Nick Timothy: Free speech and Islam in Britian – “If we are not brave enough to say these things, the very future of our society is at stake” | Conservative Home

The following is the text of a speech given on Monday 20th 2025, by Nick Timothy MP at Policy Exchange.

“Free Speech and Islam in Britain

Thank you all for coming, and thank you to Dean and the team at Policy Exchange for hosting me today.

I am here to talk about free speech and Islam in Britain – but I want to start by setting this conversation in its historical context. Because it is very easy to get bogged down in conceptual and theoretical arguments when we talk about free speech, but the way we think about free speech in this country is grounded in hundreds of years of conflict and change.

Free speech in Britain

For we were not always free to say what we thought – especially about religion. Even before the English Reformation there were outspoken thinkers – like John Wycliffe – who took great risks to challenge the orthodoxy of Rome. Sometimes the punishment for supposed heresies was very violent. But the Act of Supremacy in 1534 – followed by the execution of Sir Thomas More – led to years of political instability and bloodshed.

For a century and a half, England experienced civil strife as Catholics and Protestants fought for control of the state. It was not only under Queen Mary or Oliver Cromwell that there was intolerance and oppression. Religious belief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was more about the enforcement of uniformity than respect for pluralism.

But it was out of this strife that new ways of thinking emerged, and the earliest liberal thinkers in England published their works in the years and decades after the Civil War. Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, in 1651. Two Treatises of Government, by John Locke, in 1689. These were very different arguments: Hobbes on the need for a strong state to maintain the peace, and Locke on property rights and individual consent as the foundation of political legitimacy.

It is tempting to think the years that followed quickly produced a middle way between political and religious extremes, giving rise to a moderate Anglicanism, and a clear English – later British – commitment to liberalism and pluralism.

But the Test Acts were passed in the 1670s, and while the Glorious Revolution gave us the Bill of Rights, the Toleration Act, and our essential constitutional model, 1688 was primarily about the replacement of the Catholic James II with the Protestant William and Mary.

The Toleration Act gave freedom of worship to non-conformists, but did not apply to Catholics and Jews, and non-conformists remained excluded from political office and the universities. Over time, the remaining restrictions were repealed, with Catholics emancipated under the Duke of Wellington in 1829.

Gradually Britain became a broadly Christian and pluralistic nation instead of a uniquely Protestant one. Examples of sectarianism continued, most obviously in Northern Ireland, but tolerance grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Legal change marched in step with cultural change, as it became more acceptable to mock, criticise and offend religious beliefs.

Liberalism, diversity and pluralism

As the last of these changes took place – like the Lady Chatterley trial and the abolition of theatre censorship – another liberal revolution was underway, with the arrival of mass immigration.

The changes this revolution brought about reveal the contradictions of liberalism. Radical diversity, even liberal academics like Robert Putnam have shown, undermines social trust and the norms that make societies work. And when norms disappear, so too does light-touch liberalism.

As Edmund Burke put it, “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”

In other words, more diversity means less social trust, less social trust means weaker shared codes of behaviour, and this means chaos – mitigated only by more authoritarian government.

These changes also reveal what John Gray calls the “two faces” of liberalism. In the first, liberalism can mean pluralism, the means by which diversity, tensions and conflicts can be managed peacefully in a complex world.

But the second is ideological, intolerant and authoritarian. Here, “toleration is justified as a means to truth.” As John says, “in this view, toleration is an instrument of rational consensus, and a diversity of ways of life is endured [only] in the faith that it is destined to disappear.”

Diversity and pluralism, then – supposedly at the heart of liberalism – are accepted only insofar as they give way to progress. Yet progress, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and is therefore disputed.

Opponents of one vision of progress, then, are often cast as backward and malevolent – and we see how this plays out in reality today. Cancel culture. Professional ostracisation. Boycott campaigns. Direct action. Personal abuse. Threats. Vandalism. Physical intimidation. And increasingly sophisticated campaigns to use the law and the power of the state to favour one group over another, and to shut down legitimate opinion and debate.

Free speech and Islam

 This is how people who consider themselves liberals end up doing incredibly illiberal things. Given the certainty with which these progressives believe themselves to be on “the right side of history”, they do not tolerate those who disagree with them. Look at how they treat those of us who believe mass immigration and radical diversity undermine our social and cultural coherence.

