07/11/2013 This Week

Tonight, as Britain's top spooks come to Westminster, This Week spies

the top political stories of the week.

Are rising house prices the dirty little secret of electoral politics?

Architect and presenter George Clarke keeps housing policy under

surveillance? There is no secret code to cracking the housing crisis.

We just need to build more. As the Government announces the loss

of nearly 2000 shipyard jobs, is it secretly playing politics with

peoples livelihoods? Agent Q, Quentin Letts, is bugging us all.

For the people of Portsmouth, ship building was the big story of the

week, but at Westminster they were more concerned with spies and spoke

's. -- spooks. And sadly the spies weren't keeping

an eye on a suspected terrorist who escaped wearing in a burka. But are

we getting too spooked by this particular piece of clothing? Stand

up comedian Shazia Mirza puts cultural sensitivities under

interrogation. I don't know why people are so offended about the

burka. Have you seen Michael Portillo's shirts? !

This Week - licenced to thrill. It would be worse if he wore them on

his head. Evenin' all. Welcome to This Week,

and what a crazeee week it's been in Canadian politics. Not a phrase you

often hear in London, or in sleepy Ottawa for that matter, but thanks

to roly-poly Rob Ford, the avuncular Mayor of Toronto, municipal politics

in the land of Celine Dion is almost more eyebrow-raising than Grant

Shapps' CV. For those who don't follow Canadian politics, and I

suppose there might be a handful of you that don't, pull that House of

Leather sofa closer to the TV and I shall elucidate. Mayor Ford is a

politician for whom normal rules do not apply, a Canadian Boris Johnson,

if you like, from number eight in the G8, who admitted this week that

only a year ago, and against his better judgement, naturally, he

smoked a pipe of crack cocaine. "Probably in one of my drunken

stupors", said the Mayor, who went on to urge police to broadcast

compromising footage of him, claiming, "I want everyone in the

city to see this tape. I don't even recall there being a tape or video.

I want to see the state I was in", sounding uncannily like Michael

Portillo after our end credits roll. So has the Mayor resigned in sack

cloth and ashes, perhaps even with Toronto plod feeling his collar? Not

a bit of it. After the revelations his approval rating went up 5%, to a

not too shabby 44%. Rumours Ed Miliband is contemplating a similar

poll-boosting strategy are, as yet, unconfirmed. Speaking of those who

claim "nothing to see here, move along now", I'm joined on the sofa

tonight by two Westminster eagles who dare. Think of them as the

Broadsword and Danny Boy of late night political chat. I speak, of

course, of #manontheleft Alan "AJ" Johnson and #sadmanonatrain Michael

"All Aboard" Portillo. Your moment of the week. Such variety, Andrew!

