I don’t know if you have heard of Tahir Ali, the hard left Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley. Being a sad political anorak, I’m afraid I had. He had his 15 minutes of fame in the worst way imaginable when in 2022 he supported the pro Russia group Stop The West‘s campaign to undermine NATO. Worse than that, he supported Rebecca Long-Bailey’s failed attempt to keep Labour in opposition. by becoming its new leader. Other than that, he’s been a typical backbench non-entity. Until yesterday.
At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday 27th November, Ali asked Keir Starmer that he “commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions.” Unfortunately, instead of telling Ali where he could stick his religious texts – and to be clear, I am referring to all religious texts here, not just the one he believes in – the PM did some fence-sitting and burbled about being committed to tackling “Islamophobia in all its forms“, describing “desecration” as “awful” and urging it to be “condemned across the house“. Now, for this atheist and secularist, that is not good enough. Worse than that, I am currently on the same side of the debate, such as it is, as the likes of the former actor Laurence ‘Loozza’ Fox and Nigel Farage’s private company Reform UK Ltd. Because what Ali is calling for is the return of the blasphemy law.
We have been here before, more recently with the Danish cartoons fiasco of 2005, the Charlie Hebdo shootings of 2015 and in the dim and not that distant past, the fatwa issued against the author Salman Rushdie in 1989, whereby the Ayatollah Khamenei said all Muslims should kill him because he wrote a book that offended them. Well, the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and Scotland in 2024. And because we no longer have a blasphemy law, we the people can pass critical comment and even ridicule against religion, all religion. That is how it should be. But not in Tahir Ali’s world.
I wish Starmer had been more firm. But then, politicians rarely are. When Rushdie was being targeted by death threats, the right wing Tory minister Norman Tebbit put the boot, not into the clerical fanatics, but into Rushdie himself. He said: “Mr Salman Rushdie’s public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal to his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality.” Basically, fuck you, you’re not really British anyway. Margaret Thatcher piled in, too: “We have known in our own religion people doing things which are deeply offensive to some of us. We feel it very much. And that is what is happening to Islam”. And finally, Tory grandee Sir Geoffrey Howe, who had not read the book said this: “The British government, the British people have no affection for this book… It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany… We do not like that any more than people of the Muslim faith like the attacks on their faith.” I know Howe had not read the book because it said no such thing about Britain and Hitler’s Germany. While Keir Starmer sat on the fence, Tebbit, Thatcher and Howe came down unequivocally on the side of the Ayatollah.
If this blog had a mass following in the hundreds of thousands and even millions, do you think I’d write something even vaguely critical about religion in general and Islam in particular? Of course, I wouldn’t. I’d be cowering like the mainstream media which didn’t have the bottle to print the Danish cartoons and the politicians of all parties, except sadly far right parties. As one journalist said in 2005, “Do you really think it’s worth publishing the cartoons and then be terrified of going out for the rest of your life, for fear of being attacked and maybe murdered?” Exactly. Look what eventually happened to Salman Rushdie and Theo van Gogh.
What it comes down to eventually is this: do you want free speech or not? If you do, then people should be able to display cartoons of whoever they like, including characters from religion. It is that simple. As the late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote: “It was said by the supposed Jesus of Nazareth that his followers should expect to be mocked for their beliefs“. That surely must apply to all religions.
Even at a very low level, I was criticised by religious folk on a local Facebook residents forum for referring to religion as a superstition, which by very definition it very clearly is, not least because it is belief without evidence. “I am offended that you referred to my religion as a superstition,” said one resident. “Well,” I didn’t reply, but should have. “We no longer have a blasphemy law in this country so I can refer to all religions how I like and I have the right to offend you, as you have the right to offend me as an atheist and a secularist.” And there we arrive at the heart of the matter: being offended.
Being offended is a part of free speech. You might not like what I have to say, but you should defend my right to say it. As long as what I say is lawful – and being critical about religion has been lawful since 2008 – then you should respect the law of the land and not some alternative, undemocratic and unrecognised religious law. You could say that if you preferred to live your life under a religious system of law, then there are plenty of possibilities for you in the rest of the world. I’m afraid this makes me sound a bit Nigel Farage, but to be fair to myself – and if I’m not, who will be? – I’ve been saying this since before the time Farage was a commodities trader in the City of London, long before he set about trying to destroy everything that’s good about this country.
One thing we need more of, not less, is freedom. We do not have a truly free press and our political system is effectively an elective dictatorship, where we have a vote every five years and then have no say in how the country is run until we have another vote. Of course, everyone should be allowed to believe in their God of choice and worship as they see fit, as long as their beliefs do not in any way affect those of us who do not share their God. But neither should those of religion fear criticism, constructive or not, and they should not try to ban it, either.
This is not Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran or, for that matter, Italy, Germany and Northern Ireland, or any of the 95 countries around the world that still have blasphemy laws. And please, let’s tell Tahir Ali that’s how we’d like it to stay, thank you very much.
