My feelings towards France have become conflicted in the past year

I’m really browned off with France’s kneejerk attitude, writes Suzanne Harrington

Burkini Fascism might sound like a landlocked country in West Africa, but it’s much nearer than that. You’ve probably seen the shameful photo of that woman lying on a French beach, surrounded by policemen with guns, standing over her, ordering her to publicly disrobe. This same logic, as someone pointed out on Twitter, would have been banning Catholic nuns from wearing their habits during the IRA bombings of the Seventies. Insane, antagonistic, futile. Eye-wateringly misogynistic. And seriously off-target.

The beach where I spend every August is bang in the middle of this burkini ban coastline. Although too small and unimportant to register its own ban, it is surrounded on each side by the 30 towns that have decreed the all-in-one swimwear illegal. From Nice to Cassis, municipal cops have been patrolling beaches, scanning for women deemed too covered up. Humiliating and intimidating women — they do it in Iran, and now they do it in France.