Righteous Anger

How scintillating must be the conversation between David Lammy and JD Vance. Lammy’s words will no doubt be as effective on Vance as were the Pope’s, while Vance’s intervention will no doubt be as effective in Britain as it was in Hungary. Still, Vance and Lammy could both discuss their mixed-race children, the knowledge of whose existence would presumably cause the combustion of those who were posting on Twitter against the mixed-race nephew of Henry Nowak, who was himself a British-Polish dual national through his father, a Polish immigrant such as they vocally disdained a decade ago.

A similar shift is manifest in the response to the publication in 5Pillars of “A practical guide for Muslims on how to navigate LGBTQ Pride month”. Not very long ago, many of those denouncing that would have agreed with every word of it, albeit while possibly accusing its author and publisher of taqiyya. Nowadays, though, on this as on so many other issues, Eastern European and Latin American Far Rightists have been proved right all along that those in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand were really liberals with what were once the unremarkable Boomer liberal objections to Islam.

Likewise, if the Telegraph Tendency is now opposed to a blasphemy law per se, then it has changed its tune. The old one achieved absolutely nothing, but its abolition in England and Wales as recently as 2008 was decried as the end of civilisation by those who, not without cause, berated today’s South Wales Police for having instructed its Officers to record anti-Islamic conversations as antisocial behaviour incidents. Though again to no effect, there was a blasphemy law in Scotland until 2024, and there is one in Northern Ireland to this day.

Hamit Coskun appealed from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, which quashed his conviction. Lammy wants to abolish that right. In February, the High Court rejected the Crown Prosecution Service’s appeal to reinstate that conviction. But that was about a blasphemy law only if you worshipped Margaret Thatcher. 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 had 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.

Although she has not modified her claim to have participated in Islamic prayers at school, Kemi Badenoch no longer professes to have been “born in a country that was 50 per cent Muslim”, presumably Nigeria, having lately told both Piers Morgan and Nick Robinson that she had been born in London. Her British citizenship depended on her having been born in the United Kingdom before Thatcher had abolished birthright citizenship. Badenoch may have been naturalised, and as a Commonwealth citizen she would be eligible to vote and stand in elections in this country and to hold office all the way up to Prime Minister. But that was not how she presented herself until 28 April.

Far from the Conservatives’ having any objection to Commonwealth voting, their only gain in 2024 was Leicester East, Bob Blackman at Harrow East received the highest vote share for any Conservative candidate in the country, he was the only Conservative elected with an absolute majority, and he was one of only three Conservative MPs to be re-elected with increased majorities. Blackman has repeatedly been sworn in as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita, and at the House of Commons he hosted Tapan Ghosh, who was at least as violently opposed to Christians in Bengal as he was to Muslims.

Both Reform UK and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon have also assiduously courted both Hindus and Sikhs as bulwarks against Islam, and Yaxley-Lennon, at least, is still at it from the home in Spain that his Irish passport enabled him to keep without complication. Elon Musk, Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain might consider that there were no stronger opponents of halal meat than the Sikhs, and that the original kirpan was a real sword used defensively against Mughal persecution. In wearing the kirpan today, a Sikh still declares such readiness, willingness and ability in principle, all else having failed. But as carried in Britain today, it literally could not cut cheese, and it is rarely even visible. A desire to criminalise it cannot consistently be articulated by those who would wish the United Kingdom to adopt the laws of the United States with regard to firearms. There is no known case in which the kirpan has been used as an offensive weapon in this country.

Vickrum Digwa’s murder weapon was just one of his and his family’s extensive collection of non-ceremonial bladed articles. Families like that are not peculiar to any one community. That said, the family does belong to the Akali-Nihang warrior order within Sikhism, though not at all essential to it. With its obvious attraction to Digwa’s type of weapons-obsessed young man such as might accrue to Active Clubs and the like, many members of that order reject the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee’s 2001 ban on shaheedi degh, their traditional drink to aid meditation and, interestingly, to make them fiercer in battle. Interestingly, because its base is cannabis.

Yaxley-Lennon and his motley crew visibly prefer cocaine, as was yet again evident at Southampton, where Yaxley-Lennon addressed the same riotous crowd as Laurence Fox, who then proceeded to join Restore, which must now account for him. In between complaining about having been refused service in a pub despite banging on about the fact that he was only 17, Gregory Moffitt has done sterling work in filming the Southampton rioters and posting the footage to social media. Several convictions have already resulted from that. No doubt, there will be more. In England, you have to stay in some form of education or training until you are 18. What form does Moffitt’s take?

In view of the attacks on Sikhs up and down the country, when may we expect a COBRA meeting, and the declaration of a national emergency, as happened in response to two nonfatal stabbings out of the 150 to 212 knife attacks committed per day in the United Kingdom, leading to the deployment of an extra 100 Police Officers who had apparently had nothing else to do, as well as the imposition of further obligations on universities and on cultural institutions, obligations of the kind that otherwise inspired derision from the quarters that were lauding them in that case? At least two gurdwaras in Britain are former synagogues, so perhaps there would be action if someone set fire to those?

It ought not to be a numbers game, but as in the world, there are in this country far more Sikhs than Jews. Yet no one outside their community has grifted himself all the way to the House of Lords as their self-appointed champion. Jews, though, must endure three of those, Rapey Woodcock, Fido Austin (check his hard drive), and John Mann, whose proposed ban on Palestinian flag badges and what-not in the NHS would ban poppies and all sorts, but was really designed to prevent the impactful wearing of NHS uniforms on picket lines and at other demonstrations. That would call for mass defiance.