England’s forthcoming cricket match against Afghanistan should not be cancelled amid calls for a boycott over the Taliban’s treatment of women, the Culture Secretary has said.

A cross-party group of more than 160 MPs and peers have signed a letter urging the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to sit out next month’s fixture at the Champions Trophy in Lahore as a moral objection to the Taliban regime’s ongoing assault on women’s rights in the country.

Cabinet minister Lisa Nandy said the match should go ahead so as not to penalise the England team’s players, but suggested British dignitaries should snub the event.

“I do think it should go ahead,” the Culture Secretary told BBC Breakfast when asked about a boycott of the match.

She added: “I’m instinctively very cautious about boycotts in sports, partly because I think they’re counterproductive.

“I think they deny sports fans the opportunity that they love, and they can also very much penalise the athletes and the sports people who work very, very hard to reach the top of their game, and then they’re denied the opportunities to compete.

“They are not the people that we want to penalise for the appalling actions of the Taliban against women and girls.”

However, she insisted the UK should not be “rolling out the red carpet” at the event, likening it to her stance on China’s Winter Olympics in 2022.

Ms Nandy said: “When China hosted the Winter Olympics, I was very vocal, many of us were very vocal, about making sure that we didn’t send dignitaries to that event, that we didn’t give them the PR coup that they were looking for when they were forcibly incarcerating the Uighur in Xinjiang.”

The ECB is resisting the idea of unilateral action by forfeiting the game, with chief executive Richard Gould advocating for a collective response from counterparts at the International Cricket Council.

That stance has received political backing from Number 10, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s official spokesman suggesting the onus remained with the sport’s governing body.