The government is restructuring the national health service, and because

of this, certain small organisations that existed before ceased to exist,

so the managers do not have that thing to manage any more. At that

point they are paid off with enormous payoffs. Some of them got

over 200,000. I think one got over 600000 and a married couple got

nearly a million between them. And then, the health service does not

cease to exist goes there are then new organisations that come into

play. And guess what, these people are then employed by the new

National Health Service organisations. Having trousered a

few hundred thousand, they go into another job. These are a few

millions that could be spent on patients. People are always keen to

give away money if it is not theirs. This is what happens in nationalised

industries. It is our money. It is not often that a government pulls

its own legislation as it is trundling through the process. I

cannot remember in it -- I cannot remember it happening in the

previous 18 years but it happened twice already. This week, the much

derided lobbying bill was pulled. The lobbying Bill has managed to

unite the Christian Institute with the humanist Society. It has united

the league against cruel sports with the countryside Alliance. They

paused at the six weeks. The only other time it happened as with the

health and Social Care Bill that created the mess Michael was just

talking about. Question, who was the minister in charge of both? Poor old

Andrew Lansley, the member for South Cambridgeshire. Lightning strikes

twice. He probably has his finger on the button but it happens to be the

pause button. He has been rehearsing that one. I think he did well, the

rehearsals paid off. Now, you can't move for MPs feeling

your cost-of-living pain, your pinched pocket, your squeezed

middle, before heading off to their country estates to put six grand on

their heating bill expenses. But Ed Miliband has made the running on it

and the Government has yet to come with an effective response. The

Chancellor is hoping that strong growth and rising house prices might

be the antidote, but is that just a short-term fillip, especially when

it comes to housing? We turned to architect and presenter of

Restoration Man and George Clarke's Amazing Spaces, George Clarke. This

is his take of the week. The cost of living is dominating the

news again, but while food prices, energy prices and transport costs

are spiralling out of control, the one thing that all politicians have

not got to grips with is the biggest problem of all, and that is housing.

Britain is right in the middle of a massive housing crisis, and in so

many ways this building symbolises the scale of the problem. It was

owned by a council, empty for years, completely abandoned and has

now been sold to a private owner for nearly ?3 million. The idea is that

the money is reinvested to create more affordable homes, but does that

mean affordable housing is being pushed outside of our major cities?

As an architect, it depresses me that over the last 30 or 40 years,

no government has taken the tough decisions needed to solve the

housing crisis. Housing has become a political football that is kicked

around from one side to the other. I sometimes think the government do

not really know how to position themselves. They want to leave

housing is a free market, but actually the free market has failed.

They have built many expensive trendy homes, but not enough

affordable ones. As a result, it is really difficult for people to get

on the property ladder. In so many ways, the system is a mess. Since --

since Thatcher brought in the right to buy scheme, one point 5 million

council houses have been taken out of the system. Everyone sold should

have been replaced with another, but they were not. Because of that, we

have a massive amount of demand and a huge lack of supply. We need to

reuse and recycle our existing buildings, as well as building new

ones, to meet the current demand. We need to build between 250,000, and

300,000 new homes each year. Last year we only built 120,000. Until we

build the number of homes Britain needs, we will not solve the cost of

living crisis. And from the Bankside Open Spaces

Trust in Southwark, to our own little open space here in the heart

of Westminster, George Clarke joins us now. People are staying single

for longer, meaning a bigger demand for houses. People are getting

divorced, families are breaking up, meaning a bigger demand for houses.

