There is a darkly comic moment in Harold Nicolson’s diaries, when the author sits down with his old ally Sir Oswald Mosley and discusses a uniform for his New Party. Mosley says that he is thinking of black shirts. Nicolson, still innocent of his friend’s intention to turn the New Party into the British Union of Fascists, suggests that perhaps members should wear grey flannels with a marigold buttonhole.
The leadership of UKIP are almost certainly similarly ignorant of the path that they are now treading. But their new policy of banning people from wearing the burka is a step towards a very dark place indeed, for them and for their followers. They should stop now, before it is too late.
The party leadership may share Nicolson’s ignorance, but not his naivety. The call to ban the burka is deeply cynical, for the political thinking behind their policy is obvious. Very few people share UKIP’s European obsession. Indeed, in a recent poll only 3 per cent named the European Union as an important political issue. Since UKIP’s poll rating hovers at 4 per cent, this suggests that at least a quarter even of the party’s current supporters think it is being a bit of a bore. So the party has decided to change the subject. It will campaign on immigration.
It is, therefore, stirring racial discontent, for its own electoral benefit and this is reprehensible. Calling for withdrawal from the EU is respectable, if wrong-headed. Increasing fear and misunderstanding between communities is not.
The reasons it gives for its policy are transparently disingenuous. They claim that the burka marginalises women. This is a new concern for UKIP. It is, after all, the party of Godfrey Bloom, the MEP who says that “any small businessman or woman who employs a woman of child-bearing age needs their head examined”. Perhaps Mr Bloom, who thinks that women do not clean behind the fridge enough, worries that their burkas are getting in the way.
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UKIP argues further that the burka has no place in Islam and that the religion does not require it. The Times had not hitherto realised that Nigel Farage was an authority on such matters, or that the party leader Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who was visited by God when on the operating table in 1977, thereby gained not only his Christian faith but also a mastery of the Koran. This newly acquired scholarship notwithstanding, the religious insights of politicians are entirely irrelevant when judging the right of British citizens to dress as they wish.
The most offensive UKIP assertion is that wearing the burka is inconsistent with British values. Advocates of the policy then point out (without irony) that the French, whose example is rarely cited elsewhere in UKIP literature, are trying to implement a similar policy.
What is inconsistent with British values is picking on people quietly going about their business in religious garb of their own choice and banning it. If UKIP properly understood this country, it would appreciate that. There are Islamists who doubtless wish to ban Eurosceptics wearing tweed jackets over v-neck jumpers and checked shirts. And The Times would defend UKIP against such calls because freedom to worship, and freedom of speech, is the British value that matters above all others.