Are blasphemy laws returning to the UK?

The Labour government is cracking down on free speech under the pretext of tackling ‘Islamophobia’.

The Labour Party is at it again. Not content with watering down proposed legislation to protect free speech at universities, ramping up online hate speech codes, and applying pressure to the judiciary to impose draconian jail sentences for offensive social media posts, the government is now committed to establishing a council on ‘Islamophobia’. This means that we can look forward to yet another vaguely-defined term on the statute books that can be weaponised by the powerful to suppress dissent.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s plans for a 16-member council were revealed on Monday. The chair will be Dominic Grieve, the former Conservative attorney general, who wrote the foreword to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG)’s report in November 2018 which made the incoherent claim that ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. The key problem with this definition is one that hardly needs to be pointed out, but for the sake of any Labour parliamentarians who might be reading I’ll do so anyway: Islam is a religion, not a race.

We already have de facto blasphemy laws in this country. This week a man was arrested and charged by Greater Manchester Police for burning the Koran. This wasn’t an instance of vandalism or theft; the book was his to dispose of as he pleased. The burning was a protest against the murder last week of Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been living in Sweden and who had also destroyed copies of the Koran. He was on trial for ‘agitation against an ethnic or national group’, which is just a long-winded way of saying ‘blasphemy’.

It would be bad enough if the police in Manchester were simply arresting a UK citizen for the desecration of book that some consider holy. Even more disturbingly, the police posted a notice of the charge on X that can only be described as gloating. They doxxed their victim, naming him and providing his date of birth, thereby placing a target squarely on his back for any psychopathic Islamists who might wish to take vengeance for their hurt feelings. There was also a gratuitous image of a pair of handcuffed wrists with the word ‘CHARGED’ splashed across it, like the cover of some tasteless tabloid. They may as well have written: ‘We got ’im, lads! Death to the kaffir!’

Many of us will have seen this coming…