LONDON, 14 December 2004 — The British comedian Rowan Atkinson is known across the world on the strength of his imbecilic screen persona, “Mr. Bean”. Reviving the Chaplinesque slapstick of the silent movie era, the buffooneries of Mr. Bean have a comic appeal that transcends language.
Now, however, his creator has assumed an improbable new guise: That of an earnest champion of free speech. Last week, Atkinson went to the House of Commons to help launch a campaign against the British government’s proposed Serious Organized Crime and Police Bill.
Designed in part to punish extremists who incite religious hatred, the bill is widely seen in Britain as an attempt to appease the Muslim community that could muzzle free expression, subjecting those who wish to mock religion to constraints, which ought not be acceptable in a democratic society.
Speaking on behalf of writers and performers, Atkinson told a packed meeting that “to criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but that to criticize their religion is a right, a freedom”. He added that “the freedom to criticize ideas, any ideas — even if they are sincerely held beliefs — is one of the fundamental freedoms of society and a law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed”.
Atkinson has particular reason to feel strongly on this issue. He himself has poked endless fun at religion, including Islam — though generally in ways it would require extreme solemnity to find objectionable. An old television sketch the comedian likes to recall showed Muslims prostrating themselves in prayer to the accompaniment of the voice-over: “And the search goes on for the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contact lens”. It is Atkinson’s conviction that there should be no subject about which it is impossible to make jokes. His conviction is shared by many in the British cultural world — not least the pugnaciously opinionated Jewish writer, Howard Jacobson. The other day, defending his right to be rude and offensive, Jacobson debatably observed that one of the great virtues of the British is their readiness to laugh at themselves and that Britain goes to absurd lengths to honor every faith and culture but its own.
The trouble is that there are ill-motivated individuals whose definition of free speech amounts to a sense of their entitlement to be as crudely abusive as they like about racial and religious minorities. It is, moreover, only too plain that in the present distempered climate, with feeling about Islam running high, the public expression of unrestrained contempt for Muslims can produce horrific consequences. The fate will not be quickly forgotten of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was stabbed to death following his purposefully inflammatory outburst against Islam. And in Britain, memories remain vivid of the furious controversy aroused by Salman Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses”, with its satirical portrait of the Prophet which millions of Muslims found not so much provocative as blasphemous.
British secularists, the kind of devout nonbelievers who used to be known as “free thinkers”, have long deplored blasphemy as an outmoded superstition.
But the insistence that people should be able to indulge in uninhibited public denigration of religious belief is scarcely compatible with the maintenance of civility in a complex multifaith society. It is understandable that Britain’s Home Secretary David Blunkett has been contemplating legislation to prohibit utterances that might foment religious hatred. The obvious danger is that a law which can be seen as a special favor to Muslims runs the risk of exacerbating Islamaphobia, of earning Muslims a reputation as zealots with undue influence over what can be said in a purportedly open society. It could well serve to promote precisely the intolerance it is meant to combat. All the same, Muslims have good grounds for feeling that British law is skewed against them. The fact is that under existing British race relations legislation Jews and Sikhs effectively enjoy protection from religious discrimination which is not afforded either to Muslims or to Hindus.
It remains to be seen whether Blunkett’s proposed new legislation on the issue can form the basis of a new public consensus. What is hampering his efforts on this, and every other score, is that he is embroiled in a headline-grabbing scandal over his private life which is coloring perceptions of his public actions.
A politician who has made much of his commitment to traditional Christian morality and who is much given to moral condemnation, Blunkett turns out to have been involved in a wretchedly messy affair with a married woman. Blunkett’s value to Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is that he is a self-made blind man with the working-class credentials which New Labour — a party still ostensibly dedicated to the welfare of ordinary people — badly needs and which Blair himself lacks. He has been Blair’s link with the man in the street, a blunt northerner who can congratulate the police on arresting a “Muslim terrorist” before the suspect has even been tried in a court of law — and get away with it.
Blunkett has displayed an authoritarianism hitherto unthinkable in a Labour home secretary. At the same time, he has done much to deepen the contempt in which British politicians are held. It is thanks to Blunkett’s own vanishing credibility that many see the Serious Organized Crime and Police Bill as a vote-catching exercise, a cynical attempt to regain the favor of British Muslims who opposed the war in Iraq. Now, following last week’s revelation by his biographer that he takes a poor view of many of his fellow ministers, the home secretary has even managed to antagonize the very political colleagues whose support he especially needs in his current crisis. The truth is that few can any longer take David Blunkett seriously. Staggering from one embarrassment to another, he has become the Mr. Bean of British politics.
