Britain's de-facto blasphemy laws

Freedom begins and ends with the right to criticise religion

This is an edited version of a speech I gave at Secularism 2024 on 19 October. The topic under discussion was Threats to social cohesion and liberal values. I chose to talk about the concerning rise in militant anti-blasphemy activism.

The last person sent to prison in Britain for blasphemy was the socialist John William Gott. In 1922, Gott was sentenced by a judge to nine months’ hard labour for producing material which contained a description of Jesus entering Jerusalem ‘like a circus clown on the back of two donkeys’.

Ancient blasphemy laws were officially abolished in England and Wales in 2008, though they still exist in Northern Ireland. Prior to this, believers effectively had a veto over what appeared in the public realm. Not only did they claim to know the mind of God, but they also sought to enforce it on his earthly subjects. To blaspheme was to reject the authority of the divine and by extension his fleshly disciples. When put like that it isn’t hard to see why such laws hold an appeal to sections of the faithful.

And yet, de-facto prohibitions on blasphemy have been creeping back in recent times. There are a number of examples I could cite to support this point. The events at Batley Grammar School in March 2021 are as illuminating as any. During a Religious Studies (RS) lesson for year 9 pupils, a teacher showed the class images of the Pope, Jesus Christ, and the Muslim prophet Muhammad. The images were used as part of a discussion about free speech and blasphemy. The lesson had been on the RS syllabus of the school, a state-funded institution for pupils aged four to 16, for two years; the images had also been used in previous lessons.

Two of the depictions elicited not a murmur from the faithful. However a parent of one of the children in the class objected to the image of Muhammad which reportedly showed the Muslim prophet wearing a turban containing a cartoon bomb. The parent phoned the RS teacher to warn him that there would be ‘repercussions’ and that his actions had offended and provoked ‘1.6 billion Muslims’ (some Muslims believe that depictions of Muhammad are forbidden in Islam).

Groups of predominantly men began to gather outside the gates of the school in protest. They called for the teacher to be sacked and for a local imam to be brought into the school to take over RS lessons. A local Muslim charity published the name of the teacher in a public letter and as a result his address was widely shared online. Pictures of him and his partner were posted to Facebook with comments including ‘let’s sort this out for the Prophet’, ‘he should be scared for his life’, and ‘if u see him u know what to do [sic]’. Meanwhile a local imam warned darkly that Britain would ‘become like France’ if such incidents went unpunished - six months earlier the French secondary school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by a Chechen Islamist after showing pupils a similar cartoon.

Understandably fearing for his own safety and that of his family, the school teacher on the receiving end of the protests and threats fled West Yorkshire and went into hiding with his partner and four young children. A short time after, neighbours at the home he had hastily vacated reported groups of men assembling outside the property and trying to enter. The teacher described feeling distressed and suicidal and was later said to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He and his family are still in hiding more than three years later.

And yet, rather than backing the teacher in the face of threats and intimidation, most of the relevant authorities instead chose to capitulate to the mob. The school moved quickly to suspend the teacher and sent a letter to parents (without consulting him) apologising for his use of the image. Not to be outdone in this display of pigeon-hearted masochism, the then Labour MP for the area Tracy Brabin put out a dismal statement trotting out some meaningless but no doubt carefully road-tested pieties relating to ‘the understandable upset’ and ‘offence’ caused to the local community (she later released a second statement condemning the violence). While the leader of Kirklees council said nothing, students at the school - children by definition - were the only ones brave enough to publicly defend their teacher¹.

Many of the bearded, hoodie-wearing men who appeared day after day outside the gates of the school did not, as it would turn out, have children in attendance there. Instead they had travelled in from surrounding areas to opportunistically call for the criminalisation of insults against Islam. It was later revealed that one of the protest leaders in Bately was a promoter and supporter of the far-right Pakistan-based anti-blasphemy group Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP). Several months earlier TLP had published an article celebrating the murder of Samuel Paty.

A subsequent investigation commissioned by Batley Multi Academy Trust concluded that the RS teacher ‘genuinely believed that using the image [of Muhammed] had an educational purpose and benefit, and that it was not used with the intention of causing offence’. However, in a victory for the mob, the school said it would henceforth prohibit use of the offending image in RS lessons.

The tendency on the part of local authorities to capitulate to Islamic anti-blasphemy campaigners - whose posturing as benighted victims of ‘hatred’ is undermined by the implicit threat of violence that frequently accompanies their protests - has a long and undistinguished pedigree. When the Ayatollah Khomeinei of Iran suborned the murder of Salman Rushdie in 1989 forThe Satanic Verses, a chorus of eminent voices tripped over themselves to declare that the real problem was the ‘offence’ that Rushdie was alleged to have caused to Muslims. The author’s own publisher refused to bring out a paperback of the book while fellow authors John le Carre and Roald Dahl criticised Rushdie as an impertinent opportunist. The feminist critic Germaine Greer sniffily refused to sign a petition in support of Rushdie because the threat to his life was ‘about his own troubles’.

