by Tom Slater, spiked
Our backdoor blasphemy laws were decades in the making, inked in blood and cowardice.
Does freedom of speech include the right to blaspheme? In 21st-century Britain, you’d have thought the answer would be ‘yes, obviously’. Our last blasphemy conviction was in 1977. England’s blasphemy law was abolished in 2008, having been a dead letter for decades. The centuries-long struggle for free speech in this country, as in so many others, was built on defaming gods, kings, clerics, prophets. Without the right to blaspheme, there is no right to speak freely. But in this identitarian age, what was once taken for granted is fast melting into air.
In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech.