“If you build it, they will come…” Novelist W.P. Kinsella’s fictional Iowa farmer Ray built a makeshift baseball diamond to bring the faithful to him. Britain’s government is orchestrating a plan to build a different kind of playground to attract the spiritually driven.
The UK government’s Racial & Religious Hatred bill is supposed to protect the country’s religious faithful from hateful words. More specifically it’s supposed to win back Muslim votes lost since the Labour government began its war in Iraq, by granting imans the same medieval defence against blasphemy allowed Christian bishops.
The government thinks this trade off is a good deal, as it also provides a legal tool to use against radical Islamists preaching hate from the country’s mosques.
It also thinks it comes cheap. The Home Office expects to see fewer than two or three cases of incitement to religious hatred brought before the courts a year. Only 67 people have been tried, and 44 convicted, under 19-year-old legislation banning incitement of racial hatred in Britain. The government expects a sister law covering religious hate to be equally lightly applied.
But this calculation underestimates the religiously driven in Britain, their organisation, the focus for protest provided by the court option and the political fallout from a refusal to prosecute, let alone a failure to convict defendants in high profile cases.
Calls to prosecute the blasphemous will become rallying cries. Religious extremists will lead, fired not by fear of violence or threat of crime, but by the desire to bring their apostates and critics to court to be punished and silenced.
It´s a known condition. Former Indian Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee SC warns that criminal laws prohibiting hate speech and expression encourage intolerance, divisiveness and unreasonable interference with freedom of expression.
“Fundamentalist Christians, religious Muslims and devout Hindus would then seek to invoke the criminal machinery against each other’s religion, tenets or practices,” he has said. “That is what is increasingly happening today in India. We need not more repressive laws but more free speech to combat bigotry and to promote tolerance.”
To stave off confrontations a new addition to the bill passed up to the House of Lords on 11 July explicitly prohibits citizen´s arrest under the proposed legislation. There had been fears that critics of a particular faith would monitor gatherings and then seek to ‘arrest’ the speaker.
The government says that the proposed act could not be used to silence or prosecute Salman Rushdie, or Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, author of a play about moral corruption in a Sikh gurdwara, or the BBC producers of a TV showing of Jerry Springer – The Opera, supposedly blasphemous to Christians.
It won’t stop their enemies trying though. Rushdie lived under a death sentence for years; Kaur’s play was pulled after a Sikh mob attacked the Birmingham theatre that put it on; BBC executives’ families came under threat from angry Christians who hadn’t even seen the musical.
There are thousands ready to make the case for religious offence, marshalled by religious leaders from the pulpit, or nowadays, via the internet. Nearly 50,000 people were rallied against the BBC in this way to protest Jerry Springer – The Opera.
There will be damage to inter-faith relations — and to the safety and free speech rights of those artists and thinkers who offend the extremists. And it will happen regardless of whether Attorney General Lord Goldsmith QC, the government official in charge of approving prosecutions under the proposed law, lets a judge and jury rule on the substance of their allegations at the end of their campaigns.
The furore surrounding Goldsmith’s 2003 legal opinion on the legality of the war on Iraq, allegedly under government pressure, tarnished his independence. More of that – accusations of partiality, no doubt some couched in anti-semitic abuse – will follow when Goldsmith issues his first refusal to prosecute under the act.
Or whatever decision he makes, in whatever circumstance. For Goldsmith will have to rule on allegations raised by people not known for their tolerance.
