Outside the cocktail bar in my Brighton hotel was a sign listing which clothing “for everyone’s safety and enjoyment” could not be worn. Among the usual snoot-based prohibition on shellsuits and trainers, was “fancy dress, in particular, masks”. The hotel’s reckoning, I suppose, was that a reveller wearing a creepy rubber Saw mask could unnerve fellow drinkers, feel special licence to misbehave and then be harder to bring to account.
In what circumstances should we be permitted to hide our faces from public view? And when do we have a right to insist that our fellow citizens reveal theirs? This week UK Uncut campaigners expressed outrage that the Government might bring in new powers to remove balaclavas and scarves used to conceal the identities of those involved in dandy-anarchist “actions” such as the Fortnum & Mason occupation.
It was a disappointing backward slide for a campaign that showed initial modernity and brilliance. UK Uncut’s original thesis was that if Vodafone or Sir Philip Green contrived to avoid taxes on billions made from British people they were flouting the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.
Against an austerity backdrop, targeting corporate tax-dodging had real mass appeal. Imagine the boardroom tremors if even 10 per cent of Vodafone customers moved their accounts or spokes-celebrities were persuaded to say that, for squirrelling away profits in Monaco at the NHS’s expense, Top Shop was totally uncool. But instead UK Uncut has fallen into an unfocused, “smash the rich” infantilism reminiscent of the 1980s amusing but marginal anarcho-nutjobs Class War.
And the increased use of masks by Uncut members is symptomatic of its drift from the mainstream. Covering the face manifests your social separation, your rejection of the rule of law for your own value system. As a Brighton Uncut blogger asks: “Is a row of Boris bikes a legitimate target? No. Bikes are a good thing. Is it legitimate to spray paint over the Barclays logo on each Boris bike? Well, that’s probably an individual’s choice and it ultimately harms only the brand, not the bicycle. So OK . . .”
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A mask makes you an outlaw, bandit, fugitive, a rebel waging war against the State. In Iran or Libya pro-democracy protesters have cause to conceal themselves from arbitrary terror or secret police. Less so those daubing “Read Chomsky!”
on an Oxford Street branch of the Halifax.
A masked demonstration is unnerving and sinister, whether it is the Ku Klux Klan or the right-wing March for England group who waved Union Jacks through Luton wearing masks bearing the horned face of Sayful Islam, an extremist who disrupted a homecoming parade of troops. And it is no less intimidating when it is a group of disguised men and burka-clad Muslim Brotherhood supporters gathering outside the Egyptian Embassy with signs saying “Democracy will bring oppression” and “Allah’s law not man-made law”.
If, in Bluewater Shopping Centre, boys are told to remove hoodies because their anonymity is a threat; if in Parliament no member may wear a hat in the chamber lest it disguise his identity; if Theresa May is set to bring in special powers to remove balaclava helmets during the royal wedding, is it right that the burka be exempt?
In nine days, France will start implementing the law it passed in October imposing €150 fines on any woman who covers her face in the street or in public buildings.
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Presenting this Bill, the French Government argued that it was to protect community life and “to ensure the dignity of the person and equality between sexes”. The Netherlands already prohibits all public facial coverings — except at specific carnival times — judging that it “hinders eye contact, which testifies to mutual respect”.
Should the burka be excluded from Theresa May’s legislation? There are those who argue a cultural or religious special case. Yet the belief that covering the face is integral to being a good Muslim is disputed by many scholars. Rather it has become a symbol of political Islam and represents, just like the anarchist’s face mask, adherence to an alternative — theocratic, not democratic — set of laws. The burka puts religion before citizenship, asserts that a woman is family property, not an autonomous individual. As the Somali-born former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali said to me in an interview, “it erases her identity”.
Last summer as I stood outside a friend’s house, where our kids were having a water fight, a Land Cruiser abruptly zoomed through the quiet street far too fast, scattering the children. It was driven by a woman in a burka. Putting aside whether it is safe to drive looking through a slit — in some German states it is illegal — why did this woman have the right to conceal her identity while driving a car on a public highway?
Moreover, why is British law not seeking to protect the Muslim women who feel compelled to wear the burka? In The Islamist the author and former fundamentalist Ed Husain recalls how he and fellow Hizb ut-Tahrir members took only six months to get every Muslim girl in a Tower Hamlets college to cover up, just by quiet menace and questioning their piety in wearing Western dress.
In France, there are reports that in the six-month run-up to the burka ban, women are casting off the stifling all-concealing cloth for simple headscarves. Perhaps this is less to do with on-the-spot penalties than an aspect of the new law that has received less attention — that any man found guilty of forcing a woman to wear a burka will be liable to a fine of €30,000.
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Perhaps in Britain we should stop short of a public ban but adopt this penalty to make sure that any woman who wears the burka is doing so of her own free will. In addition, we should create a code of conduct in state schools insisting that the face is revealed to enable learning and we should forbid private Islamic schools — such as the Madani Girls’ School in East London — from imposing the burka as compulsory school uniform for girls as young as 11.
The central theme of our age is resolving how a diverse, economically divided and globally mobile population can coexist within a single state. We can only do this without fear as equal citizens, united under one law, looking each other in the face.