Britain's new blasphemy laws are a return to empire

Empires do not tolerate disorder, and Britain is an empire in its own land

It was the British rulers of India who introduced blasphemy laws to the subcontinent. The 1860 Indian Criminal Code outlawed “uttering words, etc., with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings”. This was not because the British had acquired religion — any more so than they arrived with, at any rate — but because they were sick of handling the violence and disorder that resulted from religious provocation in a diverse community.

“Empire”, Talleyrand supposedly said, is “the art of putting men in their place”. Nation states are “ruled in the name of a nationally defined people”, neatly slotted into cultural institutional frameworks that suit them. Empires, on the other hand, spread and sprawl. They govern culturally, linguistically, and religiously diverse groups of people. They require ways of controlling the disparate groups within their borders, of functioning with diversity, and are rarely particularly subtle about it.

Quietly, and almost unnoticed, Britain has become an empire again. In keeping with modern decolonial thought its ambitions are no longer external but internal. Rather than governing cultures spread across a quarter of the earth, it governs cultures from across the world gathered in its core; an empire in its own land.

You can see this clearly when you see how the state responds to events like those in Wakefield. To briefly recap, a “highly autistic” boy brought a copy of the Quran to his school. A page was smudged. All hell subsequently broke loose.

A local councillor described the smudging as “serious provocative action” that could “set back community relations for years to come”. Local Muslim community leaders, councillors, and the police were called in for meetings. The four boys involved were suspended from the school and have reportedly received death threats from other pupils. West Yorkshire Police — working “closely” with the school — has helpfully “recorded a hate incident”.

You may think that people in Britain retain the liberty to treat their own private property as they wish, so long as their actions are not undertaken with the intent of hurting others. You would be wrong. The primary objective of the modern British state is managing the tensions between the constituent parts of its empire.

This priority goes a long way to explaining the behaviour of politicians and state officials. It explains, for instance, the asymmetric nature of liberalism — where religious views are decried based on who holds them — or the strange emphasis on investigating right wing views critical of the current social consensus. Anything which would disrupt the structures of empire is a risk to peace and order.

The new blasphemy laws are the price of governing diverse cultures without assimilation. Some are overt; we have laws against inciting religious and racial hatred, or speech which is “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene, or menacing character”. Others are tacit, and take the form of social taboos. What they have in common is the aim of suppressing intergroup tensions.

This might be broadly acceptable if people were generally aware that this is now the way the state functions. The problem is that they aren’t. Time and time again, we find someone pushing the boundaries — showing a cartoon, making an unwise comment, or simply stumbling unawares into an area of ‘cultural sensitivity’ — and suddenly finds that the state, far from a neutral arbiter of the law or the protector of their liberties, is mostly interested in ‘managing community tensions’.

People are generally unwilling to spell out the ‘soft’ blasphemy laws explicitly, or state outright that the state now sometimes views enforcing the religious sensibilities of conservative minorities as part of its remit. This makes the topic hard to engage with in public life. You can see this in the discourse around the Wakefield incident; people don't quite feel that they can criticise the state directly for attempting to keep the peace, and end up casting around for reasons to object. Often they end up with the idea that it’s playing into the hands of the far right, despite the obvious objection that in no other realm would they use this to oppose a policy (“No, we can’t have more immigration, it just plays into the hands of-”).

Nobody particularly wants to engage with the fact that Britain has fundamentally changed the nature of both its country and its state. Decades of politicians have maintained a collective pretence that we can simultaneously shift to historically unprecedented levels of immigration without assimilation, that nobody will need to change anything in their lives or behaviour because of this, and that the state will remain unchanged. This was not true, and soft blasphemy laws are an inevitable consequence.

If you’re going to be an empire, you need to act like an empire.