| Voltaire and Tolerance | ||
| It was always going to happen, but it is with great pleasure that we have seen the falling out of Elon Musk and the Donald over the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ which will increase the indebtedness of the USA by 2.4 trillion dollars – the sort of money which Musk, through his department for government efficiency (DOGE), had promised he could cut from government waste, only to find that it wasn’t there to be found. $180 billion was wrongly claimed to have been saved at one point. By slashing and burning medical aid programmes around the world, the total may be in the end perhaps around $10 billion. And he will in the process have caused many tens of thousands of preventable deaths around the world. But then they don’t have any visible ‘value’. And, stop press, it seems that Mr Musk has decided to withdraw some of his more extreme comments in an effort to rebuild some bridges with the retaliator in chief. No toleration there. But our own mini-Trump, Mr Farage, too, is having difficulty. Sarah Pochin, Reform’s newest MP, asked Sir Keir at Prime Minster’s question time whether, since the Prime Minister is an Europhile, he wished to join the many countries on the continent which ban the wearing of the burqa. The Prime Minister does not like to provide actual answers and so we don’t really know what he thinks. Neither was it entirely clear what Ms Pochin’s own position was or that of her party. One of its MPs backed the idea on X: “No-one should be allowed to hide their identity in public”. On his GB News show, Farage appeared sympathetic to the ban, but the party chairman, Zia Yusuf, a very rich former merchant banker and practising Muslim, said it was certainly not party policy and resigned. As, it seems, did the boss of Reform’s answer to DOGE who had been appointed by Yusuf. Tributes were very quickly paid by Farage and Tice to the amazing work done by their ex-chairman in obtaining funding for the party and helping to organise the party structure and so lead it to its triumph in the local elections. Having listened to their blandishments, he has changed his mind and rejoined the party. Nice to see a happy ending! Reform UK, of course, makes much of its commitment to British values. It claims, on the main page of its website, to be the only party which will stand up for them. But defining British values, as we all know, is remarkably tricky. That’s why most attempts end up with some sort of bland statement which depends greatly on fair-play and our propensity to queue. Being seen as different from our continental cousins is not though new. Three centuries ago, in 1726, the great French thinker Voltaire came to these shores to escape the Bastille and liked what he saw. He spent three years here and came to consider the country, in contrast to his own Ancien Régime France, as what a nation should be. He described the ‘English Miracle’, a miracle he saw as having been brought about by toleration, particularly religious toleration. The first seven of his twenty-four ‘Letters on the English’ deal with people from the various sects he met. The first four of those described the Quakers at length. He liked them but found them to be very odd and apt to quote parts of scripture out of context to justify their unusual ideas. The Anglicans were described in another of them and yet another was devoted to the Scottish Presbyterians, whom he didn’t like at all. They were joyless. His point was, however, that all were free to practice their religion as they chose. “An Englishman, as a free man, goes to Heaven by whatever path he chooses.” Not so in France, where the state decided on the range of permitted religions – just the one. But, in England, Voltaire tells us: “Though the Episcopal and Presbyterian sects are the two prevailing ones in Great Britain, yet all others are very welcome to come and settle in it, and live very sociably together, though most of their preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit.” He was of the view that England was rich and powerful because England was tolerant. He refers to the Royal Exchange in London as: “a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. If one religion only were allowed in England, the Government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.” Voltaire’s view influenced the thinking of subsequent generations of Europeans who praised England as the land of liberty. And compared to most countries, Britain’s government was remarkably hands-off. An English scientist who wanted to publish an experiment in the 18th century just had to find a publisher. A French one first needed permission from the Academy of Sciences, which would almost certainly involve first trying to overcome the prejudices of many conservative members. And here in England, it was said that things were “legal until they were illegal”; there, they were “illegal until they were legal”. The space which the state left its citizens to just sort themselves out was far wider than anywhere else. Which is why, before the first world war, an Englishman could, in AJP Taylor’s words, “pass through life and barely notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman.” I’m sure that Voltaire wouldn’t expect us to ban the burqa – that wouldn’t be the England he knew. It would be the authoritarian Europe he hated. So, we have a paradox. As Ms Pochin noted, France and a number of other European countries have voted to ban the burqa. Given their history and culture and the many expressly secularist constitutions, it was to be expected. But Reform UK grew out of a campaign to leave Europe, to preserve distinct British values against continental over-reach. Why, then, do so many of Reform’s leading figures now wish to ape them? Could it perhaps be racism? Surely not... On a closer analysis, however, the issue with the burqa is not actually religious. Islam does not demand it. It exists as a result of blatant misogyny, the sort which exists in the home, but which in the form of the burqa spills out into the street. Misogyny was a concept which, in Voltaire’s time would not exactly have been to the fore. So does this justify a different stance? Arguably, yes, but the question is then one of proportionality. Misogyny is to be found in many sections of society. The estimates for the use of the burqa in the UK indicate that it is in the low thousands. So then, not a major player. Do we therefore try to ban misogyny in general? A difficult task, particularly in the home where it is impossible in practice for the law to combat it. Instead, we will have to hope that the wearing of burqas will disappear as future generations see the benefits of a more egalitarian life-style. Maybe the inherent tendency for adolescents to rebel against their parents’ views will produce the result we want. 11 June 2025 Paul Buckingham |
||
|
|