11 July 2004

Muriel Gray argues that the home secretary’s new proposal is beyond belief

MY memory isn’t what it used to be. I can’t quite remember the theme tune to Robert Robinson’s TV quiz programme Ask The Family, except for the fact that it was a jingly little number played on a sitar. I have absolutely no idea who the majority of people are in Hello magazine, despite some of the older ones pictured in unspeakably vulgar villas looking vaguely familiar. As if this wasn’t bad enough, on being introduced to an iconic pop star in a London restaurant, I expressed my pleasure on meeting this legend for the first time only to be reminded that I’d interviewed him at length on TV.
So with such progressively diminishing brain cell activity perhaps it’s not surprising that when I last voted Labour I don’t recall supporting a party that would take us into an illegal war, and would be alone in Europe in cosying up to a right wing, religious fundamentalist and corrupt American administrat ion. I also don’t remember voting for a Home Secretary who wants to force innocent citizens, who value the last shreds of their freedom, to carry identity cards, is making a dog’s dinner of our immigration ideology, who speaks publicly about “nailing” a defendant tried abroad without full defence, and is now possibly about to incite even more religious hatred by the naive notion of attempting to legislate against it.

Maybe it’s me. Perhaps it was all there in the small print of the manifesto, right there under all the Bright New Britain stuff, it might well have said “and we will also promise to behave like a bunch of scheming, right wing, idiotic, self-serving, authoritarian dip-sticks”. If it was, then I’ve simply forgotten.

Forgive me then, for wondering what the hell is going on with David Blunkett. The worst thing is, in common with the majority of his Labour colleagues, I can’t work out what he actually believes. His immigration policies flap about wildly like a loose tarpaulin, his sling-‘em-out or invite-‘em-in barometer depending entirely on whom the government are currently focusing their vote-hungry high beams.

So one cannot accurately gauge from this legislative cynicism whether Blunkett is a friend or a foe of the ethnic minority. He makes the right noises, and I have never believed him to be racist in any shape or form, but his legislation often cuts across these spoken ideals. Similarly it would be good to trust him, in his latest proposal to make incitement to religious hatred a criminal offence, that this is indeed a move to stop the worrying escalation of abuse and violence towards British Muslims.

But I don’t believe him. I don’t believe him because David Blunkett is a very shrewd and clever man, and his reasoning power will already have informed him that such legislation will have the entirely opposite effect, particularly on those less intellectually gifted readers of such organs as The Sun and the Daily Mail, who believe that anyone with a brown skin is a threat to civilisation itself. Indeed the predictable protests have already begun with the “mollycoddled Muslim” cries coming from the gutter press and its “readers”.

So what’s he up to? Whose vote is he chasing this time? Hard to say really. If it’s the Muslim vote then he may have made a mistake. Although they accept that something needs to be done to protect Muslims from further harassment, some community leaders have publicly expressed concerns that such a law would be most likely to be used against them rather than for them.

After all, the Koran is peppered with little bits of instruction to shun the company of Jews, Christians and infidels, and even condones the occasional smiting if those pesky infidels simply won’t be told.

Those of us who believe in freedom of expression will doubtless agree that if that’s what Muslims believe, however baffling, then they should blooming well be allowed to do so as long as it’s never expressed as a threat.

But one community leader pointed out that such a belief, when expressed publicly, as in reading out those particular passages from the Koran in a mosque, could possibly be construed under Blunkett’s proposal as inciting hatred of infidels, and therefore would qualify for a prosecution. That would be a travesty. Expressing the rules of any organised religion, however anachronistic those religions may be, is not incitement to hate. The barbarians who chop off heads and blow up children are full of hatred for a bucketful of reasons other than their religion.

So perhaps Blunkett is being sneakier than we think. Perhaps he secretly wants to placate not the Muslim community at all, who have a comparatively small vote, but the considerably bigger numbers of Daily Mail readers, who want assurances that imams cannot preach jihads and angry young men cannot take to the streets beating their breasts and calling the West names.

I suspect he will please nobody, for religion, unlike race and colour, is a matter of choice, and a demo cracy has to have the right to speak out for or against it. Incitement to racial hatred is an entirely necessary law, as one cannot choose one’s race. There is however, no legislation in place to stop incitement of hatred towards women or gay people, and yet one’s gender or sexual orientation is also not a matter of choice but of birth.

A tabloid printed the Big Brother contestant Becki Seddiki’s family’s response to her overt sexual behaviour. Her brother said she had shamed the family and the religion of Islam and mentioned darkly that people in her home country of Morocco had said she should be killed. So a religious man publicly, if obliquely, threatens Becki with violence, and by suggestion other “wanton” women like her, and that’s okay. But Blunkett thinks women need less protection than the religious.

Incitement to violence of any kind is already an offence. If it has to suffice for women and gay people then surely it should also have to suffice for people who believe in saints, prophets, resurrections, aliens and healing crystals.