One law for everyone.
Some assembly required.
One Law for Everyone was inspired by a 76-year-old pensioner who managed to turn a burqa into something considerably more troublesome than a fashion statement. He’s studying Islam, considering conversion and identifies as a woman. Britain has spent years explaining how important it is to respect religious belief, gender identity and the law. Splendid principles, all of them. Then along comes an elderly gentleman who decides to take the instructions rather literally, and suddenly everyone needs to consult the manual. The police have their interpretation, the courts have theirs, and somewhere in Whitehall there’s probably a civil servant frantically searching for the section entitled “What If Somebody Actually Tries This?” The remarkable thing is that he hasn’t needed a megaphone, a protest march or even a particularly sturdy pair of shoes. Just a veil and an apparent willingness to test how all these carefully worded principles fit together. Whether his legal argument succeeds is for the court to decide. In the meantime, the questions are rather entertaining. One law for everyone. Apparently. Just don’t ask everyone at once.
Seventy-six, a public menace,
Armed with nothing but a veil.
Britain’s finest wrote the rulebook,
Then watched their logic fail.
They banned the masks, then made exceptions,
Left the small print nice and wide.
An old man took them at their wording,
And watched their courage hide.
He’s studying Islam, might convert,
Identifies as a woman too.
Now the experts need a meeting
To decide which rules are true.
They can define a hundred genders,
They can lecture us on faith.
But a pensioner in Portsmouth
Has them checking every page.
One law for everyone,
What a lovely little lie.
Seventy-six, beneath a burqa,
With a courtroom asking why.
One law for everyone,
One pensioner, one veil.
A rulebook full of exceptions,
And a law put on trial.
Another veil, another protest,
High-vis jacket, denim jeans.
That one’s treated as religion,
This one’s treated as a crime scene.
They’ve got principles for the cameras,
They’ve got standards for the press.
They’ve got very different answers
When the wrong man wears the dress.
No one’s checking holy scripture,
No one’s measuring belief.
Just a sudden burst of certainty
When it’s someone they can brief.
One law for everyone,
What a lovely little lie.
Seventy-six, beneath a burqa,
With a courtroom asking why.
One law for everyone,
One pensioner, one veil.
A rulebook full of exceptions,
And a law put on trial.
Then he turned up at the court,
The same black veil upon his face.
They asked him to remove it,
And made another special case.
Would they ask another woman?
Would they risk the same offence?
Suddenly the fearless system
Found a little common sense.
The law’s not blind, it’s short of glasses,
And the guidance needs a guide.
They’ve got courage by committee,
And a different rule for each side.
They preach respect and equal treatment,
Then get tangled in the cloth.
An old man doesn’t need to shout
To pull the bloody curtain off.
One law for everyone,
What a lovely little lie.
Seventy-six, beneath a burqa,
With a courtroom asking why.
One law for everyone,
One pensioner, one veil.
They wrote the rules to govern him,
Now the rulebook’s on trial.
No riot shield, no master plan,
No great revolutionary.
Just a pensioner in a burka,
And a state that’s scared of irony.