When Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain complains about an opponent believing ‘free speech means protecting the right to offend Muslims’, you feel an instinctive response gathering in your throat. You’re damn right it does. It means the right to burn the Qur’an, mock the Hadith and doodle cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed performing in a rainbow-flag hijab on RuPaul’s Drag Race. In a liberal society, people should be free to blaspheme against any and all religions, even pretendy ones like Anglicanism.
Mass immigration plus non-integration have allowed enclaves of reaction to sprout up in Britain. In these parallel states, some migrants and subsequent generations live as paper citizens but do not subscribe to the cultural assumptions that have come to undergird British national life
You should be free to tell Catholics they’ve built an entire church around one woman’s genius excuse for getting knocked up by someone other than her husband. Free to tell Jews that when a solicitor gives you the title deed to a piece of land it’s called conveyancing but when a voice in the sky does it it’s called schizophrenia.
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