That’s another reason the British Government should not be in the business of helping coercive lobby groups further stifle debate. Islam raises political questions that Judaism or Buddhism doesn’t – the suggestion, for example, that Muslim women should be exempt from the requirement to be photographed on national identity cards. In the absence of Blunkett’s law, we might still get the odd crusty type from the shires huffing on BBC phone-ins that if Muslim women think it’s insulting to be made to remove their hijab for ID cards, they should bloody well have thought about that before moving to Britain. But, if the Home Secretary’s proposals sail through, we’ll discuss such questions, if at all, between tightly imposed government constraints explicitly favouring one party to the dispute. I know which one of those options any self-respecting liberal democracy ought to prefer.
In The River War (1899), Winston Churchill’s account of the Sudanese campaign, there’s a memorable passage which I reproduce here while I’m still able to:
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science – the science against which it had vainly struggled – the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.
Is that grossly offensive to Muslims? Almost certainly. Is it also a rather shrewd and pertinent analysis by one of Britain’s most eminent leaders? I think so. If David Blunkett bans the sentiments in that first sentence, the sentiments of the last will prove even more pertinent.
INCIDENTS & INVESTIGATIONS
Crime? It’s a matter of opinion
ALL OVER THE United Kingdom, right now, real crimes are being committed: mobiles are being nicked, front doors are being kicked in, bollards are being lobbed through bus shelters – just to name some of the lighter activities that add so much to the gaiety of the nation. None of these is a “priority crime”, as you’ll know if you’ve ever endured the bureaucratic time-waster of reporting a burglary.
So what is a “priority crime”? Well, the other day, the author Lynette Burrows went on a BBC Five Live show to talk about the government’s new “civil partnerships” and expressed her opinion – politely, no intemperate words – that the adoption of children by homosexuals was “a risk”. The following day, Fulham police contacted her to discuss the “homophobic incident”.
A Scotland Yard spokesperson told the Telegraph’s Sally Pook that it’s “standard policy” for “community safety units” to investigate “homophobic, racist and domestic incidents” because these are all “priority crimes” – even though, in the case of Mrs Burrows, there is (to be boringly legalistic about these things) no crime, as even the zealots of the Yard concede. “It is all about reassuring the community,” said the very p.c. Plod to the Telegraph. “All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed.”
So no crime was committed. Yet Mrs Burrows was “investigated” and a report about the “incident” and her involvement in it is now on a government computer somewhere. Oh, to be sure, the vicious homophobe wasn’t dragged off to re-education camp – or more likely, given budgetary constraints, an overcrowded women’s prison to be tossed in a cell with a predatory bull-dyke who could teach her the error of her homophobic ways.
But, on balance, that has the merit of at least being more obviously outrageous than the weaselly “community reassurance” approach of the Met. As it is, Lynette Burrows has been investigated by police merely for expressing an opinion. Which is the sort of thing we used to associate with police states. Indeed, it’s the defining act of a police state: the arbitrary criminalisation of dissent from state orthodoxy.
Mrs Burrows writes on “children’s rights and the family”, so I don’t know whether she’s a member of PEN or the other authors’ groups. But it seems unlikely the Hampstead big guns who lined up to defend Salman Rushdie a decade and a half ago will be eager to stage any rallies this time round. But, if the principle is freedom of expression, what’s the difference between his apostasy (as the Ayatollah saw it) and Mrs Burrows’ apostasy (as Scotland Yard sees it)?
I don’t suppose the Tories will be eager to take to the ramparts for Mrs B, either. At the last conservative confab I dropped in on, the bigtime A-list party heavyweight was droning on about how “the public sees us as too white, male, middle-class and heterosexual”. If it’s any consolation, the American lady sitting next to me nudged me in the ribs and said, “He doesn’t seem that heterosexual to me.” Not for the first time the Tories take too much for granted. But, at any rate, defending Lynette Burrows’ right to free speech seems unlikely to play well with the party’s marketing gurus.
As for the government, in The Observer on Sunday, Tony Blair wrote a piece almost every bland sentence of which had me spraying my cornflakes all over my civil partner, right from the sub-headline: “The most important freedom is harm from others.”
Well, up to a point. If you live in one of those parts of, say, Aston in Birmingham where the writ of the British state no longer runs in any meaningful way, that sounds grand. But the police don’t seem to have much stomach for enforcing your right to be free from harm in such neighbourhoods. The Prime Minister was writing principally about the great Asbo – that’s not the powerful God-like being from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, although, from Mr Blair’s touching faith in Asbo as an instrument of righteousness and justice, it might as well be. Technically, Asbo is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, one of those “so-called summary powers”, as the Prime Minister puts it. The trouble is the British police are a lazy lot and, if it’s a choice between acting against intimidating thugs who’ve made the shopping centre a no-go area or investigating the non-crime of a BBC radio interview, they’ll take the latter. I leave it to Scotland Yard to decide whether the Asbo’s reach already extends to “homophobia” and “Islamophobia”, but whether it does or not, sticking Mrs Burrows’ “homophobic incident” in a police file is certainly an Anti-Social Behaviour Notice, de facto if not de jure.