It pains me to say that Labour politicians have often conducted themselves little better than the former MP for Batley and Spen when it comes to facing down anti-blasphemy activists. In response to the Rushdie fatwa, then Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march of 3,000 people through Leicester calling for the novel to be banned (Vaz had previously offered his ‘full support’ to Rushdie until, spotting an opportunity to boost his standing among an unreconstructed section of his local electorate, he reneged. One suspects these same voters didn’t look so kindly on later revelations that Vaz was a procurer of male prostitutes²). Meanwhile, Iqbal Sacranie, the future head of the Muslim Council of Britain who was knighted by the Blair government 16 years later (for of all things ‘services to community relations’), described death as ‘perhaps a bit too easy’ for Rushdie. When Rushdie was himself knighted by the Labour government in 2007 - and when illiterate mobs in Pakistan responded by burning effigies of the Queen - Labour’s former foreign secretary Jack Straw said he ‘sympathised’ with their ‘hurt feelings’. Margaret Beckett, his successor at the foreign office, duly apologised for any ‘offence caused’ (a pre-fabricated phrase that is trotted out a lot on such occasions).

Blasphemy related incidents in the UK involving intimidation and threats of violence have increased in frequency over recent years³. Asad Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim shopkeeper from Glasgow, was murdered in 2016 for ‘disrespecting Islam’ (the Ahmadiyya Muslim community’s beliefs are considered blasphemous by activists). In 2022 the screening of a Shia-influenced film, Lady of Heaven, was cancelled after protesters gathered outside branches of Cineworld. Tellingly, the cinema chain chose to pull the film ‘to ensure the safety of our staff and customers’. In 2023 anti-blasphemy activists protested against schoolboys in Wakefield for allegedly disrespecting a copy of the Koran. An autistic boy involved in the incident received death threats according to his mother. There were also eight weeks of Islamist-backed protests outside schools in Birmingham in 2019 demanding an end to LGBT-inclusive education⁴. Prior to the protests in Batley, local religious community leaders had been aggressively interfering in teaching at other schools in the area. This had created what the Khan Review described⁵ as a ‘climate of fear’.

It is understandable that the fear of violence should lead private companies, public institutions and politicians to cave into anti-blasphemy activists. However, I suspect there is more to it than that. Indeed, many powerful figures in Britain subscribe to what the Observer columnist Kenan Malik has aptly termed the ‘take me to your leader’ model of community relations. Eager to avoid potentially incendiary accusations of racism, the authorities in Batley reacted to escalating protests by prostrating themselves before Deobandi ‘faith leaders’ of Pakistani origin (a sect hardly noted for its progressive bona fides). This noisy and reactionary minority was henceforward treated as the ‘authentic’ voice of British Muslims - despite the fact that only 41 percent of the UK’s mosques are Deobandi⁶ (there is apparently nothing racist about viewing ethnic minorities in monochrome).

Anti-blasphemy activism is gaining momentum at a time of growing ambivalence toward free expression in the West. The right to be ‘offensive’ (a highly subjective term) sits uneasily in the fragmented and solipsistic world of social media where information can be rescripted according to taste. The next frontier of capitalism is concerned with selling us whichever version of reality is most cordial to our predilections. As citizens of these information silos, we are increasingly swapping Keynes’ dictum - ‘When the facts change, I change my mind’ - for the vacuous banalities of American lifestyle gurus: you have your ‘truth’ and I have mine. To show insufficient ‘respect’ for any set of beliefs that proclaims itself ‘deeply held’ is considered impertinent.

Needless to say such developments are not conducive to the functioning of a free and pluralistic society. To live in freedom is invariably to encounter things one finds offensive. This is especially true for those who choose to navigate the irritating complexity of life through the prism of absolute truth or revelation. Many of us find such all-embracing certainties ridiculous. History suggests that freedom begins and ends with our right to say it out loud.

1. https://www.change.org/p/reinstate-the-rs-teachers-that-have-been-suspended-at-batley-grammar-school?recruiter=307940145

2. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/28/keith-vaz-faces-parliamentary-ban-over-drugs-for-sex-workers-scandal

3. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/understanding-and-responding-to-blasphemy-extremism/understanding-and-responding-to-blasphemy-extremism-in-the-uk-accessible

4. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/26/birmingham-anderton-park-primary-muslim-protests-lgbt-teaching-rights

5. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65fdbfd265ca2ffef17da79c/The_Khan_review.pdf

6. https://www.muslimsinbritain.org/resources/masjid_report.pdf