In the UK there are already de facto blasphemy laws. But under pressure from the Islamic lobby, which is growing in power, an incoming Labour government contemplates introducing legislation which would irreversibly damage freedom of speech and stifle any ability to criticize radical Islam.
Among their various manifesto commitments, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party have promised to upgrade the British state’s focus on “hate crime.” This should be a chilling prospect to anyone who knows how these laws are wielded in Britain.
The Runnymede Trust, a “progressive” activist think tank in Britain, adopted the term “Islamophobia” in 1997 to describe not just prejudice against Muslims but also towards Islam. The term was inherited from Revolutionary Iran in the 1980s and it mainstreamed the concerted effort to regulate speech against Islam in British public life. In more recent years, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims has introduced its own vague and therefore pernicious definition of the term. According to this definition, “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” This is the definition which the Labour Party has officially adopted for internal party purposes.
The trouble with this definition is that its scope is so broad that it covers almost everything that might be said about Islam and about the practices of some of its most extreme adherents. It could be illegal to claim that the history of Islam has involved spreading the religion via the sword – which is, of course, true. It might also be illegal to associate certain crimes or harms perpetrated against women within some minority communities as having anything to do with Islam.
Now, a Labour government wouldn’t have to criminalize “Islamophobic” speech to effectively introduce a blasphemy law through the back door. Simply the adoption and proliferation of the concept in policing, the work force, and guidance for public bodies would be enough to radically change the way Britons feel comfortable speaking about Islam.
There are three ways in which Labour have committed themselves to pursuing this course of action in their manifesto. Firstly, they intend to introduce a new Race Equality Act, designed to enforce ethnicity pay gap reporting, that will “strengthen protections against… discrimination and root out other racial inequalities.” Second, they will upgrade the monitoring of Islamophobic hate. Presumably one possible purpose of such monitoring is to justify the introduction of further anti-Islamophobic measures, whether in terms of legal penalties or softer but no less effective social pressure. And finally, they have mooted the creation of an ethics commissioner in Parliament with the power to censor elected officials.
The impact on speech in the workplace would be grave, bordering on dystopian. It is little comfort to know that you won’t simply be thrown into prison (for now) for making an oblique criticism of radical Islam, if you might, instead, easily lose your livelihood and have your life destroyed by overzealous Human Resources managers or vexatious activist colleagues for speaking your mind.
It would have a huge impact on media and reporting as well. This definition of “islamophobia” would be adopted by the BBC and by Ofcom, the UK media regulator, which would radically undermine accurate reporting of anything which might offend Muslim sensibilities in Britain. Take the grooming gangs scandal, for example. The grooming and rape of young girls played out over many decades in deprived towns across Britain at the hands of largely Muslim men with Pakistani origin. These went unreported and not investigated by the police for fear of coming across as “Islamophobic.” In recent years, finally, there have been pockets of reporting around this issue which would likely be quashed by the proliferation of this definition throughout UK media institutions.
(For a harrowing, and very fresh example of such behavior, see Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s translation of a recent account of what it’s like to live as a woman in a Muslim neighborhood. It made me so angry I wanted to scream.)
This change could also radically undermine proper reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the APPG report introducing the new definition of “islamophobia,” even accusing Muslim Majority states of exaggerating claims of a genocide makes you an Islamophobe. As such, anyone who questions Hamas’ narrative of Israel’s military operation would be caught under the definition.
The second commitment – upgrading the monitoring of Islamophobia – risks the police engaging in Stasi-like operations for which there has been precedent. In Britain, for many years the police have recorded what are called “non-crime hate incidents.” These are incidents which do not constitute a crime, but which are logged against someone’s name due to the perception of another that their speech was motivated by hostility based on an ever-increasing list of protected factors – race, sexual orientation, disability, and now possibly their “muslimness.” American readers, thank your lucky stars for the First Amendment.
