FOUR councils have removed hot cross buns from school menus to avoid offending children from non-Christian religions.

Tower Hamlets, Liverpool, York and Wolverhampton have stopped serving them for fear that they could provoke protests from Muslim, Hindu or Jewish students or their parents. It is the first time that councils, rather than individual schools, have taken steps to ensure that hot cross buns are not served to pupils.

Tower Hamlets, in East London, acted after objections to pancakes being served on Shrove Tuesday. A spokesman said that the council was moving away from a religious theme for Easter. “We can’t risk a similar outcry over Easter like we had on pancake day. We will probably be serving naan breads instead.”

More than a third of the population of Tower Hamlets is Bangladeshi, the highest in Britain.

Liverpool council said that the symbol of the Cross had the “potential to offend”, so it had banned the buns.

Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that the decisions were “very bizarre”, particularly when Britain was about to go to war. He said that the bans were an attempt to respect religious sensitivities, but it was “taking things a bit too far”. Serving hot cross buns was “not very serious” and was not likely to offend Muslims, Mr Sacranie said.

Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP, said: “It’s not as if eating a hot cross bun automatically makes you a born-again Christian.”

The controversy follows a head teacher’s decision this month to ban books containing stories about pigs from some classes in case they offended Muslims. Barbara Harris removed the literature, including The Three Little Pigs, from under-sevens classes at Park Road Junior, Infant and Nursery School in Batley, West Yorkshire. Sixty per cent of pupils are of Pakistani or Indian origin and 99 per cent of these are Muslims. The Muslim Council of Britain asked the school to end its “well-intentioned but misguided” ban.

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