Boris and the burqa
Well, that didn’t take long, said Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. Four weeks after resigning as foreign secretary, Boris Johnson has made a characteristically noisy return to the “political fray”. And rather than weighing in on, say, the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, the Tory heavyweight has instead “emerged with some very strong opinions on… the burqa”. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Johnson said he opposed the bans on the full-face veils introduced in Denmark and France. But he declared it “absolutely ridiculous” that some Muslim women choose to look like “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”, and argued that MPS and other public officials should be allowed to ask that niqabs and burqas be removed during meetings. His language was “demeaning, insensitive and unnecessary”, said Hashim Bhatti, a Tory councillor, in The Guardian. The backlash was fierce: Theresa May backed a call by the party chairman, Brandon Lewis, for Johnson to apologise, saying his remarks “obviously” offended people. Johnson, though, refused to say sorry. This is a clear test for the Conservatives, who have been worryingly tolerant of anti-muslim rhetoric in recent years: Zac Goldsmith’s disgraceful mayoral campaign, for instance, tried to smear Sadiq Khan as an extremist. Eager to bash Labour over anti-semitism, the Tories seem oddly reluctant to “tackle Islamophobia” within their own ranks.
Sorry, but Boris has nothing to apologise for, said Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. A “ghastly” symbol of patriarchal oppression, the burqa belongs “in the dystopian nightmare of The Handmaid’s Tale, not on British high streets”. Indeed, most British people probably think he didn’t go “far enough”: some 57% of voters told Yougov in 2016 that they supported a full burqa ban. The depiction of Boris as some “poundshop Mussolini” only shows that we can no longer say anything “even remotely critical about Islam”, said Brendan O’neill on his Spectator blog. His whole argument was that Muslims should be allowed to wear burqas – even if he, himself, doesn’t approve of them. What’s wrong with that? Just as people are entitled to exercise their religious or moral beliefs, “the rest of us must have the right to criticise and even ridicule those convictions”.
Of course it’s fine to debate the burqa, said Will Gore in The Independent – but politicians shouldn’t descend to “name-calling”. What worries me is that Johnson clearly knew exactly what he was doing. This wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark; it was a carefully written newspaper column designed to stoke division and pander to his grass-roots base. As Donald Trump has shown so clearly, there is “political mileage in targeting minorities” – and Boris, “ever the opportunist”, seems to be giving it a go. “These are febrile times,” said The Times. Extremism is on the rise both on the Left and the Right. Leading politicians should consider the consequences, “and put a stop to inflammatory talk”.