Britain’s tribute to the Musk v Trump moment – when Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf flounced out last Thursday after the party’s newest MP Sarah Pochin called for a ban on the burka – turned out to be a short-stay hissy fit.
Within two days, after a lot of “I love you really, mate,” bro-motional calls with the one and only Reform figure who counts – Nigel Farage – Yusuf was back, albeit in a new role.
Further personnel dramas are guaranteed in a small, surging party dominated by a handful of big male egos and competing power centres. More substantially, the row has revived a topic long sidelined by the main parties but which rumbles underneath debates on ethnic integration: how should a pluralist society treat the wearing of face and body coverings in observation of the more puritanical versions of Islamic observance?
Reform treads a line here between avoiding the outright nativism and knee-jerk hostility to political Islam of the rising Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), while not alienating sympathisers of its own who are more virulently Islam-sceptic.
The fact that Pochin chose the subject as her first Prime Minister’s Question was to Yusuf’s frustration. He thought it a “dumb” choice, as a ban is not party policy, and he is personally equivocal on the matter: he told The Sunday Times he is “a bit uneasy about banning things which would be unconstitutional in the United States, which such a ban no doubt would be”.
But being stricter on symbols of separation also appeals to a strong gut feeling among many people that the face-covering of young women goes against the grain of an open society. If liberals are too mimsy in their beliefs to take this on, then such sceptical voters are open to hearing from parties on the Right on the matter.
Labour is often uncomfortable when trying to decide where it strikes the balance between a live-and-let-live tolerance of groups who spend much of their domestic and community lives apart from the wider society, and promoting greater cohesion. The problems of that are apparent in growing community tensions.
Those tensions tend to surface in the worst of circumstances: there was simmering discord over how to handle the aftermath of Pakistani grooming gangs offending with impunity, and the underlying aggression towards second-generation immigrants revealed in the Southport riots.
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The face-covering question is a lightning conductor for a lot of raw emotion, as well as a tricky policy choice. It irritates those on the Reform/Conservative cusp, who would like to see it tackled in the manner of the hardline secular French state – which bans the practice in public buildings, administrative jobs and schools. It’s a trend followed in some German states, Austria and some Spanish cities.
For the Tories, Kemi Badenoch was loath to allow a good Reform row go to waste and added her take: employers should be permitted to ban staff from wearing burkas and other face coverings in the workplace, describing Sharia law as “nonsense”, and highlighting a growing unease at the high rate of first-cousin marriage in some Muslim communities.
None of this is especially new, but it is an argument moving back to the heart of politics at a time of greater suspicion of immigration and asylum – and of its downstream consequences. I first covered it when former Labour home secretary Jack Straw broached a difficult topic with a degree of tact missing from today’s noisy arguments, when he said in 2006 that he asked women who came to his constituency surgeries to remove face coverings to converse with him.
He did not say what his response was if they refused; the problem with mandating changes to face-covering is that the policy must be implemented in an agreed number of settings to be legally effective, or else it becomes unenforceable without the inverse of Iran’s morality police chasing around to tell women what to wear.
Boris Johnson last broached it in 2018 with comments on women in the full-body niqab “looking like letterboxes” and “bank robbers”, only to conclude that an outright ban was not a good idea. David Cameron avoided that trap but assigned some modest language-lesson funding for second-generation immigrant women who do not speak English well.
In the way of on-the-hoof Cameron-era remedies, there was no strong impact study which told us which women were then targeted to take part and what the outcome was.
But integration and the costs of not taking it seriously do matter. Labour has long had a quiet determination to not “go there” too rigorously. The insistent Reform challenge may put an end to that omerta.
In this new context, the face veil is an easy focus for a quick and heated exchange. But parties which intend to be more serious – and less merely cynical – will need to think more about what they want to do about it than a vague plan to outlaw a symbol of separation.
Pochin will likely be asked by Reform’s multiple bosses to move her attention to something else on behalf of the residents of her Runcorn and Helsby constituency: the subject, however, won’t go away.
Anne McElvoy is co-host of the Sky News/Politico podcast Politics at Sam and Anne’s
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