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The British media have targeted immigrants as a burden on national resources, and increasingly, as a security threat. Muslims in particular have been presented as an alien ‘other’ who refuse to ‘integrate’ into the British ‘way of life’, and indeed who ‘threaten’ it. The nation is often discursively gendered female and therefore it is perhaps no surprise that Muslim women have been pushed to the forefront of the debate about the perceived threat to ‘British culture’. The veil has become a symbol of cultural difference; it is seen as an example of a refusal to ‘integrate’; an emblem of opposition to British ‘cultural values’; and is offered up as a sign of the perceived failures of multiculturalism and the ‘problem’ of tolerance. The issue of the veil has a long (and complex) history in the cultural imaginary of Western modernity, linked to British colonial encounters with Islam, so it is imperative to consider how current discussions of the veil are framed by that history and are shaped by the contemporary socio-political context. Since the ‘War on Terror’, the veil has come to symbolize ‘threat’, and the historically sedimented meanings attached to the veil raise it as an easy symbol of Muslim ‘culture’ as apparently backward and opposed to ‘freedom’. The issue has been explained entirely in cultural terms so that the historically complex issue of veiling has been reduced to a simplistic question of cultural difference.

The neo-liberal restructuring of the British economy and welfare state is another important context; for the consequences of this restructuring are explained (and explained away) in cultural terms by reference to the intrusion of an alien and threatening culture (Islam). In order to ‘protect’ British ‘culture’, the state has relied upon the anti-Muslim sentiments whipped up in the media to push through a rash of anti-Terror legislation which not only discriminates against the Muslim population of Britain, but curtails the very freedoms that it purports to protect.