The right to be rude (Civitas Blog)

It’s been an ongoing saga for years, but finally the farce has come to an end. No, Harold Bishop hasn’t died, and it pains me to tell you that Barbi’s still alive too; but on the upside the Home Office’s Bill for the incitement to religious hatred was last night defeated in the Commons. As the BBC reports, the narrow defeat means that the Bill will become law with a series of amendments passed by the Lords designed to safeguard freedom of speech and meet the concerns of campaigners such as the comedian Rowan Atkinson. Our reasons for opposing the Bill are well documented elsewhere on the website, but the wider spectrum of resistance has also been revealing, with an unexpected alliance forged between the National Secular Society, the British Humanist Association, the Christian Institute, the Evangelical Alliance, the Muslim Parliament and the Muslim Forum. This represents a triumph for the Voltairian principle of disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it.

The debate yesterday in the Commons was led by Home Office minister Paul Goggins, a buffoon with the kind of evocative surname that Dickens would have given a buffoon, and he couldn’t seem to come up with any better justification for the measures than filling a spurious loophole in the law. But it was when MPs got down to brass tacks – asking what would and wouldn’t be covered by the legislation as drawn up by the government – that his troubles really began.

For example, when Labour MPs Claire Curtis-Thomas and Bob Marshall-Andrews asked whether the statement ‘the prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 6-year-old girl was immoral’ would be liable to prosecution if the Bill became law, old Muggins replied that for a prosecution to proceed it would have to be proved that the author of the statement either intended to stir up religious hatred or was reckless as to whether religious hatred was incited. The ‘reckless’ bit is the real stumbling block here.

A number of other hypothetical cases were considered in the House and then another Labour backbencher, Gordon Prentice, asked if the caricatures recently published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten would be covered. The disputed cartoons include one showing Muhammad, the founder of Islam, wearing a bomb-shaped turban, and another of him telling suicide bombers he’d run out of virgins to award them. These images have provoked uproar across the Islamic world. Mr I'm-in-a-Pickles replied: ‘The straight answer is [yes] if there was an intention to stir up hatred or if the person was behaving in a reckless way about the impact of his behaviour.’

It’s that ‘reckless’ word again. The Conservative frontbencher Dominic Grieve described the proposals as a lawyers’ field day because they were so badly drawn. He called for religion not to be made the subject of new incitement to hatred laws. ‘Those of us who have a belief have just had to lump it when someone comes along with something which we find offensive. It worries me so much that the Government is asking me and everyone else to take a step backwards on this issue rather than saying these are our values and you have jolly well got to subscribe to them.’

In the end, the government lost its first vote by a margin of ten and the second by a margin of one. The sweet irony in the second instance was that Hilary Armstrong, the government’s chief whip, told Mr Blair that he could go home. His vote would have been the decider. Ms Armstrong is almost certain to jump if she isn’t pushed first. Salt on a wound for Blair was that the Respect MP George Galloway, back from the Big Brother House, voted with the government. The joke going round Westminster yesterday was that ‘he thought it was a feline whip’.

So, to a chorus of ‘resign’ from Conservative MPs, Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, told the Commons that he accepted its verdict and that the Bill would become law. But it was stripped of measures to outlaw ‘abusive and insulting’ language and behaviour as well as the crime of ‘recklessness’ in actions that incite religious hatred. The amendments restricted the new offence of inciting religious hatred to ‘threatening’ words and behaviour rather than a wider definition covering insults and abuse. They also required the offence to be intentional and specified that proselytising, discussion, criticism, insult, abuse and ridicule of religion, belief or religious practice would not be an offence. These amendments, it is arguable, make the bill useless, since what remains is already covered by other laws, such as the Public Order Offences Act.

The whole business has been a mess, with the government presenting bad measures to placate the Muslim vote that it ostracised over Iraq. It is a rare defeat for the government and could well be the beginning of the end for the Blair administration (the backbencher Labour rebels may have a taste for blood that will kill off ID cards and the education proposals too), but the most important outcome is that our freedom of speech is for now safe.