Seems carerra had already started a thread on this topic. I guess it takes a while for news to cross the pond 🙄 I just heard about it today.
Quoted post said:
Straw veil call sparks Muslim fury LONDON, England -- A senior British Cabinet minister has sparked fury by saying that Muslim women who wore full veils made community relations more difficult.
Jack Straw wrote in a newspaper that a veil was "a visible statement of separation and difference" and that he was more comfortable dealing with female visitors to his local political office with their faces uncovered.
Here is what I think: Jack Staw, David Blunket, Claire Short and the entire New Labour Party have been advocating a multiracial, multifaith society since they were elected and now it seems Straw has been backtracking, as you point out. My own theory is that Jack Straw may have altered his views since he invited Condoleeza Rice to his Blackburn constituency and saw the huge anti-American reaction with his own eyes - people calling for Miss Rice to be executed apparently. Maybe this put Straw on the spot. The problem is Jack wants to have his cake and eat it. He wants a multiracial, multifaith society so he opens the door to free, uncontrolled immigration. However, when the millions of immigrants don't cut the cultural ties that bind them to their own homelands, he feels uneasy. My argument all along has been we shouldn't be engaging in social engineering in the first place and trying to create this merged, multifaith society which according to Blair is supposed to be founded on Islam and Christianity co-existing peacefully. I don't mind immigrants from the Middle East coming to live over here but not on the scale it's been taking place - where we see whole cities being demographically transformed and alien cultural practices becoming established. The same goes for the millions of immigrants who are now ariving from Eastern Europe as well. What Jack wants to accomplish is seemingly to bring millions of foreign peoples over to the U.K. and then expect them to become British and abandon their own traditions and culture. I don't think that's going to happen as religion is so deeply rooted in Middle Eastern culture, especially. The simple, obvious solution is to reduce immigration as they did in Holland and recognise we are becoming an ethnically divided society which could cause friction and lck of social cohesion in the near future.
davidmc said:
Seems carerra had already started a thread on this topic. I guess it takes a while for news to cross the pond 🙄 I just heard about it today.
