There’s a sudden vacancy in the constituency of Wakefield. The incumbent Labour MP hasn’t resigned or died. He just happens to be Simon Lightwood, a good example of nominative determinism. Lightwood’s weaselly intervention in Qurangate carries all the moral force of a sliver of driftwood carried along by the tide. In place of an MP, Wakefield has the faintest of shadows.
Statement on the recent incident at Kettlethorpe High School: pic.twitter.com/k5a8eoslVA
— Simon Lightwood MP (@simonlightwood) March 5, 2023
Note that he characterises teenage boys dropping and scuffing a book – a book which was the property of one of those boys – as ‘the incident’.
Note that he condemns threats and ‘hate speech’, as he calls it, ‘from anyone’. Some people are threatening to murder a 14-year-old autistic boy, others are apparently saying nasty things on the internet. There are some less-than-fine people on both sides.
Note that he similarly avoids identifying those who ‘seek to inflame and spread mistruths’. Just some anonymous trouble-makers, I suppose. Certainly not his Labour colleague, Councillor Usman Ali, who issued a statement, since deleted, claiming the Quran had been ‘desecrated’ and calling on ‘all the authorities, namely, the police, the school and the local authority’ to take ‘swift and appropriate action to deal with this grave situation’.
Note the snivelling, cowardly euphemisms Lightwood deploys. In Wakefield, ‘people work together to tackle problems’, which in this case meant the headteacher Tudor Griffiths suspending the four boys because ‘their actions did not treat the Quran with the respect it should have’. It meant West Yorkshire Police pandering to the mob, dispatching a chief inspector to address them and even recording the scuffing as a ‘non-crime hate incident’. It meant the mother of the autistic boy effectively begging for his safety in a local mosque, complete with hair covering to underline her submission. Truly, that is ‘celebrating our diversity’ and ‘living together with tolerance, respect and mutual understanding’.
There is mutual understanding, all right. Weak, spineless authority figures understand that a vocal minority of Muslim reactionaries are hellbent on preventing or punishing anything they deem disrespectful of their religion, and know how to exploit the masochism of the liberal state to do so. These reactionaries understand that masochism. They understand how deeply it runs through the arteries of British public life, from MPs to senior police officers to headteachers. They know there is nothing public officeholders in Britain will not do to avoid being called racist. They know these hollow men will cave at even the vaguest hint of intimidation.
The political class is too afraid to confront the problem, no longer willing to defend, let alone assert, the superiority of tolerance and pluralism to those ideologies that seek to usurp them
Simon Lightwood is one such hollow man and it is because of men like him that we are being cowed into the effective re-criminalisation of blasphemy, but blasphemy against only one religion. When no one in authority is willing to stand up for liberalism, pluralism and the rule of law – when a Labour MP is not willing to do so – those fundamental principles are left at the mercy of a retrograde element sledge-hammering away at them from within.
While Lightwood and the rest of the liberal establishment thoroughly deserve the opprobrium being heaped on their timorous little heads, it won’t have escaped your notice that Qurangate happened under a Tory government. Suella Braverman has done what she does best and supplied tough-sounding quotes to the right-wing press, though a pledge to clarify education guidelines on blasphemy and disciplinary action is mildly encouraging.
Religious intimidation is incompatible with the values that underpin British society. Anyone who engages in it should be treated with zero tolerance by every facet of the state, including and especially the criminal law. Any public employee who colludes or complies should be dismissed on the spot. Any institution that involves itself in such conduct forfeits all taxpayer and lottery funding and loses any relationships to local or central government.
There are few if any grounds to be hopeful that such a strategy would be adopted by this Tory government, which has occasionally appeared to grasp the danger here but failed for the most part to act accordingly. It’s hard to see a Labour government being much of an improvement. The political class is too afraid to confront the problem, no longer willing to defend, let alone assert, the superiority of tolerance and pluralism to those ideologies that seek to usurp them. The heavy lifting will, I suspect, be left to the British Muslims who regard Qurangate as a mixture of sinister and cringe. They don’t want their country’s schools, police and lawmakers held hostage by self-appointed mutaween whose pronouncements hold little relevance for younger, educated, socially progressive Muslims.
This fight belongs to all of us. It should not be left to British Muslims alone but it probably will be. Simon Lightwood is a shadow but the rest of the political class is just as insubstantial. The seat of Wakefield is vacant. The British state is vacant.
Comments