It’s banned in Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Tunisia,  China, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. There are also tons of partial bans, in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Burqa bans have regularly been upheld by the courts.

In short, however you personally feel about the burqa, its restriction has become a routine and largely uncontested part of the life of many countries and territories, and discussions about banning, or further banning, are ongoing in lots of locations.

It’s a thing, babe, in Morocco as much as in Italy.

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Now, UD‘s own US, largely because it’s so large (most people here don’t ever encounter burqas), hasn’t had anything to say about burqas; but, well, England. Now England…

England’s the big holdout; no burqa bans here!

Many of its neighbors, as we see, have gone the total or partial ban route.

And at the very least, these neighbors don’t consider mere debate about the burqa to be an abomination. How can it be, considering what’s going on in the world with the garment? Do you really want to hold yourself snobbily aloof from this widely shared/discussed concern?

Embarrassingly, yes. An MP brought the matter up in PM’s Questions the other day – the sort of thing one would expect to happen, and one would want to be prepared for – and got a fierce appalled Lady Bracknell put-down from the PM and others.

I mean how dare you. How dare you.

It is amusing – embarrassingly so – that England continues to feign indignation that anyone, anywhere, would have the nerve…

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Here’s the deal. The story is now all over the British press, which means the latent unhappiness in much of the population with full facial veiling is now being made manifest.

Dig. You’re supposed to shut up about the burqa and keep it out of the press precisely because the moment you break the uncomfortable national silence about it, millions of Brits will realize that now that you mention it they are quite unhappy with the thing.

I mean, uh, strong majorities, when asked, support a ban.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the government’s attempt to strangle vox populi through incredulous contempt will work.