Jack Straw tells it how it is

Bravo for Jack. I can't say I've ever cared for the man; he always seemed too weak for truth. Now he stirs up a national debate on full-face veils. When a little gerbil like Straw speaks out on this we should take note. A few interesting points. It has been suggested he is doing it to road-test a tougher government line. This cannot be right as the Cabinet have courageously failed to join him on the barricades. It has more plausibly been suggested that this is his first salvo in a campaign for deputy leader, having noticed how well John Reid is playing in the country. Well, maybe some truth in this. Still, he has long been requesting women in his constituency surgery to remove their veils. This is a persisting, sincere concern of Jack's. That, combined with the time it has taken to speak publicly in the matter, tells us volumes. Jack is worried by this not as a national figure, but in his capacity as MP of a northern constituency: he feels alienated from the area he represents. At the same time, he has not spoken out about his worries because he knows that he needed the Muslim vote to get elected and he feared the reaction to raising the issue. He may feel the prospective leadership race and a shift of national mood has given him a chance to speak, but the two key truths here are a local MP disturbed by his own constituency, and unable to speak out for fear of his job and the extreme, potentially violent response.