We have increasing immigration, which is a bigger demand for houses

as well. Why have politicians been so slow to react by building more

houses? They have been. I agree with every word of that piece. The ONS

published statistics today. We did not cover ourselves in glory but we

got up to 230,000 houses built just before Lehman Brothers. That year

was the peak, the ONS have said today. That has dropped now by 44%,

and an 8% reduction last year, down to 120,000. There needs to be

political consensus. I cannot think of any reason why, just as in London

everyone worked together on something like Crossrail, it was a

cross-party big project, and the problem is much wider than London,

of course, why there can't be a political consensus on the need to

increase the supply of housing. Why wasn't it a priority in the last

Labour government? When we came in there was a ?19

billion backlog of repairs to council housing. We put a lot of

money into the decent homes standard, bringing those up to a

decent standard. As a result, we did not put the money into

house-building. I think the statistics, there are about 400,000

plots that have received planning permission and you can build on

them, which are standing there, either bank, which is one of the

points Ed Miliband was making in his conference speech, but for whatever

reason no one is building on them. What do you want the government to

do? Build more affordable housing. How they do it will be the hotbed of

the housing debate over the next few years. Do they do it through council

house building, or housing institutions? Housing associations

to a brilliant job to try and build as many affordable houses as

possible. The fact is, you have to get your hands on the land. The

government owns a huge amount of land, which should be made more

available for the building of affordable homes. The government has

come up with a scheme for the big house bonus, which you build now and

pay later, but I think that should even apply to self builders. The

collective self builder last year was the property developer. These

are people who build their own homes? Just over 50,000 self built

homes last year and the biggest house-builder built 12,000. But we

are still low in the developed world league table of the number of self

build homes per capita. Michael, if you look at the fact that the last

Labour government record was lacklustre on this, why hasn't this

government learned the lesson? Because there is even less money

around now than there was before. George pointed out that this has

been going on for donkeys years. The last time anybody talked of building

300,000 houses was in the 50s or 60s. So the problem is quite

intractable. I do not think it is just that rotations are too stubborn

or stupid to see the problem. I think there are genuine issues. This

government says a lot of the issues to do with planning controls, with

how long it takes to get planning permission, how resistant people are

to houses being built in their areas. And indeed, I think in this

country, by contrast with others, the citizen is king. The state

serves the citizen, not the other way around. Even a government that

wants to say, let there be houses, finds itself trampling over the

right of lots of people who want them not to be houses. One thing I

disagree with in George's report is that I think it was fundamentally to

the benefit of the country when the number of council tenants went down

and the number of owner occupiers went up. Something we talked about a

few weeks ago on this programme, one of the things that strikes me as

awful is the proportion of owner occupiers has shrunk dramatically.

Whereas people still think we are top of the table, I looked at it the

other day and we are now 17, in terms of owner occupation. The idea

of right to buy, I had no problem with because homeownership gives

stability to communities and people stay for longer. My issue was that

when we sold off those houses, we did not build the new ones to

replace them, so people like my family, who were brought up in a

council house, my sisters cannot get the Council house on the list. But

Labour did not change that. No. People point to the 1930s, when that

are set -- the recession was not so deep and the recovery came quicker

because of a house-building boom. You see that as you drive out West

London. But there was no town and country planning act in the 1930s.

And then we had this house-building boom in the 50s and 60s, but that

was on the back of a huge slum clearance programme that went on in

all of our major industrial cities. The political imperative of both

these things does not seem to exist at the moment. But I think it comes

back to the point where this started, about the rising cost of

living and how much of your personal income is spent on particular

things. When it comes to rent and mortgage is, it is a huge proportion

of your income. Now, particularly when you look at the scale of house

prices, the general average was that they house would cost roughly three

and a half times your income. It is now over six times your income. I

think there is a political imperative, because waiting lists

have never been longer. There is a political imperative because parents

see that their kids cannot get on the housing ladder. They cannot get

rid of them. I do not dispute that everybody understands the issues,

but I think the system is not set up well enough to deal with it. We have

tried to put it on to the private, big house-builders to make -- to

meet the affordable home requirement. But it is a pain in the

backside for them to do that stuff, and it costs them to do that. I

think the state needs to step in to build affordable homes. The elephant

in the room is that we have run a low interest rate Brucie to make

sure people would not be repossessed who had massive debts. The

consequence is that house prices have started to rise again. One has

to be careful about talking in averages here. That is a Southeast

bubble. Even on average, house prices are rising. People are less

able to get on the housing ladder. Rents have now risen to reflect

capital values. Rents used to be much cheaper than capital values.

But now the rents are catching up, which means that even the people who

can't get on the property ladder are having a real cost of living problem

cos the rents are going crazy. If we went in for another state backed

housing building programme, what is the guarantee that we will not end

up building a lot of the rubbish we did last time 's I think we have

moved on from that. The 60s was a terrible time for British

architecture, no doubt about that. Technology has moved on. I think the

lessons have been learnt. We are never going to build that quickly or

badly again. That does not mean we should not be building at all.

Now, like an Indian rocket heading for Mars or Michael Portillo heading

for the dance floor, prepared to engage thrusters as we head into

political orbit. Waiting in the wings, stand-up comedian Shazia

Mirza is here to explain why everyone is so blooming sensitive

about cultural sensitivities. And for the vast majority of you who

have nose insisted it is whatsoever, or culture, for that matter, we

await your latest ramblings on the Twitter, the Fleecebook or the

culture free zone that is the inter-web. Today marked a watershed

in British politics. The country's top spooks, called M, N and O,

presumably, appeared together in public for the first time. They

revealed to a committee of MPs some astonishing secrets. The days of the

Cold War are over. Really? When did that happen? Real spying is not like

James Bond. Wow! Who would have thought it? So we asked the Daily

Mail's Quentin Letts to infiltrate the murky world of Westminster

politics for his round-up of the week . This report includes scenes

of terrible acting, which some viewers might find disturbing.

