“Outlawing incitement to hatred on the basis of religious belief, as opposed to ethnicity, is a major attack on freedom of speech. It means extending the blasphemy laws which still, at least in theory, protect Anglican Christianity from rational public debate, to shield all religions with authoritarian impartiality.
“The bill is partly a cynical pitch to win back Muslim voters outraged by Blair’s warmongering and erosion of civil liberties (like the expansion of state funding for faith schools, and defence of the hijab) and partly the brainchild of a Prime Minister with a lot of respect for religious superstition and very little for human rights.
“So why did the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party, whose leaders have boasted that they will be ‘setting the agenda’ for this Parliament, fail to rebel?
“Unfortunately, on this issue as on many others, these MPs are highly representative of a left which is increasingly losing its political bearings. The ‘religious hatred’ law has elicited not a squeak of protest from the trade union movement; meanwhile the National Union of Students, on the initiative of the SWP and their Stalinist friends Socialist Action, has positively endorsed new Labour’s assault on respect for rational thinking and free speech.”
Sacha Ismael of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq provide us with a good illustration of which section of the left has really lost its bearings. The section of the left that supports the right to incite hatred against Muslims and sneers at the defence of the right to wear the hijab.