SEVERAL constituents have contacted me recently to raise their concern about the implementation of sharia law in the UK.

Such a concern in Ringwood or Fordingbridge is not as absurd as it may at first seem.

The fact is that, although we might not experience sharia ourselves, many of us read the stories in national newspapers, and they are full of it.

I can recall several “scare” stories in the Sunday papers announcing the implementation of sharia in England, which prompted a spike in my correspondence.

But the actual detail of those stories rarely justify their screaming headline.

The most recent example was a front page story in the Sunday Telegraph last month which, if you took the headline at face value, might have led you to believe we were all to be immediately subject to sharia in civil legal cases.

The story however, amounted to no more than a seminar organised by the Law Society (a professional body representing solicitors) to enable its members to gain sufficient expertise to offer services in the growing market for sharia-compliant wills.

Of course, whatever might be in a sharia-compliant will, or any other will for that matter, if it is to apply in England, has to be in accordance with English law and public policy.

For any aspect of sharia to apply in this country, if it is at odds with our existing law, it will first require an act of Parliament – and I do not see any prospect of that. Does this mean that the concerns expressed by my constituents are entirely misplaced? I don’t believe so. On the contrary, they are right to be concerned. Sharia does exist here, even if only as voluntary code. People are entirely at liberty to settle their disagreements and disputes privately without taking them to court. Families and reasonable people do it all the time. It saves time, expense and heartache.

Indeed, government policy is actively encouraging divorcing couples to settle their disputes amicably, or with the assistance of conciliation services, and only to resort to the courts as the very last resort.

Equally, in a free society, there is no reason why people shouldn’t voluntarily take their disputes to a sharia council to be settled. Of course, if they don’t like the outcome, they can still take the matter to court.

The difficulties arise when vulnerable individuals are not sure of their rights and where families and community peer pressure might coerce them to take a dispute to a sharia council and to abide by its judgement, less than entirely willingly.

I believe that it is our failure to address the dangers of culturally closed communities that has allowed all sorts of abominations, such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation, to arise and persist.

We need, therefore, to be vigilant about the possibility of sharia councils, however voluntary, acting as a mechanism that closes off a distinct community from the mores and values of the rest of us – one of the lessons I drew from the Prime Minister’s exhortation a fortnight ago, when he said we should be more evangelical about our Christian values.

We need to uphold and champion these values, and not apologise for them.

But we should do so with humility, because it is only relatively recently that we have embraced some of the most important standards implicit in teaching of Christ, and for the absence of which we might be rightly critical of sharia. It is, after all, less than a century ago that we afforded half our population one of the most basic of political rights, so we have no cause to be smug.