Talk, age and Letts. I always knew it would come to this. Interrogated,

weather BBC. You are our most valuable asset, and yet you have

failed to gain this programme a single scoop. Explain yourself. I

don't have to answer to you. We will throw in a bottle of blue nun. All

right, then stopped started with a terrible row about a lost terror

suspect. On Monday, it emerged that Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed had given his

government minders the slip at a West London Mosque. He ditched his

electronic bag from Q branch and radically changed his appearance.

Personally, I could not see what the fuss was about. I thought it was a

brilliant disguise. The Home Secretary was spooked because he was

one of those chaps on TPIMs, terrorism prevention and

investigative measures. Critics say they just aren't as strong as

control orders. He took off his tag and dumped into a taxi. She was

warned about changing the law, she was warned about weakening controls,

she was warned that more people would act is gone, and they have,

twice. Still, she will not act. What the right honourable lady never

tells this house when she makes this point is that 43 people who were

subject to control orders have now exited those control orders. The

truth is that even before time limited TPIMs were introduced, the

courts would not allow people to be left permanently on control orders.

But the real problem for the Home Secretary is that a lot of these

measures are about to be expiring and can't be renewed without fresh

evidence. On Tuesday, it was the turn of the boys in blue to get a

bashing. Two officers had to perform the most excruciating, humiliating

duty that can ever befall a public servant. They had to say sorry to

Keith Vaz. Poor swine. They had to tell him they may have inadvertently

misled MPs over a meeting they had with former government Chief Whip

Andrew Mitchell. Alas, PC plod's memory just isn't what it used to

be. One of them had even forgotten the name of the Home Secretary and

managed to call her that woman. Whilst I believe that at the

relevant point of the meeting on the top of October, I appear to have

failed to bring the Home Secretary's name to mind, I fully

accept that this does not excuse the form of expression are used in the

meeting with Mr Mitchell, and I apologise. At one person who did not

get an apology from one of the officers was the former chief whip.

Do you wish to take this opportunity to apologise to Mr Mitchell and his

family, as Mr Hinton has done, for the distress caused? I can't

apologise for something I have not. Tell us about your timing naval

intelligence. Yes, a good old 21st Gloucestershire Sea cadets. Later

that day, government sources disclosed that BAE Systems were

going to mouth more than 400 shipbuilders, most of them in

Portsmouth. We have announced that the Clyde will become the focus of

the whole of the UK's warship building industry. Many workers

in's felt they were paying a high price for train to keep Scotland in

the union, and I would agree. Many of us was a prized at Prime

Minister's Questions. They did not seem to want to talk much about

shipbuilding. But the session still went into extra time. John Bercow,

the speaker. We all know who he works for. I was getting desperate

for a scoop, so I assume my best secret identity yet to try to flush

out a story, what the prime minister might call the Ed Miliband

disguise. Chicken! Heap, is to protect the NHS, but it is now clear

that the NHS is not safe in his hands. My job is to stand up for the

NHS and deliver a strong NHS. When will they understand that his job is

to stand up to the bullyboys of Unite and show some courage? Then

the big story hit me. The spy chiefs were coming to town. The whole week

had been a diversion. Quentin, you have got to reach M.

The leaks from Edward Snowden have been very damaging. They have put

our operations at risk. It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing

their hands with glee. Archiver is lapping it up. The ayes have it, the

ayes have it personally, I can't see the point of all this cloak and

dagger stuff if even our top spy chiefs are staying in the shadows.

It is called 21st century accountability, and you have made us

look like complete numpties again. If I didn't know better, I would

think you were a double agent, or worse, a Liberal Democrat. How dare

you! I have had quite enough of this. I off to have mighty -- my

teeth. Anyone know how to get this chair off? Most annoying.

