Ukip to campaign to ban burqa and sharia courts, says Paul Nuttall

Ukip will push to ban the burqa and sharia courts, Paul Nuttall has said, although he denied the Eurosceptic party was reinventing itself as an anti-Islam party.

In a BBC interview, Ukip’s leader also refused to confirm whether he would stand in the 8 June election, having been defeated in the Stoke-on-Trent Central byelection weeks ago.

Nuttall said the party’s policies were not singling out Muslims. He said there were no similar proposals to ban Jewish religious courts because the Jewish population was smaller than the Muslim population.

Nuttall had previously said in 2013 the party should not pursue a burqa ban, but he told the Andrew Marr Show that circumstances had changed.

“We have a heightened security risk at the moment and for CCTV to be effective you need to see people’s faces, because whether we like it or not in this country there’s more CCTV per head than anywhere else on the planet,” he said. “We’re the most watched and for that to be effective you need to see people’s faces.”

Nuttall said he had changed his views on the veil because of new reports on integration, including one by the former Equality and Human Rights Commission chair Trevor Phillips and the government’s integration adviser Dame Louise Casey.

“Integration is actually getting worse in Britain at the moment, not better. This will help,” he said, although he denied he would ban new mosques from opening. “This isn’t an attack on specifically on Muslims, it’s all about integration,” he said.

“It cannot be right we have courts or councils in this country where the words of a woman are only worth half that of a man. That has no place in a liberal, democratic functioning western democracy.”

Nuttall said local branches would be making decisions about candidates in the weeks to come, including whether to stand down in areas where there was a Eurosceptic MP.

“This is not an order which is coming down from the top of the party. I will speak to branches in the coming week and they will make decisions,” he said.

Nuttall said the party would only consider standing down if there was an MP who had campaigned for several years for Brexit, giving the example of David Nuttall, the Tory MP for Bury North who has a slim majority. “He’s been a good Brexiteer all his life,” Nuttall said.