Britain’s blasphemy laws were made by multiculturalism

Many had warned that Britain would soon have ‘blasphemy laws by the back door’. And so it came to pass on Monday, when Hamit Coskun was found guilty of a religiously aggravated public-order offence for setting fire to the Koran. Yet while there has been justified outrage at the decision, there remains a failure to grasp the true meaning of this landmark verdict. It represents not merely the return of blasphemy law by the back door, but also the advancement of ‘hard multiculturalism’ through the front door.

By hard multiculturalism, I mean a long-standing state policy of recognising, institutionalising and promoting ethnic difference – as opposed to ‘soft multiculturalism’, which refers to the experience of living in a society with multiple ethnicities (a distinction and wording I coined 20 years ago in my short book, The Poverty of Multiculturalism). In the past 12 months, we’ve seen both the consequences and the reinforcement of hard multiculturalism, with all its attendant anxieties and miseries.

It has manifested itself starkly in Keir Starmer’s ‘two tier’ Britain, a country in which the state openly treats people differently according to their ethnic background. Two-tier justice is partly an intellectual inheritance of a hyper-liberal ideology that regards white people to be inherently privileged, and all those who aren’t to be worthy of special treatment and protection. But that ideology was mere garnish to an existing multicultural settlement that had long entrenched racial awareness in the UK. By the time woke arrived 10 years or so ago, Britain had already been fractured into mutually suspicious ethnic blocs, each armed with competing grievances and claims to victimhood.

The verdict handed down on Monday to Hamit Coskun, the Armenian-Kurdish activist who burnt the holy book outside the Turkish consulate in February, is indicative of a profound problem. Coskun was not found guilty of blasphemy as such, either technically or in spirit. Historically, blasphemy laws existed to enforce the religious orthodoxy of the majority, not the feelings of an ethno-religious minority. The judge, John McGarva, instead found Coskun’s ‘highly provocative’ actions to be ‘motivated at least in part by a hatred of Muslims’. This was in essence a hate-crime prosecution.

The real transgression here was not insulting a religion, but posing a threat to a country judged to be in need of protection from itself. Our judiciary and politicians already believe Britain’s white populace are easily inflamed, hence their reluctance last year to disclose the ethnicity of the Southport killer for fear of stoking community tensions. It is now clear that they also think Muslims in Britain can’t control their emotions. Indeed, the judgement explicitly cites the fact that one passer-by stabbed Coskun with a knife as a reason to punish him. It blames the victim’s performative insult to Islam for compelling a Muslim to act violently.

In spending decades encouraging people to look upon each other through the prism of race, ethnicity and religion, our elites have left a country fragmented. And now, in order to maintain order among rancorous ethno-religious groups, they resort to rule by iron fist, with disproportionately long prison sentences for hate speakers and plans to ban so-called Islamophobia. They’re trying to keep together a populace they helped divide in the first place. Monday’s ruling will continue to make things worse.

The real useful idiots of the Nazis

In remarks last week, in which he likened those who call for Britain to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights with the Nazis, UK attorney general Lord Hermer deployed a familiar tactic used by our overclass. Gary Lineker did the same thing two years ago when he said that the Conservative government’s language in regards to asylum seekers was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ’30s’.

The comparison of people who believe in national sovereignty, democracy or populism with the Nazis, by elites who continue to sneer at the low-information riff-raff for their Brexity opinions, overlooks a significant point. It was not the masses who brought the Nazis to power in 1933 and kept them there, but the democracy-fearing German elites.

The Nazis came to power with support of the industrialists and oligarchs, who sought stability and profit. They also had the help of conservatives and aristocrats, such as German president Paul von Hindenburg and chancellor Franz von Papen, who thought that Hitler could be used and controlled. And they had the mandate of the middle and lower-middle classes hit hardest by the economic crash of 1929. As German historian Detlev JK Peukert concluded in his 1982 book, Inside Nazi Germany: ‘In the many elections held before 1933 the traditional core of the working class showed itself to be the social group least susceptible to National Socialism.’

As for Carl Schmitt, the jurist and political theorist who provided justification for Nazism, and the bogeyman invoked by Hermer, he was one of many deluded, over-educated men of his era who despised parliamentary democracy. The elite today who champion unelected, supranational judicial bodies, and who draw parallels between their opponents and fascists, would do well to ‘educate themselves’.

In praise of Headliners

It’s a pity that GB News is considering axing its popular evening preview of newspapers, Headliners. This would be a truly regrettable decision.

Not only does Headliners command healthy viewing figures, and many regard it as the best programme on GB News, it’s also intelligent, irreverent and actually amusing – in an age in which most political TV comedy has none of these qualities.

What with Mock The Week having been put out of its misery three years ago, some time after the EU referendum of 2016 set it on the road to ruin, and with Have I Got News For You having gone down a similar self-satisfied path of sneering at the lower orders, Headliners is about the only show left that consistently savages the establishment.

Paradoxically, given that it is broadcast on a network that once boasted of being an antidote to the ‘mainstream media’, Headliners continues to take newspapers seriously in an age that doesn’t. The deaths last month of Times investigative reporter Andrew Norfolk and Express political editor Patrick O’Flynn remind us that print journalists play a vital role in our politics and shaping public debate. Headliners constantly reminds us where most news originates: from professional, traditional outlets that first report what’s happening.

Headliners also confounds the lazy consensus of those who mock GB News as a channel producing mere propaganda for the peasants. Its regulars include Nick Dixon, an English literature masters graduate, who casually mentioned Jean Baudrillard the other week; Simon Evans, whose forthcoming Edinburgh show is set to be loosely based on the allegory of Plato’s cave; and Leo Kearse, whose wit and wits are as sharp as his tongue.

Headliners often pushes the boundaries of acceptability, garnering thousands of Ofcom complaints, which may end up forcing the hand of a skittish GB News, which already has many powerful enemies. Still, if nothing else, its presenters would at least be able to walk away satisfied that it’s been a victim of its own success.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.