And look at how they side with the thugs, activists and Islamists who demand not only an Islamic blasphemy law here in Britain – but specific restrictions on criticism and scrutiny of the conduct of Muslims.

There is remarkably little in the Quran about the punishment of blasphemy and apostasy. When others blaspheme, it tells Muslims, “do not sit with them … or else you will become like them.” This may hint at the tendency towards Islamic separatism within Britain – but not at the violence with which some respond to perceived insults against their faith.

When he was insulted, Muhammed is said to have advised his friends to be “gentle and calm, as Allah likes gentleness in all affairs.” But some hadiths – believed to be sayings of Muhammed – are more intolerant. This reflects conflict within the early Islamic jurisprudential class, which adjudicated on contested passages in the Sunnah. While Muhammed had the right to pardon his critics, many scholars say, this does not extend to the ummah. They must punish blasphemy – and punish it harshly.

Blasphemy is therefore a capital crime in the four principal Sunni schools of jurisprudence – Hanafi, Shafi, Maliki and Habbali – and the Shia Jafari school. And in recent decades, we have seen a power play in which religious scholars and jurisprudents in Muslim-majority states have sought to impose their authority at home and abroad by seeking enforceable blasphemy codes – even in non-Muslim-majority states.

These schools and scholars have no formal jurisdiction in this country, but their arguments play out in courts in countries like Pakistan, which have a direct influence here because of the size of the diaspora and scale of recent immigration. And we should be clear about the role of foreign countries and governments in the challenges we face here in Britain. It is true that Saudi Arabia exported Salafism around the world from the 1960s. But it is also true that the Pakistani state – government, military, and intelligence services – has incubated Islamism and exported it to this country.

These jurisprudential arguments from foreign countries play out in mosques, in public meetings, and on the streets in this country. For we are talking not only of an intellectual exercise undertaken by academics and theologians. While most Muslims and many imams reject this way of seeing the world, the call to punish and prosecute apostates and blasphemers – even when they are not Muslims – is made by many preachers, activists and thugs who threaten violence.

The first time these attitudes came to public attention in Britain was with the protests against The Satanic Verses in 1988. Thousands took to the streets, and after a fatwa was issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Sir Salman Rushdie lived with round-the-clock police protection. Many – including the Union of Islamic Students’ Associations in Europe – publicly promised to murder Sir Salman. Three years ago, Hadi Matar almost succeeded.

Kenan Malik has argued we have since “internalised the fatwa and introduced a form of self-censorship” when we talk about Islam. It is difficult to deny that this is the case.

I will not repeat the stories of the Batley teacher, the schoolboys in Wakefield, or other well-known examples. But there is much more going on. Even today, after all the evidence about the rape gangs, ministers refuse to admit the obvious: that these were racially and religiously aggravated crimes by mostly Muslim men against non-Muslim children.

During the public disorder last year, West Midlands Police explained that they had not deployed officers in response to gathering crowds of vigilantes from the local Muslim population because they had worked with “community leaders” to determine the “style of policing that we needed to deliver.”

In prisons, Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, says Islamists control whole wings of prisons, with officers afraid to intervene, “because of the … fear of discriminating against Muslim prisoners.” Officers are known to appeal to the “emir” of a prison – almost always a terrorist or violent offender – for their help in maintaining order.

In the media, the BBC publishes feature pieces about Muslim converts describing them as “reverts” – repeating as fact the Islamic belief that we are all born Muslim and converts are simply returning to their “natural state”. Journalists explain in private that their investigations into Islamists often get canned by editors nervous of legal challenge, complaints to the press regulator and even threats of violence.

These are threats with which I am familiar. Since my speech in Parliament in June defending our right to criticise religious beliefs, I received a death threat deemed credible by the police.

The misuse of the Public Order Act

This is the background to Britain’s new blasphemy laws. These laws have not been debated in Parliament, and no MP voted for them to come into effect. Instead, the police, prosecutors and the courts have used the Public Order Act 1986 to punish criticism of Islam that offends Muslims.

Two people this year have been arrested and charged after desecrating copies of the Quran and criticising Islam in public. One is awaiting trial, so I will not comment on that case. The other, Hamit Coskun, was found guilty but won his appeal earlier this month.

In both cases, Sections 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act were used to charge and prosecute the defendants. These sections make it an offence to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” to a victim by using “threatening, abusive or insulting words of behaviour.”

