There are no ‘Burqa Bans’ on the Continent
Miles Faber
The newest MP for Reform stood up last Wednesday to ask her first question to the house;
“Given the prime minister’s desire to strengthen strategic alignment with our European neighbours, will he in the interests of public safety follow the lead of France, Denmark, Belgium and others and ban the burqa?”
Although couched in the language of “following our European partners” it demonstrated an unsurprising amount of ignorance about how burqa bans actually function in Europe. Take Belgium. In May 2012, less than one year after they implemented their ban, riots broke out in Molenbeek when two police agents asked a woman to remove the garment.
Since then, the enforcement rate has been very low; and in the rare event a burqa wearer is encountered the punishment almost always amounts to a warning. Is there any doubt that in the country of two tier commissioners, grooming gang cover ups and hate-speech arrests the police would behave any differently than to that of Belgium? Or that, as Kemi Badenoch has suggested, any sane employer would risk race riots to enforce their own sumptuary rules on staff?
Even in the Netherlands where the ban only applies to hospitals, schools and government offices it is still rarely enforced. Besides, as already ruled by the ECHR in both Belgium (2017) and France (2014) the law is only compatible with the Convention on Human Rights insofar as it bans all full face coverings. There is no such thing as a burqa ban in countries party to the Convention. There are only general bans on all face coverings, which given the extra discretion judges are given in common law jurisdictions, will be applied selectively.
Despite this omission, her question was unwittingly indicative of British parliamentary discourse becoming much more continental. Such crowd-pleasing banalities are the lifeblood of European parliaments and almost the only industry of their members.
Without even the fig-leaf of “constituency surgeries” and other social work, the members of proportionally representational lower houses cannot retreat to asking the minister if he agrees that his constituency deserves a new swimming pool. The result is a race to the bottom of easy, cost-free ‘wins’ for publicity or to merely justify their €144,000 p/a salary.
About a dozen motions go through the Dutch lower house on a normal day — the majority of which are no longer than a typical question to the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. Below, as a case in point, was last Tuesday's activity for a one-man right-wing faction, Joost Eerdmans, who broke away from the larger FvD shortly before the 2021 election.
Translated:
1. “Criminalise the glorification of female genital mutilation”
2. “Ban protests outside NATO headquarters”
3. “Pay for the vandalism to the University of Amsterdam with damages recovered from the protestors.”
This is just one man on one day but thousands of similar motions have been introduced and hundreds more passed in the last five years. It is only the lamentable but inevitable ending of a populist leader who built his profile on a successful ban of the burqa, a proposed banning of the Koran and a promise to ban all Mosques.
For Reform, with only five MPs, Pochin’s question may have only caused a hurried clarification of Reform party policy — but such bovine exercises in egotistical publicity building cannot be afforded in government.
So my message to Britain and Farage is thus: heed the warning of the ghost of the Premiership yet-to-come and nip those calls in the bud or the clink of Old Geert Marley’s chains will allow you no more sleep until the clock strikes 2034.
“Will the Prime Minister commit to making XL Bully glorification and propaganda a criminal offense?”
“Does the Prime Minister agree with me brown sauce goes on his chip butty every morning and not red sauce?”