Peregrinations

Burkini ban is undisguised nonsense

Anthony Peregrine

I’ve been spending time at the beach recently, trying to fill it up. Visitor numbers to the southern French coast are down by 20 per cent so far this summer, the drop largely due to absent foreigners. (Come on – it’s holiday time, the sun’s out, perfect for the beach and the sustaining of Western values: get with the programme.) On my most recent visit, the Mistral wind blew. Some families had put up windbreaks and, nearby, another was attempting to do so with the sort of incompetence that suggested they were working to French government guidelines.

The break blew upwards and off, the children disappeared and needed fetching back, leaving mum and grandma holding the structure and almost flying away with it. Long minutes passed and still the break flapped gaily, like those lines of flags across Himalayan hillsides. The family would have maybe done better had they not all been laughing uncontrollably. This proved contagious. Everyone around was laughing, too.

It seemed to make no difference that the adult young woman – the mum, I assumed – wore a burkini, covering her top-to-toe but with face free, and the older lady (grandma?) was enshrouded under perhaps several dozen layers. We were all absolutely on the same side, windbreak-wise. And how, I wondered later, might this state of affairs have been improved if a (fully clothed) policeman had barged in upon it, insisting the younger lady change into something skimpier – or pay a £32 fine? I think everyone might have been tempted to ask the policeman: “Just who the devil do you think you are?”

Cannes has a long record of doing stupid things, but the banning of the burkini enters unmarked territory of imbecility. Defining the clothes that people wear is what religious police do in Muslim countries. we wear what we want. In attempting to solve a problem – essentially of intolerance – mayor David Lisnard has triumphantly reproduced it. He has also insisted the affected women somehow choose between duty to their country and to their religion or culture. This cannot but be divisive, creating the context for the beach barney in Corsica last weekend.

And how is the measure to be policed? In what significant detail does a burkini differ from a wetsuit? What of other women who prefer to be covered? My Welsh grandmother went to the beach as she went to church, including hat with hatpin, for it could be windy at Pendine, too. You’d have needed a company of SAS to get her out of her coat, never mind into a swimsuit. Thus idiocy piles upon idiocy. Shortly, I shall go to the beach at Cannes dressed as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Haul me in, Mr Mayor.