Britain’s new blasphemy laws imperil us all

‘Let’s be clear, we don’t have blasphemy laws in the UK.’ So said Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s business secretary and premier solicitor impersonator, to the BBC earlier this week. Reynolds was pushing back against US vice-president JD Vance, who gave European leaders a very public dressing down at the Munich Security Conference last week for censoring their voters, and Britain for criminalising its Christians. Of course, Reynolds’s denial was about as trustworthy as his CV.

You needn’t alight, as Vance did, on the vexed issue of ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics, which have led to Christians being arrested for staging silent protests / prayers, to see that blasphemy laws have made a horrifying comeback in Britain. Easily a more vivid example is that, a day before Vance addressed the global great and good in Munich, a man was arrested for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in central London. Another man, who slashed at the Koran-burner with a knife, was also arrested. Welcome to 21st-century Britain, where we ‘don’t have blasphemy laws’ but you can be arrested – and stabbed – for desecrating a holy book. Maybe Reynolds could finally put that legal training to good use and explain the difference to us.

This wasn’t a one-off. Two weeks prior, another man was arrested in Manchester for burning a Koran next to the memorial for the Manchester Arena bombing. He immediately pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing. To make matters worse, Greater Manchester Police decided to release not only his name, but also his home address – effectively putting a Google Maps pin in him for the convenience of Britain’s Islamist scumbags.

You might be wondering when this new blasphemy law was passed. England and Wales’s old blasphemy law was abolished in 2008. The last blasphemy conviction was in 1977. When did this new theocratic regime come into being? While the new Labour government has mooted a crackdown on ‘Islamophobia’ – which, whether the idiots realise it or not, is really just code for ‘criticism of Islam’ – it seems it needn’t bother. Our hate-speech laws, as spiked has long warned, have effectively become rebadged blasphemy laws anyway.

Indeed, both the Manchester and London Koran-burners were charged with a ‘racially or religiously aggravated public-order offence’. The rationale seems to be that while the British state doesn’t recognise the divine authority of Allah per se, it has convinced itself that blaspheming against Islam or burning its holy book is essentially a form of racial / religious harassment. Depressingly, this is precisely the bait-and-switch that Islamists have been trying to pull off for decades – justifying their demands for worldwide censorship of anti-Islamic blasphemy in bogus social-justice lingo. Inevitably, Britain’s midwit establishment has fallen for it.

We’ve been here before. An EDL member was convicted of the same charge in 2011 for burning a Koran at a demonstration. Interestingly, that stunt was in response to an Islamist burning poppies, who was also (outrageously) convicted for doing so. But at a time when Islamic anti-blasphemy activists are on the march in the UK – forcing the Batley teacher into hiding for showing his pupils Muhammad cartoons, getting a heretical Shia film pulled from cinemas, and menacing an autistic school boy from Wakefield for the crime of lightly scuffing a Koran – you can’t help but feel police and prosecutors are becoming more willing to use hate-speech laws to do the extremist mob’s bidding.

The logic is perverse. Over recent years, we’ve seen religious hardliners menace those they accuse of blasphemy. The death threats clearly aren’t empty. Hatun Tash – an ex-Muslim and Christian preacher who could often be seen at Speakers’ Corner in her Charlie Hebdo t-shirt – has been stabbed and was the target of a foiled gun attack. The Batley teacher, whose name was posted online by Islamist activists and a local Muslim charity, remains in hiding almost four years on. And yet the state is effectively siding with his and Tash’s tormentors. Rather than go after those trying to terrorise and kill people for offending their religious sensibilities, police are now focussing their efforts on locking up the alleged blasphemers, in the hope this will calm the intolerant bigots down. It’s an exercise not just in censorship, but also victim-blaming.

The rationale for blasphemy laws has always been that they help maintain not simply Godly virtue, but also social harmony. As Lord Scarman put it in 1979 – when the House of Lords was hearing the appeal in the case Whitehouse v Lemon, the last successful blasphemy trial – blasphemy laws ‘safeguard the internal tranquility of the kingdom’. Ahead of his time, Scarman wanted England’s then Christian blasphemy laws to be extended to protect all religions: ‘In an increasingly plural society such as that of modern Britain it is necessary not only to respect the differing religious beliefs, feelings and practices of all but also to protect them from scurrility, vilification, ridicule and contempt.’

This is a catastrophic mistake. Not only for freedom of speech – which obviously must include the right to be scurrilous, to vilify, to ridicule and be contemptuous towards religion, given that’s kind of what freedom of speech was built on – but also for the ‘internal tranquility’ that England’s secular mullahs probably think they are safeguarding. Cracking down on anti-Islamic blasphemy will not assuage the zealots. Look at Sweden, where Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika was murdered last month while he was on trial for burning a Koran in public. (The Mancunian Koran-burner said his stunt was in solidarity with Momika.) Or look at Pakistan, where there are brutal blasphemy laws and murderous movements that try to mete out mob justice against alleged blasphemers, even those cleared by the courts. Official appeasement only fuels their violent hysteria.

What’s more, blasphemy laws – particularly the kind being demanded by Islamic extremists and, on recent evidence, now being enforced by our credulous authorities – are a threat to precisely the religious freedom and toleration that multiculturalists claim to support. To my knowledge, there have been two people killed in Britain specifically related to anti-Islamic blasphemy over the past decade. Both were Muslims. Their murders happened within weeks of each other in 2016. Two ISIS fanboys took a hammer to 71-year-old Rochdale imam Jalal Uddin, because they accused him of practising black magic. Then Bradford cab driver Tanveer Ahmed drove to Glasgow and stabbed and stomped Asad Shah to death. Shah was an Ahmadi Muslim, a dissenting sect that is deemed heretical by most Muslims. Much of Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy movement, which is reaching more and more into Britain, is obsessed with this tiny, embattled minority.

Britain’s new blasphemy laws need to go the way of the old blasphemy laws: abolition. They are a threat to everyone’s freedom of speech, and they risk pouring paraffin on the violent hysteria of Islamic hardliners, a blaze that could soon claim the lives of Muslims, ex-Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus and non-believers alike. The state should stop going after the Koran-burners, and train its ire on those who believe their precious hurt feelings give them a right to kill.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater