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It is the Left who are the real problem in Britain, writes former Conservative special advisor James Price
Before I managed to flee Sadiq Khan’s London, I lived near a primary school in leafy Queen’s Park, North London. It is not far from the GB News studio, in fact. This school was founded by Yusuf Islam, perhaps better known as the singer Cat Stevens. In 1998, it became the first Muslim school in Britain to receive taxpayer cash.
At school opening and closing, one could not help but notice the dress code was a little different to the sleepy village Church of England school I attended many years ago. The mandatory dress code for girls attending Islamia is, from the age of eight, to wear a hijab. Girls as young as 5 may wear one. The boys, meanwhile, had no such restriction.
Islamia is about to be joined by another school with a similar ethos behind its dress code. Barnet Hill Academy, a fee-paying primary school, was signed off by Labour-run Barnet Council on August 4 and opened this month as a voluntary-aided school. Its uniform policy makes a white hijab compulsory for Muslim girls from Year 3, at the age of seven,. The council says the policy is "legally compliant" and the school's "inclusive policies support the elimination of discrimination and the advancement of equality of opportunity". Truly, words have no meaning anymore.
When the shadow education secretary Laura Trott called the policy "appalling", the school added a line to its website excusing non-Muslim girls. So the rule now seemingly applies only to the girls whose parents say their seven-year-old is a Muslim. How much understanding she may have to make this call herself is perhaps up for debate.
The warped and backward idea behind the veil is both to promote modesty and to protect women from the lasciviousness of men. Why on earth does a seven-year-old need to be worried about modesty? Every boy in the playground has been conditioned to accept this absurdity as reality.
I would argue this represents the sexualisation of small girls. Furthermore, it is dawa, Islamic missionary work aimed at the next generation that I have written about previously. And we taxpayers are now paying to force this on a generation of young girls, preparing them for a life of submission and diminution compared to their male peers. Where does this all lead? Well, Home Office figures released last week and covered by the People's Channel show at least 100 children aged 12 or under were referred to the Forced Marriage Unit since 2021. 27 of them were five or under.
This phenomenon is from recent Boriswave arrivals only; the number of homegrown, British cases went from 10 in 2023 to 58 last year.
The obvious thought experiment in every case involving Islamic exceptionalism is to conduct the simple thought experiment: would the Government tolerate this if it were a Christian issue? Imagine a Christian school handed public money while its little girls cover their heads and the boys go bare. We would never hear the end of it.
I am sure by now the left-wing press will be calling me a bigot about this. But as ever, it is the Left who are the real problem. Because the Muslim world used to know better. In 1953, Nasser met the Muslim Brotherhood's Supreme Guide, Hassan al-Hudaybi. His first demand was compulsory hijab for every woman in Egypt. Nasser, dressed in impeccable black tie, recalled his response to a room full of laughter. “Sir”, he had replied, “Your own daughter is at medical school, and she does not wear one. If you cannot get a scarf on one girl in your own house, how am I to put one on ten million?”
And even in Baghdad over a century ago, there was opposition. In 1910, the poet Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi, great-uncle of my old boss, former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, published an article calling on the women of Iraq to throw off the veil.
France banned the hijab from its state schools in 2004 and its public servants leave it at home. Britain should copy both: no hijab in any state school and none on the public payroll. When Neena Lall, head of St Stephen's Primary in Newham, tried a ban for the under-eights in 2018, she was depicted as Adolf Hitler in a video, her chairman of governors resigned and the ban lasted a fortnight. A headteacher cannot do this alone. But Labour must act. The alternative is to say we are comfortable with the fact young girls will never be allowed to feel the wind in their hair in Great Britain in 2026. It is barbaric and must be stopped.
However, far from stopping it, Labour is increasingly complicit in fuelling the rise of Islamism across Britain. I wonder, for example, why Labour have deleted any record of the evidence it received when preparing its so-called "Islamophobia definition"? I think it is possible they do not want to reveal just how close certain Muslim organisations have become to this Government in recent years.
And now Sir Keir Starmer has run away from Parliament, the ensuing by-election will become a race to the left between Labour and the Greens (themselves ensnared by a soft Islamist takeover).
If these schools are willing to force girls to cover their hair, what else will they be willing to do?
