A teacher at Batley Grammar school in Bradford showed students in a religious studies class a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed. Over in France, such actions can see you getting your head chopped off and what happened next is just so predictable. A mob gathered outside the school. Had that mob included James Delingpole, Piers Corbyn, Toby Young and Laurence Fox and the protest been about lockdown, the Police would have waded in, made arrests and broken it up.
But as we have seen time and time again, the Police use their new covid powers, gifted them by our liberty-hating Parliamentarians, in a very selective manner. Some protests are fine. Others are not. Rip down Colston’s statue okay, BLM vandalising Churchill’s statue is fine and dandy but if you march against masks that is illegal. The appalling draconian laws on protest make me despise MPs even more. The inability of the Police to apply them in a uniform way makes me increasingly despise the Fuzz.
Naturally, the headteacher of the school, a wretched worm called Gary Kibble who, almost certainly, reads the Guardian and backs its woke and spineless agenda, has issued a grovelling apology and the teacher has been suspended. A registered charity named the teacher and, facing a number of threats, he is now in hiding and has been granted Police protection. Can he ever work again? Probably not.
And so by mob rule we have enacted blasphemy laws in the UK but for one religion only. If a teacher tells your kids that Jesus was a fraud and that the Bible is a work of fiction, there will be no protests and he or she will not be sacked. Even Christian parents, like the ones in this household, would accept that the teacher is entitled to his or her views, however misguided, and hope that our kids are smart enough to ignore them.
How about those threatening the teacher with threats either shouted or online be charged with harassment, Mr Kibble be sacked for being a cowardly worm and the charity which named the teacher lose its charitable status at once? Of course it will not happen. Those on the left will not dare to challenge the mob as that might be culturally insensitive. It might be seen as not accepting the diversity agenda in full. The education industry is beholden to the woke left and will go with the flow of the mob. From the Government, there will be words but no action.
Thus our drift to the acceptance of a state where there is a prohibition on acts that might be deemed blasphemous, but against only one religion, accelerates. A few years ago, all the great and the good said “JeSuisCharlie”. What happened to that determination to support basic freedoms or was it all for show?