patrick.net

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1949231889539379352

[Nick Timothy MP] I beg to move that leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about freedom of expression in relation to religion or belief systems; and for connected purposes.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I do not believe that Mohammed was a Prophet sent by God. I do not accept the instructions he said he received from the Archangel Gabriel. I do not accept that the Sunna, or body of Islamic laws, has any relevance to me.

I respect the religious beliefs of others, but I do not mind if Mohammed is satirised, criticised or mocked. I am not a Muslim, and I choose not to live by the moral codes set out by Islam. I am a Christian, and I should make it clear that I don’t think anybody should be prosecuted for satirising, criticising or mocking Jesus either.

England and Wales abolished blasphemy laws in 2008, and Scotland abolished them in 2021. But even then, those laws had not been used for decades. The last blasphemy trial took place in 1977, and the state has not brought a public prosecution for blasphemy in more than a century. But now, blasphemy laws are back.

I have been advised not to refer to two high-profile cases of people being arrested, charged and prosecuted for causing harassment, alarm or distress to Muslims or even, nonsensically, to Islam itself. So while I will keep my speech to the conceptual, I invite the House to recall that there are real examples of what I raise in the criminal justice system right now.

The issue is the way that sections 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 are being used — far beyond the intent of Parliament — to police what we can and cannot say about Islam. I will come to the details of sections 4 and 5, but first I want to say something about the intent of the Public Order Act.

The long title of the Act makes clear that its purpose was to abolish some common law and statutory offences to make way for new offences relating to public order. Nowhere in the Second Reading debate from 1986 did anybody raise the need to protect religions or followers of religions from offence. The context of the Act was football hooliganism and the riots in Brixton and Broadwater Farm.

It’s true that part III of the Act created new offences relating to racial hatred; and this was amended to include religious hatred by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. But in part III, in section 29J, to which we will return, the Public Order Act says:

“Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents.”

We can therefore be confident that the Public Order Act, even as amended, was never intended to become a blasphemy law. This obvious conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the controversies regarding blasphemy and Islam in this country began two years after its introduction, in 1988, with the publication of The Satanic Verses.

Since that year, and the protests and fatwa against Sir Salman Rushdie, our public conversation about Islam has been limited through a mixture of self-censorship and more official restrictions, such as the definition of Islamophobia accepted by many public bodies. These restrictions are motivated not by a desire to avoid offence — consider the criticism and mockery made of other religions — but fear of a violent response by those who are offended.

Some say public order offences are not the same as a blasphemy law, and that it can be legitimate to prosecute somebody for saying something that might cause wider disorder. Perhaps in some circumstances this may be so, but we should interrogate this line of thinking.

First, the Crown Prosecution Service gave the game away by charging one man with causing “distress” to the “religious institution of Islam”, which is pretty much the dictionary definition of blasphemy.

Second, twisting the law to make a protestor responsible for the violent reaction of those who will not tolerate the opinions of others is wrong; it destroys our freedom of speech. Some argue that while this may be regrettable, it’s now an unavoidable consequence of the multicultural society in which we live today.

By this logic, the state must police the boundaries between different ethnic and religious groups to avoid disorder. But we should be clear that that means state intrusion and a loss of liberty on some occasions, and mob rule on others. This is the very essence of the two-tier policing row we have seen recently: rough justice for those belonging to identity groups that play by the rules, and freedom from justice for those belonging to groups willing to take to the streets and threaten violence.

This is the logic of using the Public Order Act to prohibit us from saying what we like about a religion. A person may be found guilty because of the violent reaction of those offended by their actions. From Sir Salman Rushdie to the Batley teacher still in hiding with his family, the threat of violence is what lies behind these new blasphemy laws.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. There are at least 14 Muslim-majority countries where the penalty for blasphemy or apostasy is death, and we have significant diaspora populations from many of them. With the number of people… here who came from those countries growing, and the increasing assertiveness of organised political Islam in Britain, this is a problem that seems likely to only get more severe. But the answer is not to surrender to the mob; it is to hold the line, and that is why today I bring forward this Bill.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I said earlier that section 29J of the Public Order Act protects “criticism”, “insult” and even “abuse” of “religions and the beliefs or practices of their adherents”. But this only applies to part III of the legislation, because part III introduced offences relating to racial hatred, later amended to include religious hatred. Nobody thought sections 4 and 5, which in part I of the Act make it an offence to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” by using “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” would be used to criminalise the expression of opinions about religious belief.

