A lot of Britain’s problems with integration stem from our failure to perceive the ways in which our own society is different to others in the world. Principles that seem fundamental to us are often the result of unique circumstances that caused certain European societies, and their offshoots, to think about morality, property and the individual in a very particular way.
Because we associate these principles with basic decency, it can be difficult to appreciate that they are not universal without feeling prejudicial toward other cultures and peoples. We forget to consider how and why our particular principles emerged; we assume they were just always there.
Our very broad approach to freedom of speech is one such principle. There is a basic idea that one should be able to say what one has to say — but without a grasp of how and why this concept emerged in England, for the reasons that it did, it is hard to get a feel for why we insisted that the boundaries extended as far as they did. In particular, the freedom to cause offence to religious sensibilities is understood to be a fundamental part of the concept. Even very religious people brought up in the British tradition are comfortable enough with the idea that others have a right to denigrate their beliefs, and that this is inextricably bound up with the rights that protect their own religious freedom. But this is by no means universally understood outside the Western context, where religious people have very different ideas of what it is that protects their position in society.
This problem has manifested itself most recently in the case of Hamit Coskun, who was arrested in February for burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London, and was subsequently charged with harassing and distressing “the institution of Islam”. The charges triggered a voluble backlash from a number of parliamentarians and campaigners, including the Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, and the National Secular Society who sought legal advice on the applicability of the charges. It appears now that the CPS have withdrawn this initial charge and have apologised for the inappropriate wording, but that they are seeking to substitute it with a new charge with a similar effect.
Also prominent amid the backlash was the ex-Reform, now independent MP Rupert Lowe, who took to the website everybody still refers to as Twitter to state that Britain didn’t have blasphemy laws, that burning the Quran isn’t a crime, and that freedom of speech included the freedom to cause offence, including to Islam. This prompted a response from the Independent Alliance MP Adnan Hussain, accusing Lowe of seeking to use free speech to protect people’s rights to offend Muslims. Lowe replied that, yes, that is exactly what protecting freedom of speech meant. Hussain expressed surprise that Lowe would invest so much energy into the subject, and that freedom of speech came with limitations designed to protect minorities, which he accused Lowe of wishing to remove in the case of Muslims.
There is the possibility that Adnan Hussain, who qualified as a solicitor and was born in the UK 36 years ago, has a nuanced understanding of the British tradition of freedom of speech with regard to religion, and is behaving disingenuously in an attempt to carve out special privileges for Islam. Potentially, he is just playing to the gallery of his fellow Muslims. Still, I don’t think it’s unlikely that somebody of Hussain’s background could have got through life without developing an understanding of the logic of the British tradition of freedom of expression.
We have seen our own commitment to free speech steadily atrophy in recent decades
It is difficult for many Westerners, especially people of Mr Lowe’s generation, to understand how unusual our conception of untrammelled free speech is to the vast majority of humanity. The principles upon which it is based are highly counterintuitive, and like many of our rights and freedoms, they are the sort of thing that could only have emerged from a society with exceptional confidence in the independence and strength of its institutions, and with a high degree of social trust.
Indeed, we have seen our own commitment to free speech steadily atrophy in recent decades as that confidence and social trust has diminished. Our political elites are now in a state of perpetual alarm about the words and ideas that are exchanged in the public square, and appear convinced that far tighter restrictions are needed to prevent a range of bad actors from causing harm and bringing down democracy. MPs responded to one of their colleagues being hacked to death with a machete by a Somalian terrorist, by attempting to restrict online communications. Mr Hussain’s belief that freedom of speech requires limitations will be a lot more familiar to younger generations in Britain, regardless of their ethnicity, than Mr Lowe’s maximalist approach.
The emergence of freedom of speech as a critical enlightenment principle is inseparable from the Reformation and from Protestantism, and the individual’s mission to discern the truth and nature of God. This was resisted by established churches and states, and would become a defining element in the religious wars and revolutions that would shape modern Europe over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Britain, after a long century of religious turbulence and wars, the Bill of Rights of 1689 foreshadowed the expiry of earlier statutes limiting the freedom of the press. This was followed by the dramatic transformation of attitudes that essentially redefined religion as a matter of private conscience, and one’s neighbour’s religious views as being none of one’s business Public criticism of specific religious positions, even in the most robust terms, no longer indicated imminent mortal or political peril to those that held them, and so could either be ignored or responded to in kind.
Blasphemy nominally remained a criminal offence, but became increasingly infrequently prosecuted. The final conviction was in the early 1920s for a pamphleteer who compared Christ to a circus clown. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the freedom to speak one’s mind became inextricably bound up with the concept of freedom of conscience, and the concept of what it meant to be British. This principle was most keenly adopted by political radicals, and for most of the 20th century it was a principle most closely associated with the Left. Limitations on free expression were most likely to be imposed by conservatives for content that was likely to outrage public decency, but this was very seldom related to the realm of ideas, which is where religion by then sat in the British mind.