He will return, with the chair, too. Now to join us, we have a former

Home Secretary and former defence secretary here. Let's go straight to

the former Home Secretary first. What was achieved by the three spy

chiefs appearing in front of this committee? Given that just over 20

years ago, you could not even know their names, there were not even

recognised as people, the heads of these three organisations, it was an

event in itself that they appeared before the committee. Gordon was

killed when he was prime minister for their appearance. Gordon Brown.

He was keen for some of them to be held in public. Now it has happened

for the first time. Did you learn anything you did not know? The point

was that all this information that has been Benoit Paire has been of

help -- the information has been helped to our enemies, they claimed.

They simply asserted that. Did not see any evidence. That is right. And

when challenged to give some examples of what it might be that

Al-Qaeda was lapping up, in his phrase, he said, we would have to

have a private session to give any examples. But Andrew's question was,

what was the point of it. The point is that they have seen what happened

when this happened in the United States. The spy chiefs were treated

respectfully and have a chance to make points about national security

that do not otherwise get made very much. This committee does have

people who have been in my position before. Malcolm Rifkind is a former

defence secretary and Foreign Secretary as well. These are people

who respect the security forces. They are not going to give them a

hard time. All right, they can't say why it would be damaging, but of

course, the revelation about the degree, the amount of information

does security forces are able to hoover up, that is of course some

benefit to our enemies. There was a whole series of court cases where

the government preferred not to pursue the case rather than to

reveal in court what they did and did not know and how they did or did

not know it. I assume that some of that information has been

compromised. On the other hand, this particular committee is also the

committee that failed to nail down what was happening over

extraordinary rendition. The question about the security services

is one of oversight and control, and whether the checks and balances are

as strong as they need to be. There are lots of people watching the

proceedings today thinking, yes, this may be progress. It has been 38

years since the CIA chiefs made themselves available on Capitol Hill

am so it is progress, but is it enough scrutiny? It was

choreographed on Capitol Hill. I agree with Michael. In these

circumstances, it does show progress. I personally, I think

Malcolm Rifkind is a fine chair, but this idea that it should always be

someone from the opposition rather than government is a good idea. Do

you agree with the head of MI6 that as a result of the Guardian leaks

and so on, our adversaries are rubbing their hands in glee? They

probably are. I think the Guardian have tried to be very responsible,

because they said they have redacted information. The complaint would be

that no one from the security forces that down with them with these

articles, as they did in America. But nevertheless, what they think is

innocuous, they are bumbling amateurs in this field. They don't

know what information is innocuous or not, because so much could

compromise our agents that a fairly simple statement without any names

or operational details could affect things. Let's move on. This is

relevant, because Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed was under this TPIM, a

watered down version of the control order. He escaped in a burka and is

a suspected terrorist. What do you make of that? It has got worse for

Theresa May, because she told Parliament that the police had his

passport, when they didn't. Then she was clearly wrongly briefed. OK, you

can say that. Is it a problem for a figure like that to get a passport?

It gets worse, because when TPIMs were introduced, people, not just

us, Alex Carlile, a Liberal Democrat, said, look, this is going

to be dangerous. It is fair enough for Theresa May to say other people

have escaped control orders. They did, until they were tightened up

and we were allowed to move people away from their natural habitat and

their networks. Once that happened, there was not a single person who

escaped. The central dilemma is that in a democracy you cannot hold

people unless you have gone through a judicial process and put them in

jail, and the courts will make life difficult for you unless you have

been able to do that. Some of these people are not being prosecuted

because the prosecuting authorities are not willing to reveal the

evidence against them. But it remains a fundamental problem,

because the government is asserting on the one hand, we know these

people are dangerous but we are not seducing them or putting them in

jail. Except that Theresa May insisted that he does not pose a

direct threat to the British public. Even though he is 27, received

training from Al-Shabab, who were behind the Kenyan attack, and they

are the Somali -based arm of Al-Qaeda. Surely he is potentially a

danger. If not, why was he under a TPIM? It is a nonsensical statement.

