I watched 10 minutes of Question Time the other evening for the first time in ages. I probably won’t again. Richard Madeley? I mean, really? The memory of it has been bugging me ever since.

He was asked about women wearing the niqab. A summary of what he said (I think - it was kind of hard to unpick) is as follows: the niqab shouldn’t be banned, but women mustn’t be allowed to wear it in public. Now that’s some fine semantics.

Perhaps predictably his empty-headed rhetoric got a rapturous reception and provoked equally muddled opinions in support. The consensus seemed to be that ‘many women’ are forced to wear the niqab and therefore it should be outlawed. Three observations ...

1. Who are these ‘many women’? Nobody produced any stats. Now, I could be doing the audience and (most of) the panel an injustice, and maybe they know facts and figures I don’t. But isn’t it more likely they were parroting second hand stories of isolated examples they’d read about? How many is ‘many’? Is that one woman in two, in 20, in 2000? A statistic without a number is, after all, not really a statistic at all.

2. Even if some women are forced to wear the niqab, is that a reason to ban it? If I forced my wife to dress in nothing but a fig
leaf, you wouldn’t outlaw the fig leaf but my coercion. Sure, it might be hard to prove ... but so are all cases of marital abuse, whatever the cultural heritage of those concerned.

3. To ban something as petty as an item of clothing sets a fundamentally dangerous precedent and is therefore only justifiable in situations of extreme threat. Are we currently in such a situation? No we’re not. Has any act of terrorism been carried out on UK soil by someone wearing a niqab? No. I would suggest that the media clamour is less symptom of our fear than exemplar of its cause.

Over the last few years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time staying with friends on Zanzibar. A predominantly Muslim island, there is palpable disapproval when a tourist woman walks the streets of Stonetown in a bikini. Sometimes she might attract a comment, perhaps even a word or two of abuse. But bikinis are not banned and if anyone attacked that woman the cops would come down like a ton of bricks. After all, the Zanzibari government recognises the value of tourism to the island.

Personally, I disapprove of the tourists’ behaviour and cultural insensitivity ... But, different strokes and all that. And I suggest that those who disapprove of the niqab in the UK adopt the same attitude. After all, little has more value than our attempted multiculture - it is to be protected; if not at any cost then certainly at a higher price than we, as a society, have so far been asked to pay.

A couple of months ago, I went to a posh restaurant to celebrate my parents’ anniversary. I turned up in jeans and trainers and my dad was noticeably embarrassed. But he didn’t turn me away. To be honest, if I’d arrived in a frock and high heels, he probably wouldn’t have turned me away either; though full SS regalia might have tipped it. These things are, after all, relative. And the point about legislation is it allows for no such thing.

The last refuge of the banning lobby on Question Time was the playground argument that some Muslim countries are intolerant of Western mores ... They might as well have proposed that our dad was, indeed, bigger than their dad.

We have repeatedly taken to the pulpit as defenders of freedom. If we really believe our own claims, therefore, we cannot be drawn into petty prejudice -  you don’t champion freedom by attempting to curtail it. And so it is that debates like those on Question Time illuminate less about the subject concerned than our
crippling hypocrisy.

Incidentally, and with no connection, I’m currently rereading Nick Laird’s ‘Glover’s Mistake’. I don’t read that many contemporary novels once, let alone twice. He is a brilliant writer. Although the loathsome characters are sometimes a turn-off, I find the tongue-tip accuracy of his description and wit breathtaking. My admiration just about outweighs my jealousy. It also has a lovely cover and the protagonist is called David Pinner, like one of the ensemble of ‘Jerusalem’. So there we are …