The 28 days debate is a red herring compared to this attack on free speech

Samina Malik may be cretinous, but shouldn’t be criminalised

Eeny meeny miny mo
Catch a kafir by the toe,
If he hollers, chop his head off,
And put the video on YouTube.

I’d better be quick, because I assume the Old Bill will be around any moment now. The little verse quoted above is my poetry debut for The Spectator and before you point out its many deficiencies of feet, metre, scansion, rhyme — not to mention its strictly limited breadth, semantically speaking — let me assure you it was intended as a pastiche. You shouldn’t take it at face value. With any luck, that will get me off the incitement to racial and religious hatred charges and also the solicitation of murder rap. It is a pastiche of the work of Samina Malik, the self-styled ‘Lyrical Terrorist’, who will be sentenced for her own poetical works on 6 December, having already been convicted by a British court. My verse is a sort of tribute to her, in a way — it’s a long time since we’ve banged someone up for writing a poem or two. The Americans tried to convict Ezra Pound and we incarcerated Oscar Wilde, of course. But in both of those cases it was for stuff they did in their spare time, when they weren’t writing poetry, i.e. treason and sodomising men respectively. So — Richard Lovelace, back in 1648, perhaps? But that was for a pro-royalist petition, rather than one of his vainglorious, starch-panted, gung-ho ballads. Stone walls do not a prison make? Well, they did an OK job in your case, mate.