understand how private Members’ Bills work. There is something rather ironic about the hon. Gentleman wanting to follow Europe in this matter.

Quite simply, this is about freedom of choice. It is about the right of women in my constituency to choose whether to wear the niqab. Plenty of them make the choice to wear it, but I suspect that the majority of them probably do not. For those who do, it is right that they should have the choice.

Like my right hon. Friend, I meet such women regularly at my surgeries and at events, and I have no problem communicating with them. They talk to me passionately about the state of the local health service, local schools and local police—the sorts of issues that all MPs get to deal with. I engage with them and talk to them directly. It does not cause me any problems whatever. This is about their freedom of choice. It is the same as a Sikh gentleman having the freedom to wear a turban and a Hindu woman a bindi. People of other faiths have the right to celebrate their religion in my constituency.

I am conscious of time, so I will finish now with a quote from one of my constituents. She speaks and writes eloquently—much better than I ever could. She wrote to me this morning, saying, “As a British Asian girl who was born and brought up in the United Kingdom, I have always been led to believe that England is a free country, making us swell with pride and gratitude that, unlike many other countries, I am able to practise my religion without enduring any difficulty.” I could not have put it better myself. I oppose the Bill.