These are recorded regardless of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element and regardless of the motivation behind the speech. Before the previous government eventually relented and demoted the extent to which non-crime hate incidents were recorded there was a massive upsurge, with nearly 120,000 recorded between 2014 and 2019.
And they aren’t innocuous either. Thousands have had the police knocking at their door or at their place of work for jokes made online, in particular. This is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Because they are recorded by many police forces, they have flagged up during job applications, ruining careers without even the fig-leaf of due process or a right to a defense at trial.
The idea that the Labour Party is actively signaling that it would encourage the upgrading of this kind of monitoring, combined with the adoption of such a broad definition, should worry any Briton. You don’t have to be particularly conservative or in the habit of voicing dangerous opinions to see that so open-ended a system is open to deliberate abuse, foolish misapplication, or even just plain misunderstanding.
It should also remind us that the normalization of such policies in Western democracies risks the progressive degrading of our first amendment rights in the US. Freedoms are rarely removed all at once; they tend rather to die the death of a thousand cuts.
Potentially the most sinister of all, however, is the proposal mooted by Labour for the creation of an ethics commissioner in Parliament. According to the manifesto, Labour would create an “Ethics and Integrity commission with its own independent chair” with the power to launch investigations and expel MPs. Their reasoning is “to ensure probity in government,” but it requires no leap of the imagination to see where this would likely lead.
As it stands, MPs can say whatever they want during debates with no fear of legal interference. This “parliamentary privilege” is grounded in England’s 1689 Bill of Rights, the direct precursor of America’s own. Of course, if a member of parliament (“MP”) were to say something crazy or wicked, their party could kick them out or their electorate might punish them at the ballot box. Nevertheless, they have had total legal protection in the House of Commons to voice any concerns without fear of legal censure.
A move to create this position would move Britain from being a truly representative democracy which wrestles with contentious political questions through the workings of the oldest parliament in the world, to a country in which the parameters of political speech and therefore potential political action are set by technocrats. If the adoption of the APPG definition of “islamophobia” tells us anything, it is that these people admit of a very limited understanding of free expression. This should be taken very seriously in Britain and should serve as a warning to those in the US who take their first amendment for granted.
I write this as a warning. First to those in America who might make the mistake of assuming that Britain is a faraway country which has little to do with them. That would be an unfortunate mistake to make. Sharing a language in common, and to some extent also an elite, means that dangerous ideological slides in Britain can have quick repercussions in America (and vice versa!).
But second – and here I almost dare to hope – to those in Britain and the Labour Party who are wary of these dangers. Friends in Britain with links to Labour tell me that these changes are not a done deal, and that there are people even within Labour who are extremely worried about such shortsighted moves. Ed Husain, a liberal Muslim and academic who served as an advisor to retired Labour Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair, has come out against such changes in the Spectator recently.
I’d like to hear more from Kim Leadbetter, the Labour candidate standing for reelection in Batley and Spen, a constituency where a Religious Studies teacher had to go into hiding in 2021 due to threats and intimidation following accusations of disrespect towards Islam and Muslims. As the local MP, Leadbetter has been vocal in her disgust at these events – surely she could come out against changes in the law which might allow for future weaponized accusations of Islamophobia leading to similar results?
Labour’s current leader is a difficult man to read. On some issues, Sir Keir Starmer seems a dyed-in-the-wool progressive. He supported Jeremy Corbyn’s far-left leadership of the party in 2015-2019. Yet Starmer has also ruthlessly removed Corbyn and other hardline socialists from the party, and has taken a consistently tough line against anti-Semitism. He has been willing to lose a significant chunk of the British Muslim vote over his moderate Gaza policy. As a former Director of Public Prosecutions, he is undoubtedly aware of the dangers posed by Islamist groups which cross the line into violent and subversive activities. Starmer is likely to come into power with a huge majority. He has no need to rush into these proposed changes. Here’s hoping that Labour isn’t foolish enough to take these steps, and that, if they are, there are some Opposition MPs willing and able ruthlessly to scrutinize them.