Leading Conservative Party progressive Ruth Davidson has attacked Boris Johnson’s burqa comments and has equated wearing the Islamic garment with the Christian cross, while Tory arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve has threatened to quit the party should Leave campaigner Johnson become leader in what appears to be a proxy battle over Brexit.
Scottish Conservative Party leader Davidson said that said that the debate over Muslim women wearing the burqa or niqab is the same as the debate of Christians wearing a cross after she called for former foreign secretary Johnson to apologise for comparing the appearance of women in burqas to “bank robbers” or “letterboxes”.
“If you use the analogy of Christianity, would you ever write in The Telegraph that you should have a debate about banning Christians from wearing crucifixes?
“It’s the same argument but it’s in a different faith so why are the parameters different for one faith and not the other?” Ms Davidson said during an “in conversation” event with former Liberal leader Lord Steel at the Fringe by the Sea arts festival in North Berwick, East Lothian, Scotland, on Wednesday.
“I think it’s also not been shown through history that when men make sweeping statements about what women should or shouldn’t wear that it goes well for them,” Davidson, who is widely seen as a future Tory Party leader, said.
A leading figure in the progressive wing of the notionally ‘Conservative’ Party, Davidson, who is in a same-sex marriage and is expecting her first child, is an avid supporter of mass migration, a committed EU loyalist who wants Britain to keep as close links as possible with the European Union after Brexit, and has declared that her commitment to LGBT politics is more important than her party.
The debate over whether Johnson’s comments should result in him having the whip removed (where the MP is expelled from the party they represent) has been split almost entirely along pro-Brexit/pro-EU lines.
Remain-voting Prime Minister Theresa May has demanded Johnson apologise for the comments, made in an opinion piece in where he actually criticised Denmark for legislating to ban facial coverings.
Ex-Tory chairwoman and Remain campaigner Baroness Warsi alleged his comments could trigger a rise in hate crime and that they “have no place in the modern Conservative Party”.
Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright MP, who also voted Remain, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Johnson should have been more careful with his language, and that he was “wrong” to say the burqa was “oppressive”.
EU loyalist Dominic Grieve, a former Attorney-General and de facto leader of the anti-Brexit rebels within the Tory parliamentary party, said that he would resign from the party should Johnson become leader.
Anna Soubry — a leading figure in the so-called ‘People’s Vote’ campaign made up of Remainers pressuring the government for a second referendum after the people of Britain already voted to leave the EU — predicted that others would threaten to quit the party, tweeting: “#DominicGrieve is right. I believe many One Nation Tories would not stay in the Conservative Party should @BorisJohnson become leader. That was my public view some time ago!”
However, the Tory Party establishment are showing the extent to which they are out of touch with public sentiment on the issues, after a Sky poll revealed Wednesday the majority of Britons do not think Johnson’s comments were racist, do not think he should apologise, and believe that the garment should be banned in the United Kingdom.
The findings came as a shock to the establishment media broadcast company — after long-time Sky News anchor Kay Burley had compared being uncomfortable with the burqa to being “offended” by the burned face of Falklands War hero Simon Weston — with one newscaster remarking that “unfortunately” many Britons agreed with the former foreign secretary that women covering their faces for cultural reasons has no place in Western society in an interview with a Labour politician.