There is a fundamental trouble with this approach. It is an approach as

to how you tackle an incredibly small number of people, that is the

thing. The phrase used by the head of GCHQ in committee, he got into a

slightly peculiar metaphor about needles and haystacks. But it is how

you treat a handful of people who have exceptional circumstances

around what might come out in those court cases. You are right, no party

is totally united on this. Alan was right to point out that Alex

Carlisle is a Liberal Democrat and when he stood down from overall

responsibility for anti-terrorism policy, he warned that this was an

accident waiting to happen. All politicians can sympathise with each

other in the fundamental dilemma thrown up in a democracy. Is Terry

is a M -- a credible future leader of the Conservative Party. --

Theresa May. As a former Defence Secretary, have

English shipyards been sacrificed for the sake of keeping Scotland

within the union? It looks very much like that. The fundamental problem

is that 20 years ago we had three times as many surface ships as now.

With a smaller Navy, you need fewer places to build the ships.

Therefore, you cannot sustain both the south coast of Britain and the

Clyde, so it will be one or the other. What happens if Scotland goes

independent? Is it clear that we will then say the highly

sophisticated ships, orders which will not be placed until after the

referendum, they will not go there? If they do not go there, if Scotland

becomes a foreign country, and we have closed down ship holding in

England, where do we go? You would reopen it quickly and many Scottish

workers would migrate to work there. But you would not build ships in a

foreign country. That is clear. The politicians seem reluctant to state

what to me seems very clear. Sticking with Scotland, is Alistair

Darling right to call for a reopening of the enquiry into the

shenanigans in Falkirk constituency? He said police are now looking at

this because the e-mails have been handed to the police. Remember, we

gave the police the internal report and they took no action. Now they

are looking at the e-mails, as Alistair Darling said, and that must

be the first step. What emerges from that, I do not know. He and the

leader of the Labour Party in Scotland both want a new Labour

Party enquiry. The candidate stood down that was at the heart of this.

The chair man is no longer the chairman of the party. I get all

that. It does not get around the fact that there is quite a lot of

evidence in the e-mails to suggest that Unite were involved. Why should

the police be the first resort? Why does the party not look after its

own affairs before the police get involved? It is probably

unprecedented for us to hand the report to the police. The argument

is that we are covering things up and it is quite the opposite. The

enquiry did not speak to the relevant parties. The Unite union

told me that. Do you agree with Nick Clegg when he said about somebody,

near as a man who gets about ?1 million and spends all his time

sneering at politics, when talking about Jeremy Paxman? I saw the

headline and I put my head in my hands, and then I hoped against hope

that he was talking about Russell Brand. But he was not. Do you agree?

I think people should vote. I think people should answer the question,

particularly at this time of night. Do you agree? I think the point was

better made than the headline suggests. Now, here's a good one.

You'll like this. An Englishman, a Welshman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a

rabbi, a Muslim and a Hindu all walk into a bar. But because we're on the

BBC, and we've read our editorial guidelines, we're duty-bound to

inform you that absolutely nothing funny happened whatsoever. Nobody

was made the butt of a joke and everyone had their cultural identity

respected. Which is as it should be, or is it? We decided to find out,

and put cultural sensitivities in this week's Spotlight.

When Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed went on the run, wearing a burka, it

violated our cultural sensitivities as much as our security, forcing the

Home Secretary to defend herself and resist calls to ban the burka from

British streets. It is the right of a woman to choose how she dresses.

Ken Clarke considers the face veil a very peculiar costume and called for

it to be banned in open court. It is impossible to have a proper trial.

