Those silly French, according to a commentator in The Independent. They are trying to impose a centrist set of values. It won’t work, and worse, will bring on the martyrs.
No doubt they are, and no doubt it will. But the same arguments, precisely, have been used to oppose every re-negotiation of the state-individual boundary – seat-belts, voting-age, you name it.
Adrian Hamilton even finds the near-unanimous vote objectionable: the politicians, he says are doing it for their own interests. Gosh.
Equality for women is a central state value nowadays, and the law is, amongst other things, an expression of state values. Women of course differ among themselves about the burqa. But those who approve of it always concentrate on women who have chosen to wear it, conveniently overlooking all the other women for whom it is the outward and visible sign of female subjection. This difference reproduces the old argument between feminists and women who want to be ‘women’. The feminists won that one, and let’s hope they continue to prevail here.