The British elites have capitulated to Islamo-censorship

Does freedom of speech include the right to blaspheme? In 21st-century Britain, you’d have thought the answer would be ‘yes, obviously’. Our last blasphemy conviction was in 1977. England’s blasphemy law was abolished in 2008, having been a dead letter for decades. The centuries-long struggle for free speech in this country, as in so many others, was built on defaming gods, kings, clerics, prophets. Without the right to blaspheme, there is no right to speak freely. But in this identitarian age, what was once taken for granted is fast melting into air.

In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech.

Hussain’s arguments are as banal as they are illiberal. Free speech isn’t absolute, ackshually. Those who claim to care about Koran-burners are really just racists. Do you know who also burned books? Hitler! What most sticks in the craw is how depressingly pedestrian they are – not simply among the ‘Gaza independents’, but also the liberal elites, who long ago sacrificed genuine liberalism on the altar of multiculturalism. It is their cowardice and relativism that has brought us to this point: where the old Christian blasphemy laws may be long gone, but informal Islamic blasphemy laws are fast taking shape, with hate-speech laws refashioned to forcefield a faith from criticism.

Those shocked to see a case like Coskun’s haven’t been paying attention. Ever since the Rushdie affair, we have witnessed an unholy alliance between Islamist censors, a cowardly political establishment and an increasingly identitarian left. The first protest against The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel which earned him the Ayatollah’s fatwa and almost cost him his life, was not on the subcontinent or in the Middle East, but in Bolton on 2 December 1988. While this movement never succeeded in getting Rushdie’s novel banned in Britain, or extending Britain’s blasphemy laws to cover Islam, it put the fear of Allah into anyone who dared publish a book, display a cartoon or make a statement that some perma-outraged prick, claiming to speak on behalf of Muslims, might deem to be offensive or heretical. This haunts us to this day, as the still-disappeared Batley school teacher or the recent – mercifully foiled – attempts to murder ex-Muslim Hatun Tash show.

Worse still, the government became the Islamo-censors’ useful idiots – with New Labour ushering in laws against ‘incitement to religious hatred’ in 2006 and getting into bed with reactionaries posing as community leaders. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was one of many groups, presenting itself as the authentic voice of Muslim outrage, that emerged from the anti-Rushie movement. Iqbal Sacranie – who once said ‘death, perhaps, [was] a bit too easy’ an end for Rushdie – was among its founders. He was knighted in 2005, with a BBC profile boasting of his sway in Downing Street and the Home Office. The Labour government briefly broke ties with the MCB in 2009, after its deputy signed a declaration supporting Hamas attacks on Israel and allied troops. Starmer’s Labour claims not to do business with the MCB, even though its ministers and MPs popped up at an MCB do in January. Labour, you might recall, is currently drawing up a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ to impose on government bodies.

The dimwitted line that everyone who rages against blasphemy laws is really raging against Muslims – subjecting them to some kind of bigoted double standard – gets things entirely the wrong way round, laughably so. Firstly, because the debate around blasphemy in 21st-century Britain is not centred on whether it should be illegal to burn the Bible or draw crude cartoons of Ganesh. Secondly, because if there is any anti-Muslim prejudice at play here it is surely in the notion that Muslims, unlike any other faith or group, are constitutionally incapable of freedom of speech. That they are simply too intolerant or volatile to have their beliefs subjected to debate, ridicule and criticism. That they cannot be full citizens in a liberal, democratic society, essentially. That sounds awfully bigoted to me.

There’s another, darker irony. Those claiming the right to blaspheme is somehow a threat to Muslims should Google the names Asad Shah and Jalal Uddin. To my knowledge, these are the only two men to be murdered in Britain over the past decade for blaspheming against Islam. And both of them were Muslim. Shah, a member of the tiny Ahmadi sect, was stabbed and stomped to death by a Sunni who took offence to his YouTube videos. Uddin was bludgeoned to death by two ISIS fanboys who accused the 71-year-old imam of practising black magic. The world over, ex-Muslims, liberal Muslims and members of minority Muslim sects bear the brunt of this anti-blasphemy hysteria. Those who claim blasphemy laws would tamp down on such violence should take a look at what’s happening in Pakistan, where heretics are punished both by law and by lynchmob – the former only feeding, and justifying, the latter’s murderous intolerance.

Britain’s backdoor blasphemy laws have been decades in the making, inked in blood and cowardice. For the sake of heretics of all faiths and none, it’s time more people plucked up the courage to say ‘No’ to the Islamic hardliners, and the illiberal idiots who enable them.

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