This Bill therefore extends the scope of [section] 29J to the whole Public Order Act, thus preventing the use of sections 4 and 5 as a de facto blasphemy law, and applies section 29 also to section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

In doing so, this Bill would restore free speech as it applies to religion in England and Wales. It would stop the police, prosecutors and judges from creating a blasphemy law from legislation that was never passed for that purpose. It would send the strongest powerful message from this place, where political power legitimately and democratically resides, that this country will not tolerate intimidation, violence or censorship, that there will be no special treatment here for Islam, and that there will be no surrender to the thugs who want to impose their beliefs and culture on the rest of us.

LMAOO.. the BBC went into a Muslim majority area in the UK, to prove they’re integrating

The FIRST person responds with, “I don’t understand English”

"There's f**king kids about!"

A migrant exposed himself on a London overground train and started screaming at those who told him to pull his pants up.

Several Brits stepped in to throw him off the train.

Several Brits stepped in to throw him off the train.

Saying YOU DO NOT want your taxpayer money being used to fund "IMMIGRANTS THAT RAPE OUR KIDS" is apparently a crime punishable by 20 months in prison.

Free speech is dead.

He was arrested in the UK for saying he loves bacon? Arrested?

UK free speech crackdown sees up to 30 people a day arrested for petty offenses such as retweets and cartoons ...

Maxie Allen, a radio producer in Hertfordshire, was on a Zoom call at home when he saw police standing over his shoulder from the camera view on his screen. Six officers came knocking — his partner Rosalind Levine, who answered the door, thought their disabled daughter had died — to haul the couple off over comments they posted in a private WhatsApp group for parents at their children’s school.

In the chat, the couple had been repeatedly critical of the public school’s slow pace to recruit a replacement headteacher.

“It’s shaken the faith of the country I thought I lived in. I never imagined that just by airing your views about how an organization was run, trying to hold people to account in public office, that you get arrested for that,” Allen, 50, told the Post.

“If you have a vague law and then it’s enforced to an officious and stupid degree, then it’s always going to end in tears.”

Similar stories abound. In 2018 a man identifying himself as “Adam” phoned into the British talk radio station LBC to describe his encounter with police earlier that year.

“I’m Asian myself and I did this drawing of a mate of mine, who’s also Asian, and I said, ‘you look like a terrorist.’ And he took it really well. He thought it was funny,” he told the host.

But someone else saw the humorous doodle, took issue, and called police. Months later, Adam and his friend were interviewed by authorities — the friend told cops he laughed at the drawing and wasn’t offended — but police still made an official report for a “non-crime hate incident” and forced Adam to write a letter of apology to his friend, which he had to email to him.

Last year, 21-year-old student Jamila Abdi of East London, who is black, was charged under the Communications Act of 2003 for “indecent or grossly offensive [speech] for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety” after she used a version of the n-word in post on X out of frustration while watching a soccer match.

“I’m so p—-d off let me get my hands on that f—–g n—a,” she wrote about black footballer Alexander Isak. ...

The stories are so shocking, it’s caught the attention of the White House, which is taking an increasingly aggressive stance against censorship in the Eurozone. In a fiery address to the Munich Security Conference in February, Vice President JD Vance blasted “a crisis of censorship” in Britain.

On Tuesday, the US State Department’s annual Human Rights Report slammed British authorities’ “serious restrictions on freedom of expression,” writing that the “human rights situation worsened” in Britian over the last year, and criticized laws like 2023’s Online Safety Act.

“We consider freedom of expression to be a foundational component of a functioning democracy,” State Department press secretary Tammy Bruce told reporters, calling Britain’s chilling government actions “intolerable in a free society.” ...

This July, the Home Office announced it was assembling an elite force of special agents drawn from across the country to monitor speech on social media.

Also this summer, the UK government updated its definition of terrorist ideologies to include “cultural nationalism,” singling out Westerners who express concern over mass migration.