Idol Words?

Hamit Coskun appealed from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, which quashed his conviction. Keir Starmer and David Lammy want to abolish that right. Tomorrow, the High Court will hear the Crown Prosecution Service's appeal to reinstate that conviction. But this is only about a blasphemy law if you worship Margaret Thatcher.

What has a blasphemy law ever achieved? There was one in England and Wales until 2008, there was one in Scotland until 2024, and there is one in Northern Ireland to this day. To what effect? Rather, the success of Coskun's first appeal was a good result against the Public Order Act 1986. Who was the Prime Minister in 1986? A couple of years later, her supporters wanted to use that very Act to prosecute people who had set fire to copies of The Satanic Verses. They are very recent converts to free speech, and very selective about it.

Similarly, the basis of the lockdowns was the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. The following year, the Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Now the authority for puberty blockers and for child castration, Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no authority that is apparent to anyone. And even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now. 

Not that we ought to hold out hope for such an outcome, any more than anyone should have done then. As the House of Commons voted last year to decriminalise abortion up to birth, so that House had voted under Thatcher to legalise abortion it for "severe fetal abnormality" that did not have to be specified, and that was in the original text of a Government Bill, not a backbench amendment.