Rodney Hide: The Strange New Face of Women’s Empowerment

Here is a single image that captures the extent to which we are lost.

Khadija Patel stands at the Palace of Westminster, recipient of the British Citizen Award 2026 for her “work empowering young women.” She is covered from head to toe. Only her eyes are visible. The official caption celebrates her as a champion of female empowerment.

I am a child of the 1960s. That was the decade when Western women were discarding the restrictive symbols of the past. They demanded equal legal rights, equal access to education and work, and the freedom to move through the public square without concealment or apology. The bra-burning image, however exaggerated, stood for a rejection of imposed modesty codes and a claim on full personhood in the open air of a free society.

No one then imagined that, half a century later, the same society’s institutions would honour a woman whose public presentation is the deliberate erasure of her face and form — and call it empowerment.

There is nothing inherently wrong with voluntary religious dress. Adults in a free country may cover themselves as they choose. The problem is the official language and the organised applause.

“Empowering young women” once meant expanding options: more education, more economic independence, more physical freedom, more say in one’s own destiny. When the same phrase is attached to a figure whose appearance signals the opposite — the concealment of the female body from public view — the words have been emptied of meaning.

Up is down. Down is up.

We have lost the ability to speak clearly and bluntly. In losing that, we have lost the capacity to debate and to learn. We have lost confidence in our own history and in the principles we once died defending.

The Palace of Westminster is the seat of a society that claims equality between the sexes and the right of every individual to be seen and heard as a full citizen. Celebrating a presentation that removes a woman from visual equality with men is not a minor cultural detail. It is a revolutionary symbol that what we once stood for is no longer defended.

Western liberalism once insisted that women should not be defined by the male gaze or by traditional restrictions on their visibility. Today, that same culture treats full covering as a progressive choice to be protected and praised, while any criticism is branded bigotry.

The result is selective blindness. We have #MeToo and gender-pay debates, yet we struggle to say plainly that covering a girl or woman so that only her eyes remain is not a neutral fashion statement. It is a social signal about segregation, modesty rules, and the proper place of women in the public realm.

The 1960s generation fought for women to be seen. The present generation of institutional gatekeepers are teaching the next generation of girls that invisibility is a form of strength. That is not progress. It is a retreat dressed up as tolerance.

That same 1960s tolerance nurtured the idea that we must be tolerant even of intolerance. Sir Karl Popper foresaw the exact danger. Writing The Open Society and Its Enemies in Christchurch during the Second World War, he observed in a footnote:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Our anything-goes ultra-tolerance has led us here. It has spawned its own form of intolerance — an intolerance of the open face, the equal presence, the unapologetic visibility of women in the public square.

We are losing the open society not primarily from external assault, but from within, through our own refusal to name what is happening and to defend the very freedoms that made the 1960s liberation possible.

A free society does not need to police private dress. It does need to keep its language honest and its institutions coherent.

When “empowerment” comes to mean the celebration of comprehensive female concealment at the heart of parliamentary democracy, the word has been turned inside out.

The 1960s generation fought for women to be seen. That same tolerant generation is teaching their granddaughters that being unseen is a virtue.

https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/26271121.bolton-pair-receive-honours-palace-westminster/
https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/07/28/there-is-nothing-empowering-about-the-islamic-veil/
https://metro.co.uk/2026/07/28/muslim-woman-abused-wearing-niqab-prize-ceremony-vows-continue-work-29240613/

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and leader of the ACT Party. This article was sourced from HERE.