Anyone outraged by Labour MP Tahir Ali calling on the government to introduce blasphemy laws has clearly not been paying attention, for there are already blasphemy laws in this country. All Ali wants to do is make them official. When he urges Sir Keir Starmer to prohibit the desecration of the Qur’an and other Abrahamic religious texts, as he did at Prime Minister’s Questions, he will be aware that people are already punished for desecrating the Muslim holy book, including children.
The Prime Minister is too progressive to allow himself to disagree with a religious reactionary
In March 2023, a 14-year-old boy was suspended from school in Wakefield after a copy of the Qur’an was ‘scuffed’. So great was the indignation that his mother eventually went before the local mosque, her sinful hair covered, and pleaded for her son’s safety.
In this country, we’re tough on blasphemy and tough on the causes of blasphemy. Just ask the Batley Grammar School teacher who faced protests from Muslims in March 2021 after he included an illustration of the Prophet Mohammed in a religious studies lesson. Well, you could ask him, except he’s apparently rather fond of his head and so has been in hiding ever since.
In fact, such is our zero-tolerance approach that we even punish Muslims who say or think the wrong thing about matters theological. In June 2022, cinemas across the UK pulled screenings of The Lady of Heaven, a historical epic telling Islam’s story from a Shia perspective, which did not go down well with elements of Britain’s overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim population. Mosques lobbied cinemas not to show the film, crowds of Muslim men gathered outside movie theatres, and Islamic website 5Pillars published a review denouncing The Lady of Heaven as ‘pure, unadulterated sectarian filth’ and warned of ‘tensions’. (I always wondered what Pauline Kael would have sounded like from behind a burqa.)
While it might be jarring to secular ears to hear a British-born Labour MP propose the re-introduction of blasphemy laws, Ali is simply representing a section of his constituents.
A poll in March found that 52 per cent of UK Muslims favour ‘making it illegal to show a picture or cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed’ at some point in the coming 20 years. Reassuringly, the same poll showed a stout 23 per cent opposed to the implementation of sharia. If nothing else, it would save on the hassle of finding a new Archbishop of Canterbury.
Elements like Ali are an embarrassment for secular progressives, who are full-throated in their imprecations against Christianity but rather quieter when it comes to Islam. Note the Prime Minister’s response to Ali’s suggestion that English criminal law was needed to protect the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Sir Keir said:
‘I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.’
Not a word about ancient British liberties, freedom of expression, or indeed any indication whether or not Sir Keir is minded to bring in such laws. The Prime Minister is too progressive to allow himself to disagree with a religious reactionary. This is exactly the problem: men like Sir Keir – weak, cowardly men – have thoroughly surrendered their reason to identity politics and the reality-throttling postmodernism that undergirds it. Thus does an authoritarian’s membership of a favoured group trump any objection to his authoritarian agenda. This is what comes of seeing people not as individuals but as the embodiment of one ‘community’ or another, to be treated according to the state’s relationship with their identity group rather than on their own personal merits.
But this is not just an intersectionality issue, it’s an immigration issue. Britain has imported the world and every strain of sectarianism within it. It makes a sort of grim sense that it should now import the speech restrictions used to contain that sectarianism elsewhere.
This debate tends to draw out tough-guy muscular liberals who airily dismiss blasphemy laws as out of step with modern Britain. In any other context they will inform you that there are no ‘British values’ and that, even if there were, immigrants need not acclimatise to them. Having the state browbeat immigrants into adopting our civic norms is hostile, xenophobic and just, well, icky. Britain’s relaxed outlook on integration and assimilation is what makes for our vibrant multicultural society. But when the consequences of their immigration policies become clear, or rather the consequences for Westminster’s liberal consensus, all of a sudden British values aren’t quite so nebulous.
It feels odd to see that written down because it is a dissection of my own foolish, destructive idealism about immigration, a daydream from which I am slowly awakening. I continue to regard immigration as a good thing, but now I believe it must be strictly controlled for scale and social impact.
I remain as confirmed as ever in my view that Muslim immigrants deepen this country’s faith, enhance its skills and expertise, expand its entrepreneurialism, and contribute to its charitable spirit, but now I would like to see the state become more assertive on integration, actively prevent closed-off communities and ruthlessly discourage the bringing here of sectarian or extremist outlooks from the other side of the world.
To proceed as we have been, with mass immigration and minimal integration, will mean more people coming from illiberal cultures, and more who will cling to those cultures and try to impose them here. And if Britain does indeed have no distinct culture or values of its own, if it is nothing more than an aggregation of the preferences of its compartmentalised communities, liberals can hardly complain when calls go up for tyrannical laws to protect sacred beliefs. Much of the world lives under tyranny and the more of the world that comes here, the more that here will come to resemble there.
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