Three years ago, in one of the most egregious educational scandals of recent times, a religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School in west Yorkshire was vilified, inundated with death threats and driven into hiding — where he and his family still languish — as a punishment for doing his job.
After teaching a lesson that was an approved part of the school syllabus and included an image of the Prophet Muhammad, the teacher faced complaints not only from Muslim parents, but Islamic activists who did not have children at the school. There were angry protests outside its gates. Instead of defending the teacher, the school suspended him and two of his colleagues and issued a formal apology.
The police and Kirklees council did little to assist him, as he found, in a travesty of a natural justice, that he and his family were effectively living as fugitives. His fears were understandable: six months before, Samuel Paty, a history teacher, had been beheaded outside the Paris school where he worked by an 18-year-old jihadist after showing his pupils a cartoon of Muhammad in a class on free speech. Since the original furore in March 2021, the unnamed teacher has experienced suicidal thoughts and lives with the debilitating consequences of PTSD.
So it is gratifying that Dame Sara Khan’s review of threats to social cohesion and democratic resilience, published yesterday, offers — at last — official recognition of the outrageous failures and neglect by public bodies that left him isolated, gaslit and professionally capsized.
As Dame Sara, the government’s adviser on social cohesion, says: “There [was no] clear condemnation of those engaged in such behaviour who were creating an intimidatory and threatening climate. There was a disproportionate concern for not causing offence to the religious sensibilities of those who, unaware of the facts, chose to engage in intimidation and harassment.”
What is often grotesquely celebrated as ‘consequence culture’ amounts instead to censorship and intimidation
The review covers much ground and the Batley affair is only one of the cases that it investigates. At the conceptual heart of Dame Sara’s findings is what she calls “freedom-restricting harassment”; defined as “when people experience or witness threatening, intimidatory or abusive harassment online and/or offline which is intended to make people or institutions censor or self-censor out of fear”.
This is an important exercise in social, civic and political analysis. What is often grotesquely celebrated as “consequence culture” or “accountability” amounts, in practice, to censorship, intimidation and a culture in which local councillors, public sector workers, artists, civil society activists and MPs exercise self-censorship pre-emptively to avoid the wrath of the mob.
In a truly shocking poll released as part of the review, 76 per cent of the public say that they have refrained from expressing their views openly for fear of harassment. For 27 per cent, the consequences of this intimidation have been “life-altering” — one in eight of this group having lost or changed their job, or been forced to move.
In a notionally free, democratic and pluralist nation such as ours, these findings are unconscionable. No society which appeases every self-appointed “community leader”, the loudest group to claim grievance or the most noisily “offended” can function successfully.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which will come into force on April 1, is the latest instance of a broader trend towards restricting speech that somebody, somewhere, claims to find objectionable.
Though Dame Sara does not directly address this dismal legislation, she is right to focus not upon the limitation of expression but its precise opposite: “How to manage opposing and different opinions, how to debate well and the importance of critical thinking.”
In any pluralist community, the taking of offence is absolutely inevitable. The challenge is to handle such emotions and to protect those who address areas of disagreement. In her review, Dame Sara recommends a series of sensible measures, including a “buffer zone” of 150 metres around schools to prevent disorder at their gates, and the establishment of a new Office for Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience.
Yet the most important element of her inquiry is its overall warning: that the very fabric of our pluralist society is presently imperilled by the reflexive concessions too often made to those who most menacingly claim the moral high ground.
The unofficial endorsement of neighbourhood theocracies is not a path to stable coexistence. The harder path is also the only one with a chance of success: which is to stand up unflinchingly for the democratic rights and norms that underpin all that is best about this country.
