Jeremy Browne Wants Veil Ban In Public

A ban on Muslim girls and young women wearing veils in public places should be considered by the Government, according to a Lib Dem minister.

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

Party leader Nick Clegg told Sky News he did not think the full veil was appropriate for airport security or the classroom, but said he strongly felt people in Britain should not be told how to dress.

"My own opinion is that I strongly believe we should not be issuing edicts about what people can and can't wear in this country," the Deputy Prime Minister said.

Mr Browne's 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.

The minister 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.

Mr Browne has been accused of 'double standards'

"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.

"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 two days.

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

The Prime Minister has been coming under growing pressure from his own MPs for a rethink on current Department for Education guidelines to protect schools and colleges from being "bullied".

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

Mr Clegg, speaking at the Lib Dem party conference on Monday, said: "I think one of the great things about our country is that ... we allow people to express their identity, their faith, the communities to which they belong in the way in which they dress.

"There are some exceptions clearly. I don't for instance think it is appropriate to have the full veil through security checks at airports.

"I think there is an issue about teachers having the right to address their pupils and their students face-to-face and make face contact.

"But otherwise I really do think it is important that we protect the British principle that as long as people are law-abiding citizens going about their business in a law-abiding fashion, we shouldn't be telling people what garments of clothing they can wear."

Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, said he was "disgusted" by Mr Browne's comments.

"This is another example of the double standards that are applied to Muslims in our country by some politicians," he said.

"Whatever one's religion, they should be free to practise it according to their own choices."

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