Shock! Horror! A British politician calling for blasphemy laws in the House of Commons. Tahir Ali’s recent intervention at Prime Minister’s Questions provoked outrage from all of the usual suspects on the British right, as the Birmingham MP called for blasphemy laws which would criminalise criticism of “Abrahamic faiths”. Ali specifically mentioned his desire to criminalise desecration of religious texts, such as the Qur’an — a proposal which Prime Minister Keir Starmer did not explicitly rule out.

It’s easy to see why so many were shocked to hear calls for illiberal blasphemy laws in the Mother of Parliaments. Centuries on from the Enlightenment, do we really need to re-litigate issues such as freedom of speech and the right to satirise? 

Unfortunately, our commitment to Enlightenment values is little more than a comforting illusion. For one thing, Britain had blasphemy laws until 2008 (though they were almost never actually enforced). More pertinently, Britain already has de facto blasphemy laws. Thanks to open-ended legislation like the Communications Act 2003, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and the Public Order Act 1986, offensive speech can already be prosecuted. This might sound like hyperbole but last year in Wakefield, a 14-year old boy who scuffed a copy of the Qur’an was investigated by West Yorkshire Police. The case was recorded as a “hate incident”, and the boy’s mother felt compelled to apologise, beside stern-faced police officers, at a local mosque. This is not, I’m afraid, a unique case.

Yet the core objection is correct — it is concerning that Members of Parliament in this country are explicitly calling for legal restrictions on when religions can and cannot be criticised. 

At this stage, I will shock the reader by announcing that I am going to defend Tahir Ali. Partly, anyway. The problem isn’t the politicians — it’s the voters. Tahir Ali and his fellow-travellers are simply responding to the pressures of an electoral system in which pandering to particular ethnic or religious groups is a necessity in large parts of the country.

In Ali’s own Birmingham seat, the Labour MP won around 31 percent of the vote — down from nearly 70 percent in 2019. This steep decline can largely be attributed to two Muslim independent candidates, who won 17 percent and 15 percent respectively, and to an uptick in support for the Greens. It’s perhaps unsurprising that, at the last census, the seat was estimated to be about 58 per cent Muslim, a figure which has almost certainly climbed after years of unprecedented mass migration.

During the general election, the campaign here focused primarily on Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. While the rest of the country was focused on inflation, migration, and the Conservative Party’s record in government, voters in seats like this one were focusing on a conflict thousands of miles away. In Blackburn, Dewsbury, and a dozen other places, the national campaign fell out of focus entirely, in favour of Muslim community politics. 

And this phenomenon of Muslim community politics didn’t stop with the war in Gaza. The emergence of independent Muslim candidates, and campaign groups like The Muslim Vote, introduced a range of second-order issues into the mix — Muslim faith schools, Islamic finance, sexual education curriculums and, yes, speech laws. The eventual triumph of four Muslim independents — and the near-toppling of Labour heavyweights like Jess Phillips and Wes Streeting — highlighted the scale of Muslim disengagement from the Labour Party.

Like it or not, many of these voters have incredibly illiberal views

Many politicians in marginal seats with large Muslim populations are now acutely aware of the need to pander to these voters. Like it or not, many of these voters have incredibly illiberal views. This shouldn’t surprise us — the bulk of Britain’s Muslim population originates, either directly or by descent, from societies in which illiberal views are the norm. Due to the scale of migration over the past few decades, new migrants have been able to slip seamlessly into existing communities, where their views are affirmed, strengthened, and normalised. Mere residence in the wellspring of empirical liberalism has not changed the minds of many Muslim voters — and why would it?

Whether or not Ali really believes in the need for blasphemy laws is immaterial. If his constituents believe in blasphemy laws, then he will advocate for their beliefs, just as Liberal Democrats in the Home Counties work to block the building of new houses. If we really want to address this issue, we must stop thinking of sectarian politics as an individual problem. The core problem is that entire communities with very different ethical frameworks and political priorities have been able to grow here in Britain, aided and abetted by a state which prizes “community cohesion” over its own national culture.

Successful democracies rely on shared ethical frameworks, common cultural understandings, and a high degree of social trust. In large parts of modern Britain, we no longer have these necessary conditions. Decades of failure on immigration and integration makes figures like Tahir Ali an inevitability; his recent intervention highlights a far deeper sickness in British society.