SOME kinds of argument are new, and some are as old as the cliffs of Dover. As an example of the first sort, take the debate that is going on in many Western countries about how to accommodate Islam, with all its symbols, practices and prohibitions, in a liberal society. As exhibit A of the second category, there is petty Anglo-French bickering, good-humoured or otherwise, which goes back to the Middle Ages. And the two categories can get weirdly muddled up. Even when they are talking about halal food and headscarves, the Brits and the French cannot resist having a go at one another. In France, some sensitive cultural issues have come to the fore since March 19th when a high-level court vindicated a Muslim woman who was sacked from a day-care centre on the outskirts of Paris because she insisted on covering her head. The court found that the woman's religious freedom had been infringed. In an unusual political attack on a judicial decision, Manuel Valls, the interior minister, said the verdict was regrettable because it "called into question the principle of secular education". President François Hollande weighed in, agreeing that the law might need changing to limit overt religious expressions among people looking after very young children, even in private establishments. Moves to change the law in precisely that direction were already underway in both chambers of the French legislature, and they now look much more likely to enter force. If that happens, it will be the third piece of French legislation in that sensitive area. Conspicuous religious adornments were banned from French state schools in 2004; and full-face veils were outlawed altogether in 2011.

In Britain, for better or worse, a law that prevented child-minders or teachers from covering their heads (ie from wearing the standard Muslim hijab) would be very hard to imagine. True, English courts have backed the right of head teachers to stop girls wearing the face-covering niqab or the body-hugging jilbab to school. An English teacher who was asked to remove her niqab received a more mixed result when she went to court: it rejected her claim of religious discrimination but awarded her compensation for the mishandling of her case. But nobody has proposed that British women who teach or look after young children should be stopped from wearing hijab, which does not in any obvious way impede the wearer from imparting or receiving information. "Such a prohibition has never been suggested here," a prominent British Muslim told me. Hijab is now part of the urban British scene; a version of it is an option for London policewomen (pictured). As for the French ban on wearing full-face veils in any public setting, the Britain Home Office was categorical: "It is not for the government to say what people can and cannot wear. Such a proscriptive approach would be out of keeping with our nation's longstanding approach of tolerance." In other words, it would be as foreign as eating frogs' legs.

In France, meanwhile, it is never hard to make the case that when things go wrong, les Rosbifs are to blame. Eric Zemmour, a rambunctious French radio journalist and critic of multiculturalism, reacted to the day-care verdict in March by lamenting the way that soft-minded English ideas about diversity had corrupted his homeland. Back in the 1970s, he recalled, all French citizens had instinctively avoided public displays of religious affiliation, out of respect for others. But then "we began admiring the Anglo-Saxon sort of 'communautarisme'...in the name of the right to be different." The term "communautarisme" refers to a vice of which the Anglo-Saxons, from a French perspective, are congenitally guilty: that of allowing or even encouraging religious or ethnic groups to live in separate worlds instead of accepting the principle of equal citizenship. It is often suggested, in France, that the British sin of communautarisme goes back to the divide-and-rule policies of the empire. If perfidious Albion now has ethnically divided and dangerous cities, she is only reaping what she sowed.

In truth, Britain and France are not quite as far apart, in the problems they face or the way they respond, as both countries claim. But a difference does exist, and third parties notice it too. Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's Islamist Ennahda party, has praised Britain's tolerant democracy as a system coming closer to the Muslim ideal of governance than any Muslim-majority state does, while he lamented recently that "France is the country that understands Islam and the Tunisians least" despite the close historic ties. He has argued that the French ideal of strict secularism or laicité was designed to solve a problem that does not exist in Islam, that of an over-mighty institutional Church. But for a proud French secularist, being rebuked by an Islamist leader, and compared unfavourably with Britain, would only be a badge of honour. After all, Mr Ghannouchi lived for a couple of decades in the decadent atmosphere of Londonistan, to use a French pejorative. So what else would you expect? Que voulez-vous?

