I HAVE been trying to work out what to think about veils.

Since Jack Straw raised the issue in an article for his local newspaper, opinion has raged and ranted.

To refresh, the Labour MP said he wished Muslim women would consider removing face veils when they visited his surgery. And what a torrent he released.

A good place to start in such a matter is somewhere you would rather not be. For me this is the pages of the Daily Express. On Tuesday the paper splashed under a banner headline reading: "Veil should be banned say 98 per cent." The story observed that: "Britons gave overwhelming backing last night to a call for a ban on full-face Muslim veils."

There was more of the same, robustly put. As is its way, the Express assumed that an opinion survey it had conducted somehow represented all British people. Which is a scary passing thought.

I am happy to disagree with the likes of the Daily Express, in fact it's a bit of a hobby. Sense and proportion have been blown away over veils.

Very few Muslim women wear the full veil, yet from the tenor of the debate you could be forgiven for thinking the country was teeming with women covered in this manner.

A minuscule issue has been blown out of proportion, thanks to an inflammatory mix of politics and the media. Yet it still says something about modern Britain.

Tolerance and acceptance are important in British life. Irritation and suspicion are in there too, but, historically, this country has been able to accept other races and religions. This is truer in some corners than others, with deeper racial mixing occurring more in large cities.

One difficulty is that tolerance and religion do not always mix, not least because religions can be so intolerant. Why tolerate something that won't tolerate anything much?

But veils are perhaps alien to the British way (whatever that is). Yet in a sense, the veil is just another example of how religion jars with the secular national life. There may be good in religion, yet the strictures of faith seem designed to allow the narrow-minded to impose their rules against the general good.

The agnostics among us may opine that a world without religion would be a calmer, less divided place. But no matter. That isn't the world we live in.

Veils are difficult because so much of our engagement with other people concerns their faces. Think of all the people you know, and all the famous faces you can recall, and then imagine they were all obscured in the name of faith. A disorientating thought, and not even a sensible one, because most people don't wear veils. But it reminds us that faces do mean and say so much.

Tony Blair joined the debate on Tuesday. He said that the full-face niqab worn by some Muslim women was "a mark of separation, and that is why it makes other people from outside of the community feel uncomfortable".

There are other questions too. In some countries, Iraq for example, religious fundamentalists - all men - force women to wear such veils, beating and abusing them if they go about uncovered. Some reports say women have been murdered for not covering up.

So while some Muslim women here choose to wear veils as a symbol of their religion, their sisters in less tolerant countries are being hurt or even killed for not wearing them. How mixed up is that?

Incomers should absorb into Britain and adopt our ways, that's what people always say. Yet the country is changing all the time.

A modern Britain has to adapt and move forward, embracing what is new while retaining our old traditions.

So it's not only immigrant communities which have to change, it is the country itself that has to re-shape.

So there you go, all that from a thin bit of material.