Most British people in the 21st century have not been taught this history, unless they sought it out in higher education. Standard history teaching in schools tends to stop at around 1689, possibly before skipping forward to the Victorian period. One can certainly navigate a normal British education without encountering the writings of Locke or Milton. However, we still pick up a sense of freedom of speech as an ideal and as a right through a process of cultural osmosis. It’s probably one of the few explicitly political ideas that the average British person, regardless of their education level, really instinctively feels in their gut. That ideas have to stand or fall on their own terms when exposed to free debate is central to our understanding of democracy. The sense that words can’t hurt us is deeply interwoven in our notion of practical resilience, and stories of people being punished or prosecuted for things they have said or written cause us genuine outrage.
But communities that have arrived in Britain from elsewhere in the world, and which exist in cultural islands with limited interaction with mainstream British society, would not necessarily be exposed to any of this. Certainly, the British did not make strenuous efforts to introduce these Protestant ideas of freedom of speech evenly across the Empire during the colonial era. These ideas remained largely confined to those parts of the Empire and the Commonwealth populated predominantly by Christians of British stock. Colonial authorities were keenly aware of the dangers of arousing Muslim anger by allowing anything that might have been seen to mock or disrespect their religion. The expression of ideas or sentiment in the public forum, such as it existed, was tolerated insofar as it facilitated, or at least did not disturb, the interests of orderly government; as has usually been the case over much of the world.
In almost any human society, at any point in history, the verbal desecration of the sacred … would be an affront
In rural, heavily Muslim parts of the Punjab, or the Northwest Frontier or Kashmir from which many of Britain’s Muslim communities originate, nobody but a lunatic would have considered doing anything to insult Islam in public, and the British colonial authorities would not have stood in the way of such a person being dealt with as the local populace saw fit. Neither would the contemporary Pakistani state, which is energetic in prosecuting and punishing those who do so very harshly. The alternative would be a breakdown in public order and the loss of the legitimacy of the authorities. This approach is by no means unique to Muslims — in almost any human society, at any point in history, the verbal desecration of the sacred, be it a monarch or a deity or a book, would be an affront requiring robust censure in order to preserve order. The notion that a conflict of ideas could ultimately improve the quality of governance or bring the nation closer to God by exposing inconsistency or logical weakness would be considered laughably naive.
Perhaps an instinctive understanding of the enlightenment ideal of free speech is like developed-world driving standards; perhaps it’s something that people arriving from elsewhere in the world just automatically absorb by breathing our air. Because I can’t see what practical mechanism there is for passing this understanding on to people living in mono-cultural South Asian bubbles with limited meaningful interaction with mainstream British society. It certainly won’t come from British schools, where the need to respect one another’s religious faiths has been emphasised as one of the key pillars of good citizenship for many years now. Neither would they have been likely to have picked it up from mainstream political discourse.
Instead, they’re far more likely to have heard politicians, the police, the media, and depending on their age, their teachers, discussing the concept of “hate speech”. In addition to threatening or abusive speech, this category also covers language that is likely to cause distress based on protected characteristics, including religion. In a country that includes people who think about their religion in the way that most South Asian Muslims do about theirs, this does in fact cover pretty much any dismissive or derogatory comments about Islam that are made in a visibly public way. Indeed, it has been consistently treated as such by police and the prosecution service.
The approach by the contemporary British state to public speech is closer to the world historical norm than the Miltonian view of the post-1689 consensus. Social harmony and cohesion are the priorities, and in a society that includes different religious traditions, this means that anything that offends people’s religious sensibilities is off limits, yeah? There’s just no need for it. It was all very well back in Milton’s day for man to use his God-given power of reason to discern truth through the battle of ideas, but in today’s Britain we have stakeholder consultations for that kind of thing.
If the state didn’t find a way to police criticism of Islam and the desecration of Islamic symbols, then there are enough British Muslims who are prepared to take matters into their own hands. The mob that turned out to force the RE teacher at Batley Grammar School into hiding in 2021 is but one recent example. We may have felt outrage when, in February 2023, the mother of the boy who reportedly scuffed a Quran at a school in Wakefield was forced into a humiliating apology by West Yorkshire Police in front of a hostile Pakistani crowd; but the police probably saved that family from far greater harm.
Despite the niceties we like to tell ourselves about our criminal justice system, it exists primarily to prevent the breakdown of public order — to do the job that would otherwise be done by the mob. Along with defence from foreign invasion, this is one of the cornerstones on which the legitimacy of any state is built. The freedom of speech that emerged in England at the end of the 17th century did so because changes in attitudes and politics meant that the publication of inflammatory tracts no longer presented a threat to order; it was neither likely to incite an uprising nor provoke a response by a mob. Immigration policy over the last sixty years has effectively reversed that change, insofar as criticism of Islam is concerned, and the authorities have responded accordingly.