But this is a misuse of the Act. Parliament removed blasphemy laws from the statute book in England in Wales in 2008. And the last blasphemy trial to be brought by the state in England took place more than a hundred years ago, in 1921.

The Public Order Act was never intended to police what we say about Islam. It is true that its Part III created new offences relating to racial hatred, and this was later amended to include religious hatred by the Blair government. But Parliament took that moment to add Section 29J to the Public Order Act, which says “nothing” in Part III “shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents”.

Through an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, and in my own Ten Minute Rule Bill in Parliament, I sought to reassert our right to free speech by extending Section 29J to the whole of the Public Order Act, and to Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and to Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. To date, ministers have refused to support me – insisting we do not have blasphemy laws, when the conduct of the police and prosecutors suggests we do.

Now you might say it is legitimate to prosecute somebody for saying something that might cause wider disorder. And perhaps in some circumstances that may be so, but this only reinforces the fact that the state is prosecuting people for expressing their beliefs because they fear the violent reaction of others.

The game was given away when the Crown Prosecution Service first charged Mr Coskun with causing “distress” to the “religious institution of Islam” – almost the dictionary definition of blasphemy – and when the judge in the original hearing said the violent assault against Mr Coskun by two others was evidence of his guilt.

Fortunately, the judge in the appeal hearing was clear. He said, “there is no offence of blasphemy in our law. Burning a Quran may be an act that many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive. The criminal law, however, is not a mechanism that seeks to avoid people being upset, even grievously upset. The right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.”

This is, I believe, the correct interpretation of the law – and I have written to the College of Policing and CPS to ask them to change their guidance accordingly.

A definition of “Islamophobia”

If the Public Order Act has been used to protect “the religious institution of Islam”, then the campaign to achieve an agreed definition of “Islamophobia” is even more explicit – and even more ambitious in its reach.

This is a term that has been thrown around – and used to attack and silence legitimate political opinion – for years. Policy Exchange has shown, for example, how the Centre for Media Monitoring, an activist body used to intimidate journalists, claimed the press was “Islamophobic” for reporting that Salman Abedi shouted “Islamic slogans” as he attacked the Manchester Arena.

This is the purpose of the campaign to get “Islamophobia” defined and recognised by the state. Doing so will allow campaigners – some of them extremists – to shut down debate affecting Islam or Muslims by claiming it is racist.

Now according to leaks, the Government is abandoning its plan to produce an official definition of “Islamophobia”, preferring to define “anti-Muslim hate” instead. This may be a significant concession, but we do not know because the Government has been so secretive, and ministers remain silent. Anything that goes beyond existing laws – confusing criticism of religion with racism, confusing the protection of people with the protection of ideas – will be unacceptable.

This, after all, is what the definition produced by the APPG on British Muslims, in 2018, does. This definition was adopted by swathes of the state, and the Labour Party itself. It was supported by all the members of the working group ministers asked to produce an official definition.

The APPG definition says: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

This raises obvious questions. If “Islamophobia” is “rooted in racism”, can I be racist to a white Muslim convert? And how can “Islamophobia” be about racial difference, when to be a Muslim is to choose to believe in the religion of Islam? 

Britain already has laws to stop discrimination against Muslims – just as we do for those who believe in other religions. The “Islamophobia” definition deliberately elides the protection of people from physical harm and discrimination and the protection of ideas and beliefs from scrutiny and criticism. It deliberately tries to protect Islam from scrutiny and satire, and the behaviour of Muslims who do wrong and extremists who act in the name of Islam from accountability.

Consider some examples. The APPG report says the rape gangs are a “real life example” of a “subtle form of anti-Muslim racism.” It says it is “Islamophobic” to identify “entryism in politics, government or other social institutions”, which we know this is a favoured method of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The report says “Islamophobia” includes “claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword or subjugating minority groups under their rule.” But these are objective historical facts. Muhammed himself is believed by Muslims to have said, “the gates of Paradise lie in the shadow of the sword”.

Another hadith instructs Muslims to fight and kill Jews before Judgement Day. Many Islamic scholars reject it as inauthentic, but it is used by some preachers to justify anti-Semitic violence, and as the attack on the Heaton Park synagogue shows, we must be free to debate these texts, not least so Muslim moderates can defeat the extremists.

