Will Nietzsche be the next victim in the war for civilisation?

MATTHEW PARRIS

W

ith characteristic immodesty, I wish

to say that I was among the first, perhaps the first, to raise in the press the looming problem of translating into law the Prime Minister's and Home Secretary's stated intention of outlawing incitement to religious hatred. On 4 October Tony Blair told the Commons that such a measure was to be drafted. The Home Secretary repeated the pledge. On 13 October, writing in the Times, I suggested some of the difficulties inherent in giving it any practical effect. Since then there have been many speeches in the Lords and Commons, and many columns in the press, taking the argument further.

At second reading, answering an interruption from John Gummer, Mr Blunkett got into what looks like a serious muddle when he said (column 36):

The argument is not whether people should be allowed to say what they want but whether the intention, and the likely effect, of their comments is to stir up racial hatred. Both the intent and the consequences will be the basis on which the Attorney-General will make a judgment on any individual case.

MPs do not seem to have noticed this extraordinary interpretation by the Home Secretary of his own measure. If, to be criminalised, a religious attack had to be intended and likely to stir up racial hatred, then the government would have effectively dropped their proposals because such a measure would add little if anything to the existing law, which already proscribes any verbal attack — religious, sociological or, for that matter, horticultural — intended and likely to stir up racial hatred.

I think that, though he said it twice, the formulation used by Mr Blunkett was simply a verbal slip. His press office tells me that he was describing the existing, not the proposed, legislation. Plainly he was not. But I don't suppose anyone cares what Hansard says these days.

Speaking at the committee stage of the Bill this Tuesday, the Home Secretary reacted to criticism of his plans by suggesting that the whole fuss had been got up by a letter to the Times from the comedian Rowan Atkinson who had misunderstood the proposal. In fact, Mr Atkinson (who intervened fairly late in the day, after many MPs had expressed reservations in the House) had not misunderstood; it is Mr Blunkett who has failed to understand that one man's comic sketch can be another man's incitement to religious hatred;

and that one man's thundering philosophical diatribe can be another man's unprovoked and incendiary attack.

Just imagine a reworking of Monty Python's Life of Brian (cited by Atkinson) from the parody it was, of the life of Christ, into a parody of the life of the Prophet Mohammed. Let us call it Monty Python's Life of Ali. One would not recommend, but nor would I criminalise, such a script; its performance would almost certainly be an offence under Blunkett's proposed measure. Airily the Home Secretary assures us that the Attorney-General will be able to use his discretion whether to prosecute, but it is bad practice to bring in vast, cloudy statutes, then leave it to law officers to save you from political embarrassment by turning a blind eye to them as the mood of the hour dictates.

And as Oliver Letwin — a shadow home secretary whose moderation and command are striking more and more of us — pointed out, attorneys-general are not above the requirement to act reasonably. How could you ban Life of Ali and not Life of Brian? And what is the following magnificent passage, from Nietzsche's The Antichrist, if not an incitement to religious hatred?

With this I am at an end and I pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions.... The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its corruption: it has turned every value into an un-value, every truth into a lie, every integrity into a vileness of the soul.

Parasitism is the only practice of the Church: with its ideal of anaemia, its 'holiness' draining all blood „ . the Cross as the mark of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy that ever existed — against health, beauty, whatever has turned out well, courage, spirit, graciousness of the soul against life itself.. „ I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

Mr Blunkett now gets very ratty when we quote hateful religious or anti-religious utterances. He thinks we are behaving like barrack-room lawyers who have overlooked the fact that his new offence is a public-order offence, and so will not be prosecuted on the notional tendencies of such utterances, but on their actual propensity to stir people to hatred — which their author must intend to do. But this brings me to the nub of my objection to this measure. It places in the hands of those who might potentially be angered the power, by choosing to become angry, to render somebody else's words prosecutable.

In applying this subjective test of hatefulness, the proposal runs into the same error as did the Macpherson Report after the Stephen Lawrence case: one of the recommendations not acted upon, you may remember, was that racial discrimination be defined as what a complainant felt to be racial discrimination.

Religious factions are very good at working themselves into a rage about what they regard as offensive. If a group of Muslim extremists threatened protests, placards and scuffles wherever Life of Ali was screened, then whoever screened the film could — if he went ahead and scuffles did ensue — quite plausibly be said to have intended that result. He was warned about it, and he went ahead anyway. Remember that in law 'intend' does not mean 'want'.

And, whatever Salman Rushdie may have intended, I should not envy Penguin Books' defence counsel their task of denying that the stirring up of religious hatred was a natural, predictable and predicted consequence of publishing Satanic Verses after the fatwa had been issued abroad. Nor (alternatively) would I envy the AttorneyGeneral the job of explaining why he was refusing to use a law expressly created to forestall such unrest.

Parliament would be unwise to hand to somebody in Tehran, Lambeth Palace or Salt Lake City the power, by pronouncing something hateful, to create an offence under English law. You're in a hole, Home Secretary. Stop digging.

Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.