Free speech: In Britain, it’s no laughing matter

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

It seemed like a good, broad-minded thing to do: strike a blow for religious liberty by taking a stand against religious hate speech. But it led last week to one of Tony Blair’s biggest defeats in the nearly 10 years that he has been prime minister of Great Britain.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill ran into loud opposition almost from the moment it was introduced last June. It would have made limited but crucial changes in a 1988 law that made it a crime to “stir up religious hatred” by use of “threatening, insulting and abusive” language.

No one had a problem with outlawing threatening language. But in a nation shaped by its split from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534, banning religious insults and abuse was going too far. A broad coalition of activists, writers and artists, ranging from Muslims to evangelical Christians to secular humanists, signed a letter urging the bill’s defeat.

The public face of the opposition was that of Rowan Atkinson, the comic actor (Mr. Bean, “Blackadder”), who once delivered mock sermons on the television comedy show “Not the Nine O’Clock News.” Through a spokeswoman, Atkinson declined a request for an interview, but he has been widely quoted as warning that the bill would have outlawed satire and jokes about religion.

Many religious leaders saw it as an intolerable restriction on religious expression. By the time the House of Lords began its debate, in October, Christian Voice, an evangelical group, announced that if the bill were passed, it would seek charges against bookstores that sold the Koran, which it said incited religious hatred and would therefore be illegal.

As opponents organized protests outside their door, the Lords amended the bill by stripping out the prohibitions against insult or abuse. Only directly threatening language could be prosecuted, and then only if the clear intention to cause offense could be proven. The amended version was approved in the House of Commons last week, over the strenuous opposition of the government, and it will likely become law next year.

An exercise in politics
The original bill failed because it was a cynical political exercise, said Caspar Melville, editor of The New Humanist, a 121-year-old British magazine that has written extensively about the issue.

The bill was promoted as an enshrinement of fairness, but “what the government has done is kind of thrown a sop to Islam,” Melville said.

“This is a political issue, because Muslims are concentrated in the cities in Britain, the Labor heartland,” he said. “The Iraq war seriously threatened their support in Muslim communities. And so this was imagined, I think, as a palliative to that.”

In reality, he said, lawyers “nearly always say the laws are in place,” Melville said. “Threatening speech, calling for people to effect violence on other people or being really vile or nasty, there are laws which cover this already. It’s just a waste of time, and it really is P.R.”

Melville pointed to the conviction this week of Abu Hamza al-Masri, leader of a radical mosque in north London, for inciting murder in his statements and sermons. Prosecuted under current law, “Abu Hamza did go to prison,” Melville said.

Atkinson and many opponents of the original bill welcomed passage of the watered-down version, but others said it was pointless.

“It’s going to be incredibly hard to prove,” Melville said. “... What you’ve got now is a law which has to prove a). that your language was threatening and b). that you intended it to be offensive, which is, as lawyers and people who watch police procedurals know, a very hard thing to prove.”

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