The 2018 report uses behaviour that is already illegal – like racially aggravated attempted murder – as justification for restrictions on the expression of opinions about religious ideas. It dismisses a “supposed right to criticise Islam” and quotes, approvingly, a witness who says, “there is no ‘good faith’ criticism of Islam.” This is unambiguously the protection of ideas from criticism, not the protection of people from real harm.

Fighting back

So it is, therefore, an undeniable assault on our freedom of expression. But why are those in authority – some elected, some not – going along with something so clearly incompatible with life in a free society?

Why is it that Islamists have taken control of public discourse about Islam and Muslims in Britain? Why are moderate, liberal and secularised Muslims so often excluded from the debate? How is it that Middle Eastern leaders are warning that Islamism is growing more dangerous not in their countries but in Britain and the West?

Fear is part of the story. Fear of threats and physical violence. Fear that the multicultural dream politicians sold is less coherent and more dangerous than they can admit. Fear – certainly in the Labour Party – of losing political support to Islamist challengers. Fear –within the police and criminal justice system – of a loss of control on the streets. Do not confront the agitators and the thugs – goes this logic – but instead meet them half-way.

This is becoming a familiar pattern. Look at what has happened in the last few days with the forthcoming football match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Whipped up by local activists and even their local MP, thousands of people in Birmingham made their hostility to Jewish, Israeli football fans clear. The threat of violence was unmistakable.

And instead of declaring that this is unacceptable, instead of saying the police would do whatever it takes to make the city a safe place for Jews, West Midlands Police surrendered to the thugs and the Islamists, and insisted that Jewish, Israeli fans should be banned from attending the game.

A similar defeatism is behind the argument that although these restrictions on freedom of speech may be regrettable, they are now an unavoidable consequence of the multicultural society in which we live today. We are, in other words, where we are. The best we can hope for is to become a greater Singapore – less Locke, and more Hobbes.

By this logic, the state must police the boundaries between ethnic and religious groups to avoid disorder. We should be clear that at best this means a more intrusive and dictatorial state, but more likely, sporadic violence and mob rule. Because once the mob knows it gets what it wants with the threat of violence, the more the threats will keep coming, and the more the mob will get. The more, too, members of other ethnic and religious groups will turn to similar tactics.

This is the very essence of the two-tier justice row: rough justice for those belonging to identity groups that play by the rules, and freedom from justice for those belonging to groups willing to take to the streets and threaten violence.

This is the logic of arresting people for criticising religious beliefs. And it is the logic of defining so-called “Islamophobia”. Opinions must be policed and ideas must be defended because – otherwise – there will be trouble.

Is this what Burke meant when he said the less controlling power there is within us, the more there must be without? Far from it. Because the controlling power must be directed not at the those who express their opinions – but at those who claim they cannot constrain themselves: those who threaten violence, and who reject the basic premise of a pluralistic society.

And that is what this is all about. The reason you are free to live how you choose here is the same reason you must respect the right of others to lead their own lives – and why you must respect the institutions and the laws and the norms of behaviour that make that possible.

But pluralism alone is not enough. Because we cannot accept every ethical perspective, and we must never tolerate a moral or legal relativism in different communities. So we need to build an ordered pluralism, which embraces the freedom of individuals to live their lives as they choose, yet still builds a stronger, shared identity.

That identity must be inclusive, and recognise there are different ways of feeling part of the whole. But it must be distinctly British, respecting our history, institutions, traditions, norms and laws – and recognising their roots in Christian thought. We need a robust cultural conservatism that defends – without equivocation – our way of life.

So if you want the rights of British society, but not the responsibilities, and if you reject the inheritance that gave us those rights and responsibilities, we must be honest and brave enough to say we do not want you here.

If we are not brave enough to say this, the very future of our society is at stake. After the failures of successive governments, Islamism is now a force in our society and our politics. If we surrender to it, we know the demands for Islamic separatism will follow. Separate schools. State funding for mosques. The ulema – Muslim scholars – on the public payroll. Public prayer provision. The incorporation of the Sharia into our laws.

We do not want any of these things. So no. No to blasphemy laws. No to special protections for Islam. No to intimidation, violence or censorship. No to the politics of communalism. And no to the hate preachers, extremists and thugs who refuse to respect our way of life. If we give in to the mob, the mob will come back for more. We have to stand up to the mob, hold the line and say, with confidence, that this argument ends – here and now.”