At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, newly-elected Reform MP Sarah Pochin used her time to ask the Prime Minister whether he would follow the lead of other European countries like France and Belgium and “ban the burqa”. Given Keir Starmer’s record of implementing policies which immediately fail, one would be forgiven for thinking he would enact this doomed-to-fail policy, too, but alas, the Prime Minister immediately declined to “follow her down that line”.
Pochin’s question sparked controversy, not least within Reform’s ranks, as the Party’s chairman Zia Yusuf took to social media to decry the question as “dumb”, highlighting that a burqa ban is not party policy; Yusuf promptly stood down from his role amid this controversy. Lee Anderson, the Reform MP for Ashfield, however, was quick to defend Pochin, stating that he is in favour of such a ban as nobody “should be allowed to hide their identity in public”. Anderson received many supportive replies, especially from anonymous social media users who, er, chose to hide their identity.
Paddington would never ban the burqa
The question also sparked controversy across Westminster as various parliamentarians criticised the idea of a burqa ban as the antithesis of Britishness. Paddington would never ban the burqa. Perhaps the most vocal voice in this debate was the newly-elected Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Maidenhead, Joshua Reynolds, who at the ripe old age of twenty-five took his seat from the former Prime Minister Theresa May, who had held it from before Reynolds was born.
Reynolds took to X to condemn the argument, stating that there is “nothing British about the Government telling you what you can, and can’t wear”. There are many professions where being consistently wrong is commonplace (one notable exception being writing opinion columns in these pages, haw-haw) but one would expect legislators to at least have a rudimentary understanding about the history of legislation in the country they work in. For in Britain, laws telling people what they can and cannot wear have been commonplace for the better part of a millennium.
In 1188, in response to the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin, King Henry II introduced the Saladin Tithe, a levy of 10 per cent on revenue and movable properties to fund the Third Crusade, as well as to encourage participation in it, as those who joined the crusade were exempt from the tithe.
There were also some further clauses, however, which made this more than just a tax. Roger of Hoveden, an English chronicler writing at the time, notes in his annals that it was “also enacted that … no one was after the ensuing Easter to wear beaver, or gris, or sable, or scarlet”. I wonder if Mr Reynolds views King Henry II as lacking in British spirit. He was, essentially, French, I suppose.
Another Frenchman, King Edward III of England, enacted a sumptuary law in 1363 which sought to drastically reduce the freedoms that people of lower social classes sought to exercise through their fashion choices.
In the wake of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, the population of England was reduced to around half its normal level, precipitating vast labour shortages and subsequent increased labour costs as fewer people took on an increased workload. This meant that clothiers and merchants, viewed at this time as the lowest of the middle classes, were able to amass wealth and power deemed above their station.
The law, A Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel 1363, therefore aimed to control what these members of the lower classes wore to curb social mobility and prohibit them from being able to portray themselves as members of the upper classes; in the words of the statute itself, the common folk were wearing “Outrageous and Excessive Apparel of divers People, against their Estate and Degree, to the great Destruction and Impoverishment of all the Land”. One can almost imagine a fourteenth century Lee Anderson bellowing this at court amid calls for “common sense peasant garb” and the renaming of the French king to “Philip the Woke”.
A similar statute was enacted by Queen Elizabeth in 1574, which stated that the “excess of apparel and superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares … is grown by sufferance to such an extremity that the manifest decay of the whole realm generally is like to follow”. Scandals abounded around Shakespeare’s plays, notable for having cross-dressers and decorative costumes. One individual, Richard Walweyn, a common servant, was imprisoned around this time for padding his trousers to give him more shapely legs, in the style of the Elizabethan nobility, requiring him to wear “a very monstrous and outraygeous greate payre of hose”. He was locked up until he could prove he owned different trousers.
Much legislation still exists which exercises control over what individuals may or may not wear
Indeed, in our modern era, much legislation still exists which exercises control over what individuals may or may not wear. It is still illegal to have an absence of clothing as per the Sexual Offences Act 2003; it is a legal requirement to wear a helmet on a motorcycle under the Motor Cycles (Protective Helmets) Regulations 1998, unless you are a Sikh, as per the Road Traffic Act 1988; facial coverings can be ordered to be removed in certain circumstances under the Criminal and Disorder Act 1998.
Additionally, as was highlighted recently through the unresolved case of Kneecap member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, it is an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000 to wear clothing or carry items that arouse reasonable suspicion that the person is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, that man renowned for encouraging the flouting of Elizabethan sumptuary laws: I speak not to disprove what Jonathan Reynolds spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. Many laws have existed, and continue to exist, throughout British and English history which regulate and restrict the kinds of clothing people are allowed to wear. The vast majority of these laws have been enacted with the idea of public safety in mind, albeit a view of public safety proceeding from the minds of those with power.
The question remains, however, thus: how much does contemporary Britain have in common with what it means to be truly British? For Reynolds, and those like him, such ideas about banning certain kinds of clothing may simply not appear British because his entire Weltanschauung is built upon the idea of Britain as crucible of diversity, as a receptacle for cultural enrichment and mass immigration. Why would our current legislators bother knowing what was law, and why, several hundred years ago? Today’s Britain is different, and there are few incentives for caring about this once-great nation’s past.
