Labour's Split Personality: Blasphemy Law and The Religion of Wokeness
By Ed Dutton
I always rather enjoyed the film Me, Myself & Irene, about a chap with Multiple Personality Disorder. Most of the time, he’s an overly-enthusiastic and absurdly friendly, oblivious cuckold. But occasionally he’s triggered into becoming a very different person, Hank, who is pumped full of Narcissistic rage.
Britain’s governing Labour Party appears, superficially, to have some form of Multiple Personality Disorder; where you cope with intense trauma by dividing the self into two, with the bad things only happening to one self, who manifests at times of stress. On the one hand, it wants to take us back to the age of Blasphemy Laws, in which failing to show due reverence to the Cult is a criminal offence, but, on the other, it wants to turn us into God; into the ultimate authority where we can decide to have ourselves killed, via assisted dying, if we so wish.
At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Birmingham MP Tahir Ali, whose roots in the “Mother of the Free” don’t appear to be especially deep in the soil, encouraged the authoritarian Prime Minister to introduce laws banning the “desecration” of holy books, because doing so was inherently “mindless” and bad for community relations. By the normal definition of words, Ali wanted to ban treating something perceived as holy with violent disrespect. One assumes he had in mind the burning of the Koran. But he added that he wanted to prohibit the desecration of the “prophets of the Abrahamic religions.” In other words, it should be a crime to say disrespectful things about these men. This is a literal blasphemy law, and Starmer, naturally, failed to condemn what this Muslim proposed, merely stating that he thought you shouldn’t desecrate holy things.
Until 2008, there was a Blasphemy Law in England. The barrister and child abuser John Smyth, QC (1941-2018), whom I discussed last week, successfully prosecuted Gay News in 1977 under this law, as part of a private prosecution brought by the conservative campaigner Mary Whitehouse (1910-2001), who railed against sex and swearing on television. The central issue was the magazine's publication of a poem, “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name,” by James Kirkup (1918-2009), in which a Roman soldier has sex with Jesus’ corpse:
“It was the only way I knew to speak our love’s proud name,
to tell him of my long devotion, my desire, my dread -
something we had never talked about. My spear, wet with blood,
his dear, broken body all open wounds,
and in each wound his side, his back,
his mouth – I came and came and came
as if each coming was my last.”
England passed a specific Blasphemy Law in 1378 in response to the Proto-Protestant, and extremely left-wing, Lollards, who went around virtue-signaling about equality, although it had long existed as an offence in Common Law, that is, law simply accepted without a specific Act of Parliament. In 1921, the socialist John William Gott (1866-1922) was jailed for a pamphlet in which he compared Jesus to a circus clown. This was the last state-funded prosecution for blasphemy. In 1949, Lord Denning (1899-1999), the Master of the Rolls whose life I have explored in my book Sent Before Their Time: Genius, Charisma, and Being Born Prematurely, declared: “The reason for this law was because it was thought that a denial of Christianity was liable to shake the fabric of society, which was itself founded upon Christian religion. There is no such danger to society now, and the offence of blasphemy is a dead letter.”
So, why didn’t Starmer dismiss what Ali had to say out of hand? The answer, obviously, is that we have a new religion that upholds a new kind of society; Wokeness. This involves an inversion of the traditional order, wherein morality is judged by the extent to which you are concerned about, and laud, supposedly disempowered minorities – including foreigners, Muslims, homosexuals, and transsexuals – and the extent to which you accept that they are disempowered due to unfair privilege and other environmental factors. In other words, morality is about opposing anything associated with traditional power. You must also accept that nothing is more important than equality and harm avoidance, not even the truth.
As such, we are all gods who define ourselves; except that we cannot change race as, if we could, non-whites could not be empowered over whites. If people do not show deference to Islam, then they are not showing deference to a minority; in a sense, they are asserting the evil traditional power system. This could encourage a reversal of the new morality: a restoration of the idea that you fight for your own ethnic group and put your own group above others. This could collapse the moral order in which New Powers are invested. Hence, Blasphemy Laws are required. Moreover, as the Islamic population grows, they are necessary in order to placate Muslims and to avoid social strife.
So, actually, it makes perfect sense that we should be discussing the reintroduction of Blasphemy Laws, which were finally abolished in 2008 in relation to Christianity, at the same time that we are seriously contemplating assisted dying. Both of them stem from a Godless ideology in which nothing is higher than us, such that we can define who we are and appoint the time of our own death. Foundational to this is the same runaway obsession with Harm Avoidance and Equality – and the eschewing of traditional sanctity and group-orientation – that has led to Wokeness.
I suppose, as I have argued in my book Woke Eugenics, there is a degree to which we shouldn’t even be unhappy about the rise of assisted dying. As in other countries, it will be a slippery slope. It will start with people who really are dying in agony being able to speed up their own deaths. The secular-minded might aver that this is surely reasonable. However, with the belief that we must have control over our own bodies, it will inevitably spread.
Before long, young people capable of having children, but suffering from depression, will be electing to have themselves killed by the state, as has happened in the Netherlands. Once this occurs, we have “Woke Eugenics”: society is pushing people along a maladaptive roadmap of life – in which it’s okay, in which it’s even moral and fashionable, witness the good-looking models employed in assisted dying adverts on the London Underground this week – to kill yourself. Those who resist this dystopia will be the genetically conservative, the genetically religious, and the super-genetically healthy. Thus, the English gene-pool is purged by the genetically sick of the genetically weak. Brilliant, right?
Except, of course, there will be collateral damage, just as there has been with sudden onset gender dysphoria: Intelligent but very sensitive girls who might get over their feelings given time, highly altruistic grandmothers who feel they are a burden on their families and so feel pressured to leave the party early... This is why, sometimes, a line has to be drawn.
In a society where there is some sense of the eternal, of the sacred, life involves bonds to others, something greater than oneself, and is somehow special. Although such a society admires self-sacrifice for the group, or for one’s child, it also admires struggle to the very end, just as our ancestors struggled and never gave up. Suicide is giving up and is also saying to those with whom you are bonded that you are giving up on being with them; that your happiness matters more than anything else. But, on the other hand, it will only really be nasty Woke people, overall, who will be selfish enough to take up assisted dying. This may leave many of us in two minds, not unlike the Jim Carrey character in Me, Myself & Irene.
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Could you stop reading that poem pls? Thanks.
Ed, are you aware of Graham Moore and the English Constitution Party? I think you’d find him very interesting and he could help you to gain a better understanding of Common Law.