The impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Norway Debate, Sir Geoffrey Howe savaging Margaret Thatcher – great parliamentary moments all. No matter how long our country lasts, or how low our descendants’ standards stoop, we can be confident no session of the current PMQs will be counted in their number. Every week, the stoppable force of Kemi Badenoch meets the movable object of Sir Keir Starmer, and the nation switches over to Homes Under the Hammer.
Fair play then to Sarah Pochin, Reform’s newest MP, for lobbing a grenade into the event a few days ago, asking whether, since the Prime Minister is a Europhile, he would be tempted to join the many countries on the continent which ban the wearing of the burqa. The Prime Minister does not, in Prime Minister’s Questions, like to provide Prime Ministerial answers and this case was no different. There was a bit of waffle and a poorly disguised pivot to his now habitual attack line – Nigel Farage is Liz Truss with a pint and a fag.
To be fair to Ms Pochin, it was not entirely clear what her own position was and to be fair to Reform UK, it is not entirely clear what the party’s position is either. Its leader appeared sympathetic on his GB News show, its chairman said it was something it would never do. One of its MPs (a man who, if he did not exist would have been invented by a BBC3 sketch show) took to X to back the idea: “no one should be allowed to hide their identity in public”. Policy, one feels, is being made on the hoof. As the government’s is over the Winter Fuel Payment. As, no doubt, would the Tories’ be, if policy were a trifle they felt they needed to concern themselves with.
Reform UK makes much of its commitment to British values. It claims, on the front page of its website to be the only party which will stand up for them. Their rivals, no doubt, disagree. But defining British values, as any observer of the country’s politics will know, is remarkably tricky. That’s why most attempts end up with some sort of bland blancmange which could be accepted by anyone between California and Cracow.
It was not always thus, though. Three centuries ago, history’s greatest Frenchman came to these shores and liked what he saw. Voltaire (who did you think I meant? That raggedy-arse Napoleon?) spent three years in England between 1726 and 1729 and came to consider the country, in contrast to his own Ancien Régime France, as almost the perfect form of commonwealth.
At the heart of what he saw as the English Miracle, he placed toleration, particularly religious toleration. The first seven of his twenty-four Letters on the English deal with the various sects he met, some of whom, like the Quakers, he liked, others like the Presbyterians, he didn’t. The key point, however, was that all were free to practice their religion as they chose. In contrast to his own country which had abandoned toleration with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, “An Englishman, as a free man, goes to Heaven by whatever path he chooses.”
From this, everything else flowed. England was rich and powerful because England was tolerant. Leaving each to their own allowed them to come together and give their best. In the London Stock Exchange, where capital was raised for the voyages that would build the Empire, “Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.”
Voltaire’s view was, undoubtedly idealised, but it was persuasive. Subsequent generations of Europeans hymned England as the land of liberty (Ian Buruma’s Voltaire’s Garden is an excellent history of continental Anglophilia). As do Americans who decry its recent apparent backsliding over free speech, similar, perhaps to Obi-Wan raging, “You were the chosen one” to Anakin when he turns to the dark side.
Idealised or not, compared to most countries Britain’s government was remarkably hands-off, declining to interfere in a whole range of activities other states considered within their purview. An English scientist who wanted to publish an experiment in the 18th century just had to find a publisher, a French one needed permission from the Academy of Sciences – which might take decades to decide. Here, things were “legal until they were illegal”, there, they were “illegal until they were legal”. The “Realm of Manners” in Lord Moulton’s famous phrase, the space in which the state left its citizens to just sort themselves out (hiding their faces in public, for example), was far wider than anywhere else. Which is why, before the first world war, an Englishman could, in AJP Taylor’s words, “pass through life and barely notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman.”
The past is the past, but as the hero in Gladiator says, what we do echoes in eternity. In the aftermath of October 7, European countries banned pro-Palestinian marches, as Voltaire would have expected. Britain didn’t, as he would also have expected. So far, so English. But he wouldn’t expect us to ban the burqa – that wouldn’t be the England he knew. It wouldn’t be the England he loved, and it wouldn’t be the England he would have had the rest of the world become. It would be the petty, interfering authoritarian Europe he hated.
So, we have a paradox. As Ms Pochin noted, many European countries have voted to ban the burqa. Given their history and culture, they would do no other. But Reform UK grew out of a campaign to leave Europe. To preserve distinct British values against continental over-reach. Why, then, do so many of its leading figures now wish to ape them? How can you stand up for British Values when you wish to abandon the most distinctively British value of all?
Reform UK were not, of course, the only people who wanted to leave Europe. I remember another chap, blond, I think, who was involved in the campaign. He famously wrote a column lampooning the burqa while defending the right to wear it. Free speech and tolerance. Voltaire would have liked him. He would have thought him a proper Englishman.
Author’s Note: Shortly after this article was submitted, the Chairman of Reform resigned.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
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The issue with the burqa is quite clear – to most people. To stand up for freedom we must not allow the oppressive to take hold. The burqa is not a ‘religious requirement’ of Islam – it is a result of Islam’s demand for submission and, in this case, the subjugation and devaluing of women. To allow the burqa is to allow oppression of women and the devaluing of their societal status, rather like going back before female emancipation, only worse. Just as allowing the growth of Islamism and the sectarianism it brings with it, is allowing the very foundations of a free society to be dug away so the whole structure is cracked until eventually it falls down and breaks up under the attack of fundamentalist Islam. A naive view of Islam leads to the endangerment of freedom.
Quite. Islam is increasingly political and not just another religion. Headscarves and face coverings are symbols of women’s chattel status and separateness and less voluntary for many women than the middle class chattering class would have us believe. In their daily lives Catholics, Protestants and Methodists are indistinguishable mostly and are tolerant. Religion is a private matter. But, an increasing number of muslims emphasise difference and a tolerant religion it is not. How should a tolerant society cope with the intolerant, with a religion that does not permit equality of women? With a movement that in effect is colonising? It may be un-English to ban, but it is very English to mock and satirise, to lampoon, to point the finger., but that very English trait is denied to us by recategorising our long established culture as “hate’ speech. Modern day Hogarths and Punch are no longer allowed. The human face is an integral part of communication, of participation and denying women their face is de-humanising. Islam and its apologists in the establishment media is not just another religion. It really isn’t.
Where do we though draw the line? The simplest solution i.e. no head/face obscuring coverings, then immediately comes into conflict with hats, helmets, ‘covid’ masks, party masks, robbers’ stockings, and nun’s wimples etc.
Why not be honest and say Islamic female dress headcoverings, that obscure full facial recognition, are simply unacceptable in a non-Islamic state and list the reasons why.
BTW, will Reform now accept that dabbling with Islam isn’t sensible as it’s so easy to rile adherents?