RUTH: SAY SORRY FOR BURKA SLUR
Scots Tory leader blasts Johnson over veil jibe
RUTH Davidson has backed calls urging Boris Johnson to apologise over his “gratuitously offensive” comments on the burka.
The Scottish Tory leader says the ex-foreign secretary should say sorry for comparing women with face-covering veils to bank robbers and letter boxes.
Davidson is the latest senior Tory to condemn Johnson for the remarks after Prime Minister Theresa May told him to apologise.
She was speaking during an event with former Liberal leader Lord Steel at the Fringe by the Sea in North Berwick, East Lothian.
Davidson said while she agrees with the sentiment of the newspaper article in which Johnson made the comments – that facecovering veils should not be banned – his remarks were offensive.
She said: “I think it’s also not been shown through history that when men make sweeping statements about what women should or shouldn’t wear that it goes well for them.
“I think that this wasn’t an off-the-cuff slip. He wrote a column, he knew exactly what he was doing and I think it crossed from being provocative and starting a debate and actually it became rude and gratuitous. I think he should apologise for them.
“It doesn’t bode well, and we’ve seen it in the arguments and the debate over anti-Semitism in Labour, of how we’ve got to a point in 2018 where we’re supposed to be so much better at accepting and discussing and being open about different faiths, religions, backgrounds, social classes, all of these things, and actually we’ve become slightly even more siloed and treating them differently.”
SN P MP Kirsty Blackman said: “Boris Johnson’s incendiary remarks about Muslim women are the height of bigotry and utterly inexcusable,” she said.
Davidson’s deputy Jackson Carlaw tweeted: “Just to be clear this is not a debate about the prevalence of the #burka. It is about the casual, typically sensationalist and gratuitously offensive rhetoric deployed by @BorisJohnson. Bluntly, I’m fed up with him.”