Meanwhile, calls for action on female genital mutilation drew

attention this week to another controversial practice made it

illegal in 1985. Yet without a single prosecution to its name. How

should society respond to a practice that appears contrary to its values,

and do we sometimes fear causing offence a little too much? At least

Prince Charles can be relied on to be sensitive, something he probably

did not inherit from his father. Shazia Mirza joins us. Is it not

clear that in many cases wearing the burka, the niqab, the full-face veil

is really a way of marginalising women, making them second-class

citizens and making sure they do not participate in the mainstream of our

society? My mother wears the niqab. She is not religious but she just

does not want to be seen with my dad. The thing is that a lot of

these women choose to wear it. They are not forced to wear it. I know

loads of Muslim women and it is a minority that where the burka, which

is the full thing. I know a lot of women that where the niqab, and

their husbands do not like them wearing it, but they want to wear

it. Why has it been on the increase recently? I perform in Pakistan are

locked and you rarely see women in the Burke and the niqab. Why here?

Partly, I think they are cold, I think it is the British weather. The

overwhelming number of British Muslims come from south-east Asia,

where there is no tradition of wearing it. Is it the men or the

mosques telling them to do it? When Blair went into Iraq, there was a

rising extremism. Since then, women are wearing it, some as a political

statement because they feel they are being attacked. I know some women

that wear it as a fashion because a lot of their femmes -- friends are

wearing it. Lots of Muslim women are Judge Mansour to other Muslim women

who do not wear it. In the north of the country, there is a high Muslim

unemployment problem. There is an issue of multiculturalism and

integration, making sure the British Muslim community is a successful

part of British society. It seems one way to make sure that does not

happen as to where the burka. Many of these women are really educated.

But who would employ somebody wearing a burka? My mother is a

teacher and when she is teaching, she never wears it. They are very

good at taking it off when they need to. I have a friend who was a doctor

who wears the niqab. When she is a GP in her surgery, she takes it off.

There has been an argument that they should not have to take it off.

Where are you on this? It would be futile to legislate on how people

dress. Although the French have tried. But that is futile. The

Spanish government used to try to ban the bikini. That was under

Franco. The government does require some things of us. We are not

allowed to be indecent in public. Women cannot show their breasts in

public. In certain places you have to dress in a certain way, so it is

reasonable that someone appearing as a witness in a court case, someone

dealing with the public on behalf of a public institution, in these cases

they should be required not to wear the niqab. Many of the women are

very compliant with this, happy to take off their full-face veil at

passport control, in a court of law. They are happy to do that. I was

coming out of the Gulf last week and there were three women in front of

me in the niqab. The passport control was run by men. They were

forced to show their faces, in the Gulf. Surely you have to do that.

Otherwise it could be this man who has just done a runner. And it does

not say in the Koran that when you get a passport control you must keep

it on. But it does say you have to behave modestly, which is good

advice wherever you are, whether Muslim or not. I do not quite

understand why you lumped it in with female genital mutilation, because

that is clearly against the law. It is astounding that have been no

prosecutions. If that is because someone is concerned about a

cultural issue, I would be very depressed. People are scared to

bring up this issue. Health professionals are scared to ask.

These girls are never going to prosecute their parents. They do not

want to bring a prosecution against their parents. But often in a child

abuse case, the kids are too frightened to do anything and do not

even know if they have the power to do that, but surely it is the job of

a proper society to step in and do something. The thing with genital

mutilation is that people are thinking it is a Moslem religious

issue, and it is not at all. It is not a religious issue, not a Muslim

issue. It is a cultural issue that has been going down for centuries

and nobody has questioned it. Which culture. Sudan, Somalia. But is it

happening in Christian, Hindu, or seek communities? I don't know.

That's your lot for tonight folks, but not for us, because like today's

Intelligence and Security Committee hearing, we're operating on a

two-minute delay because we can't be trusted. So I may appear to be

speaking to you now, but in reality we're already half way to Annabel's

in the back of Charles Clarke's minicab. So we may have left the

building, but we leave you tonight with pictures that made the front

page of all the papers. Everyone at home, please put your hands together

for the truly astonishing sight of a woman wearing a sari. Nighty-night,

don't let a frenzied media over-reaction bite.