LABOUR MP Straw has been a Blackburn MP for 27 years and has long been aware that numbers of Muslim women in Blackburn wear the veil.
He did not reveal his opinion that this was a disaster for community relations, or caused him severe distress, before the last general election in May 2005, or before the elections in 1997 and 2001, for the simple reason that he would not have been elected in an area where Muslim workers and their families make up one third of the population.
He knows when to speak up and when to shut up.
Why has he chosen to speak up now, at the same time as Home Secretary Reid, and the Labour cabinet’s member of the ultra divisive Catholic Opus Dei secret society, Ruth Kelly?
This trio along with numerous other Labour MPs are seeking to blame multi-culturalism, which for many years was for them an article of faith, for the alleged ‘separateness’ of the Muslim community, which they state is the breeding ground for terrorists, especially young terrorists.
The new article of faith is that to defeat terror, the Muslims must be forced to become British.
Since they cannot afford any more Forest Gate-style police raids to shoot innocent Muslim youth, they have picked on a ‘soft target’, Muslim women wearing veils.
The veil has become the symbol of ‘separateness’ which allegedly breeds terrorism. The veil must be torn away, says Straw.
Thus the new crusader’s mission is to mobilise the ‘moderate’ Muslim community leaders for the battle to make the Muslim community truly British.
At the same time as the mobilisation of the supposed moderate Muslims begins, his stand makes him able to compete with the BNP for the racist vote, on more or less a level playing field, killing two birds with one stone, or so he hopes.
The origins of Straw’s struggle against the veil and Muslim women, a truly soft target, does not lie in a section of the Muslim community allegedly misinterpreting the Koran, but in the imperialist and Zionist onslaught on Iraq, Palestine, the Lebanon, Afghanistan, with Syria and Iran to come.
It is this onslaught, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, that has alienated large numbers of Muslim youth from the Blair government and British democracy, just as it has alienated even larger numbers, in fact millions of British workers, as the massive marches in support of the Iraqi, Palestinian and Lebanese peoples show.
The women with the veils are being made the scapegoats for the July 7 bombings, whose architects (the organisers of the war in Iraq) sit in 10 Downing Street and the House of Commons.
Sikhs with their turbans and the religious symbols that they carry (knives), anti-Zionist jews with their long beards and fur hats, and the traditional scapegoats, gypsies, are escaping this attack for the moment.
But Straw is opening up the door for many more to enter, including every brand of fascist and racist.
He will be their favourite politician for a long time.
What is wrong with Britain is not the attire or religion of any section of its population.
What is wrong, is that Britain is an ageing imperialist power, with a decrepit capitalist economy, and a ruling class that has put itself at the disposal of American imperialism, to do its dirty work in every part of the world.
Abroad it is seeking to plunder oil and gas resources; at home it seeks to smash the Welfare State.
Both at home and abroad millions march against it.
Such a government, under siege, struggling to keep its head above water, is forced to resort to more and more desperate measures.
Blair and Straw have revived the traditional British policy of divide and rule. They are trying to turn the Muslims into the ‘enemy of the people’.
Workers will reject Straw’s antics with contempt.
The enemy is at home, but it is the British ruling class and its political leaders.
What is required to deal with them is the unity of all sections of the working class, whatever their religion or origins, to carry through the British socialist revolution to smash capitalism and imperialism to go forward to socialism to free tens of millions of people both at home and abroad.