Freedom should guide our rules on dress codes

Among the most uplifting images of last year were photographs of women escaping from Isil-controlled territory, yanking off their burkas the moment they reached freedom. Almost everyone who saw those pictures, conservative or liberal, Christian, Muslim or atheist, tasted a measure of their joy. A basic principle of an open society is that we are allowed to wear what we like.

How, then, does that principle apply when it comes to countries banning, rather than enforcing, Islamic dress codes?

Logically, it is the same issue: governments ought not to tell us what to wear. But people are not always logical. Those most outraged at the sumptuary laws of Iran rarely complain about burkas being outlawed in Belgium.

Part of our liberal confusion comes from the fact that the issue of dress has become mixed up with that of racial discrimination.

Because outward signs of religious devotion in Europe were largely worn, at least at first, by ethnic minorities, the question was addressed not in terms of state power but in terms of anti-racism. And anti-racism, of course, is the highest card in the Leftist deck, trumping free contract, feminism and secularism.

Hence the reaction when the chief inspector of education made a measured intervention in support of a school that wanted to enforce a uniform code excluding hijabs.

Teaching unions accused the head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, of “naked racism dressed up as liberalism”. In fact, she had got the balance exactly right.

Just as it is wrong for the state to ban hijabs in all schools – as Austria, for example, has just proposed doing – so it is the right of any school to pick the uniform it likes.

The corollary of personal freedom is freedom of association. You can wear what you like in your own time, but your employer can insist on a dress code at work.

You can wear a hoodie or a veil in a public space, but a shopping centre is entitled to require people to show their faces if they want to use its premises. These are – or ought to be – elemental tenets of a free society.

Those tenets don’t cease to apply when we happen to disapprove of a particular item of dress. I have always loathed those Che Guevara T-shirts, for example. In my book, wearing one is morally equivalent to donning a T-shirt with the features of Myra Hindley. But there is a difference between disliking something and disallowing it, and in that difference is contained the entirety of a free society.

I’m glad to live in a country that – unlike France or China – allows people to dress in any way they please, up to the point of public indecency. I also want to live in a country where independent bodies are free to impose their own rules on those who choose to associate with them.

Is that principle really so difficult?