BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN AND JAMIE FOSTER
Descent into Intellectual Servitude
It is a peculiar and profound despair that grips the mind when it is forced to witness the noble architecture of British liberty being dismantled, brick by brick, by the very hands sworn to uphold it.
We find ourselves in an age where the clarion call of freedom, for which our grandparents spilt their blood on the beaches and in the fields against the Nazi tide, has been reduced to a timid whisper, threatened not by jackboots and panzer divisions, but by a creeping, insidious fear of causing offence.
The recent judgement in the case of Rex v Hamit Coskun is not a victory for free expression, as it may superficially appear. It is, rather, a damning indictment of how low we have stooped that such a case was ever brought, and a stark illumination of a fundamental incompatibility that challenges the very core of our liberal democracy.
The facts of Coskun are, in their legal essence, simple. A man, an atheist and Turkish national (photographed above), desiring to protest what he perceives as the Islamisation of his homeland, travelled to the Turkish Consulate in London. There, on a sparse pavement, in daylight, alone, he set fire to a copy of the Koran and shouted slogans critical of Islam. For this act of political theatre, he was set upon by a man who emerged brandishing a knife, was beaten and spat upon, and was then arrested, tried, and convicted for a racially or religiously aggravated public order offence.
The Crown Court, on appeal, quashed the conviction. One might cheer. But to do so would be to miss the forest for a single, surviving tree.
The true horror lies not in the appeal’s success, but in the fact that the machinery of the state—the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, a court of first instance—was mobilised to criminalise this act at all. We have arrived at a point where the symbolic burning of a text, an act of pure expression, no matter how repugnant to millions, is processed through our criminal justice system as if it were a threat to the King’s peace. This is a staggering debasement of the principle, bought with the blood of the last century, that the state has no business policing ideas, only actions.
Our forebears did not fight a world war to preserve a society where a man can be prosecuted for causing “distress” by offending a religious sensibility. They fought against precisely the kind of totalising ideology that demands conformity of thought and punishes deviation. The Nazis burnt books not as protest, but as edict; their bonfires were the state’s assertion of control over the intellectual and spiritual life of the nation. When a modern citizen, however misguidedly, burns a book as a protest against an ideology he fears, and is then prosecuted by the state, the historical irony is so bitter it chokes.
We have inverted the principle while mimicking the imagery.
The judgement of the Court in Coskun is a masterful, if despairing, recitation of legal principles that should never have needed such vigorous defence. It reminds us, with the weary air of a schoolmaster repeating a lesson to a dull child, that there is no offence of blasphemy in our law. It reaffirms that the right to freedom of expression, under Article 10 of the European Convention, must protect speech that “offends, shocks or disturbs.” It cites the wisdom of Lord Reid in Cozens v Brutus, that we cannot allow “determined opponents” to silence a speaker by threatening violence. The Court’s analysis is legally impeccable. But its very existence is a monument to our collective cowardice.
This leads us to the second, more troubling, strand of this malaise: the inherent conflict between the classical liberal conception of free expression and certain interpretations of Islam. The liberal democracy bequeathed to us is founded on the primacy of the individual conscience and the right to criticise, satirise, and yes, even vilify, all ideas, including religious ones. It is a system built on debate, on the premise that no idea is so sacred it is beyond questioning.
This stands in direct opposition to a worldview that, in its most prevalent contemporary interpretations, holds its core texts to be divinely revealed and beyond critique, and which often construes criticism of the faith as a personal attack upon its adherents, warranting not just social opprobrium but, as we saw with Mr. Kadri’s knife, physical retribution. The legal system, in its well-intentioned but fatally misguided attempt to foster social harmony, has increasingly sought to bridge this unbridgeable chasm by curtailing the former to placate the latter. It has chosen to punish the provocateur rather than confront the intolerance of the reaction.
The prosecution of Coskun was a capitulation to this very dynamic. They argued, in effect, that the predictable and violent reaction of Mr Kadri was evidence of the “distress” caused, thus completing a vicious circle: exercise your right to offensive speech, provoke a violent response from those who will not tolerate it, and then be criminalised for having been the catalyst. This is the logic of the mob, dressed in the robes of the law. It makes a mockery of John Stuart Mill’s dictum and signals that our commitment to free speech is conditional on it never seriously offending anyone powerful enough to kick back.
The language of the judgement, for all its legal rigour, cannot conceal the Orwellian reality it describes. We have created a climate where “harassment, alarm or distress” are becoming the new thoughtcrimes, nebulous concepts wielded to silence dissent. We have watched as the concept of “racially aggravated” hostility has been stretched to encompass hostility to a set of ideas, blurring the crucial distinction—which the defendant himself attempted to draw—between criticism of a religion and hatred of its people. To fail to see this distinction is to abandon critical thought itself.
In the end, the appeal was allowed. Coskun walks free. But we should not mistake this for a victory. A society that is truly free does not celebrate when a court belatedly stops the state from punishing a political protester. It is aghast that the state tried to do so in the first place. The case of Rex v Hamit Coskun is a warning, written in the dry prose of legal judgement, of a nation sleepwalking into a voluntary intellectual servitude. We have not yet burnt books by decree, but we now put those who burn them in protest on trial.
The distance between that and the bonfires our grandparents fought against is shorter than we dare to admit. We are preserving the form of our liberties while surrendering their substance, and the despair lies in watching it happen, one prosecuted protest at a time.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024). Jamie Foster – a former Director of The Countryside Alliance – has a background as a country solicitor and is Country Squire’s Chief Writer. He built a reputation through defending high profile cases of alleged illegal hunting, almost invariably successfully.