by Patrick West, spiked
The Koran-burning conviction is an inevitable outcome of granting special dispensation to every ethno-religious group.
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.