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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Baker’s plea for inclusion was very heartfelt and immensely important. On the defeat of Abd-er-Rahman by Charles Martel outside Poitiers in 732, the great Edward Gibbon wrote: "““And the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval conflict into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mohammed””." It looks as if we are getting to that state now. As has been pointed out, Church of England schools are part of the ancient fabric of England and society as a whole. All other faith schools, be they Roman Catholic, Jewish or now Mohammedan, want to withdraw to an exclusivity for themselves. It is that exclusivity which is dangerous. On Sunday I heard a discussion on the wireless in which an Orthodox Jewish lady said quite deliberately, ““We want our people to come to these schools so that they do not marry out””. These are habits of exclusion. All I now want to do is to speak on a point that has been touched on already. Let us assume for the sake of argument that there is a Muslim school in an area which encourages all its girls to wear veils. Let us also remember that the Prophet Mohammed had two Christian wives and one Jewish wife, and said nothing about the veil whatsoever. It came about at the time of the Abbassid Caliphate when there was an outbreak of immorality and all women were forced to wear the veil. Equally let us remember that Kemal Ataturk said of the veil that any woman wearing one would be considered a prostitute. The number of veils whipped off faces of women in Constantinople the next morning was quite enormous. There is an element of exclusion about this. It is a dangerous exclusion that will drive people inwards into ghetto-like communities, and therefore my noble friend Lord Baker must be supported because his amendment goes some way towards offsetting the damage which new faith schools are, in my belief, liable to cause. I cannot think that non-Muslim people from the leafy suburbs are going to rush to buy a house close to a school where their 13 year-old girls will wear the veil, so it is going to be extremely difficult to make up the quota. I see a terrible danger of exclusivity and people huddling in their own masses. That is what worries me and that is what we have got ourselves in a muddle over in wanting new faith schools.