What's at stake is the right to insult and cause offence

The religious hatred bill shifts the cultural balance away from free speech and towards appeasement

Polly Toynbee
Tuesday January 31, 2006
The Guardian



The culture of thought-crime and self-censorship is a creeping thing. Invisibly it chills debate and cautions editors, publishers and TV producers. It restrains the pen and puts marbles in the mouth of free speech. If only Voltaire were speaking in the House of Commons this evening when MPs have a chance to vote against a law that makes offending or insulting religion a crime with a seven-year prison sentence.

The incitement to religious hatred bill, put first by David Blunkett five years ago, has bounced back and forth, opposed by Tories and Lib Dems, The intellectual demolition has been led by the National Secular Society, with Humanists, Liberty, Pen the writers' group and comedy writers led by Rowan Atkinson now joined by Christian Institute fundamentalists afraid their hell-fire sermons will put them in peril.

Tonight on this final vote all MPs who value free speech should be there to throw the bill out. Labour put it into the manifesto, obliging the Lords to vote for it but they made crucial limiting amendments, all of them rejected by the government. A clumsy new clause pretending to protect free speech only makes matters worse. MPs should beware assertions from Paul Goggins, Home Office minister in charge, that the government has listened. Be not deceived. As ever, it's all in the devilish detail.

The bill makes criminal "a person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour". The Lords amendment took out "abusive or insulting" to make hatred of religion a crime only if it was part of a threat. That catches any attempt by the BNP to use "Muslim" as a proxy for race in stirring up hate. Words as a threat to stir hatred against anyone is already a Public Order Act offence.

Alarmingly the bill not only catches anyone who intends to stir up religious hatred. A person "reckless as to whether religious hatred would be stirred up" can also be prosecuted, a stricter catch-all test than under race laws.

What's at stake here is the right to be insulting and cause offence. Many Muslim groups think it will protect their religious sensitivities - and so it will, by shifting the cultural balance away from free speech towards a sanctimonious right to feel offended. It puts religious belief into a sacred compound protected by legal razor-wire from robust mockery or public abuse. In this inquisition of a bill, religion will become a minefield, a no-go area in the world of ideas. Before you speak or write, ask yourself not only if you intend to abuse and insult, but if you are "reckless" about any insult that may unwittingly be caused to someone somewhere? Expect the degree of insult people feel to tighten a little more each year under case law. It is already happening under employment law with certain kinds of harassment: if someone says they feel harassed, then lawyers warn no other evidence is required.

The government claims free expression is safeguarded in Section 29k. Apologies here for terrible legal language, but this is the key clause the government will use in tonight's debate to falsely reassure MPs unfamiliar with the detail. The clause begins "for the avoidance of doubt" and proceeds to obfuscate the right to free speech still further.

This free-speech guarantee seeks to protect "debate" and "ridiculing". However, unpick the language: a person can debate and ridicule "unless he intends to stir up religious hatred or is reckless as to whether religious hatred would be stirred up thereby", which immediately removes any extra safeguard. Lawyers say that instead it specifically draws "debate" and "ridicule" into the act's dragnet. Accept no assurances from Goggins on this. Even a senior Home Office lawyer admitted it was meaningless.

It would not protect Rowan Atkinson's sketch showing men bowed down praying in a mosque with the voiceover intoning: "And the search goes on for the Ayatollah Khomeini's contact lens." Many were insulted. It would not protect Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, let alone Christ in nappies on the cross in Jerry Springer - the Opera. Nor would it stop Behzti being closed down by angry Sikh mobs. Police who failed to protect free theatre will feel the benefit of the doubt tip towards religious sensitivities. Of course these writers were reckless about causing offence: that is what artists recklessly do.

Free speech is fragile: laws change cultural climates in the media and inside minds. Police who can, absurdly, question Sir Iqbal Sacranie for his homophobic views yet never arrest him for his inflammatory remarks over Salman Rushdie, will make no sense of this law. Police stations will be besieged by insulted zealots brandishing ancient books. Only the attorney general can agree an actual prosecution. Refusing will add offence to the already offended.

Much argument has been made for this bad bill. It belongs in the same nonsense league as banning "glorification of terrorism". Ideas cannot be policed, though blatant threats always have been. "Political correctness gone mad" is the Daily Mail take on all laws that protect people from discrimination but ethnic minorities and women cannot chose their physical attributes as they can chose ideas, to be tested and challenged. The bill struggles in vain to separate abuse of people's ideas from abuse of people who hold those ideas.

Dr Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP leader of parliamentary argument against the bill, says it would prevent him talking of "loathsome fundamentalist Christian homophobic bigots" though it would let him abuse politicians, as in "loathsome US Republican homophobic bigots". For some, political beliefs are far more personal than non-existent religious ones, yet no one demands sacred respect for political passions. Nor will it be lawful to say "loathsome Islamic jihadist terrorists" (even if you add the current caveat "perverted-form-of-Islamic").

One thing is certain: those who hold passionate religious beliefs see no difference between themselves and their creeds. Calling people's religion a dangerous and misogynist primitive fetish feels to them like incitement to hatred.

Already there is a frosty caution about disrespect towards religion: it causes a more shocking frisson than it did five years ago. Abuse of religious beliefs feels like a personal insult, the religious want it silenced and they are winning. How long before no MP dare call themselves an atheist? Will anyone speak up against growing faith schools in this secular nation? MPs should go into the chamber tonight to stop all this religious appeasement in its tracks.

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk