by Owen Shapell, spiked
The bigots who hounded the Batley Grammar teacher into hiding have been rewarded with a blasphemy law.
There is a schoolteacher in England whose name I cannot tell you, because he was forced to change it. In March 2021, he showed his year nine class at West Yorkshire’s Batley Grammar School a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad – a reproduction of the infamous Charlie Hebdo cartoon from 2015 – as part of a lesson on blasphemy. It was five months after Samuel Paty, a French teacher who had conducted a similar lesson, was beheaded by a jihadist in a suburb of Paris. One might have expected, in the aftermath of a colleague’s decapitation, some institutional solidarity. One would have been naive.
A mob formed. Death threats followed. The Batley teacher’s children slept on mattresses on the floor in temporary accommodation. The headteacher ‘unequivocally’ apologised for the offence caused – a sentence that, if British liberalism ever requires an epitaph, would serve admirably. The teacher was suspended. He was later cleared, but it made no difference. He developed PTSD and became suicidal. When he visited a police station after relocating, officers told him he had ‘made it harder for them by moving’. Dame Sara Khan’s government-commissioned review described him as ‘totally and utterly failed’ by every institution that owed him protection. Five years on, he remains in hiding. Nobody has been arrested for threatening his life. No politician of any consequence has dared say his name.
I begin here because the government’s new 47-page cohesion strategy, Protecting What Matters, begins with him, too. It promises to ‘stand against those who try to intimidate, threaten and harass others because they are offended by so-called “blasphemy”’. It declares: ‘We do not recognise blasphemy law in the UK.’ And then, with exquisite bureaucratic care, it then constructs the apparatus of one. It builds the scaffold and hangs a sign on it reading, ‘Not A Scaffold’.