It would discriminate directly against Muslims, irrespective of whether they wore the burqa or not in the first place. This would set us back centuries in our constitutional development. It would be a heavy defeat for the side of liberty, a battle lost where so much has been won over the centuries right back to Catholic Emancipation, our right to habeus corpus, and more recently the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Rather than being a symbol of Islamism’s triumph, the burqa’s continued legal presence in Britain constitutes a triumph for British values of tolerance under the law.
