It was only a matter of time before the burka debate spread across La Manche. And so at the weekend UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, seized its chance.
Perhaps sensing that it was becoming in voters' eyes a single-policy party, loved by farmers and fox hunters but of little interest to anyone else, Nigel Farage, UKIP's European Parliament leader, proposed the banning of the burka and niqab in public.
Farage is dressing up the policy as being in the name of equality, citing the apparently disadvantaged motor cycling community who cannot wear their helmets in banks. Careful, Nigel, you wouldn't want to radicalise that lot.
The debate, though, is loudest in France where the ruling party, UMP, has put forward a draft law to ban the burqa and niqab from public places.
Again citing equality - in this case the notion of egalité in the French constitution - the proposal has a better chance of becoming law, coming as it does from the government.
Equality is a noble cause, but when it is remembered that, out of a 1.5 million female muslim population in France, only 2,000 wear a full body veil, one wonders why any political party would want to take up so much time with a law that affects so few.
Moreover, the proposed legislation dovetails conveniently with President Sarkozy's call last autumn for a "debate on national identity", something in which Farage is also keen engage.
Yet Farage misses the point about the wearing of the burka. He views it as a minority imposing its way of life on the majority. Strangely, he omits the feminist argument that it is a symbol of male oppression or, as Rahila Gupta, of Southall Black Sisters, wrote in the Guardian, "a cloth that comes soaked in blood".
Undoubtedly, a ban would satisfy some people - although not Gupta - but I can't help wondering whether it is being proposed for the wrong reasons and, ultimately, would be socially divisive.
Still, one positive could come out of this: a split in the far-right vote at the general election.
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