The last successful case for blasphemy was brought by Mary Whitehouse nearly 30 years ago. This week’s High Court judgment on Jerry Springer – The Opera makes it highly unlikely that the law will be invoked again.
The two judges said that the 1968 Theatres Act prevented any prosecution for blasphemy in relation to public performances of plays, and that the 1990 Broadcasting Act did the same for broadcasts.
In any event, they ruled, to constitute a crime the material would have to be such “that the community (or society) generally should be threatened”.
Given the secular nature of our society, that makes a successful prosecution for blasphemy against Christianity, the sole religion covered by the law, virtually impossible.
On Wednesday, the judges refused Stephen Green, of the evangelical group Christian Voice, leave to bring a private prosecution against Jonathan Thoday, the producer of the show, and Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, which screened it in 2005. But they said the issues raised were sufficiently important for them to be considered by the Lords.
Their ruling, and the previous desuetude of the law, suggest that Parliament should now legislate to remove it from the statute book. Attacks on religion can already be prosecuted under the civil offences of libel and slander, and the criminal one of incitement to violence. On top of this, Parliament last year passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act.
In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, Mr Thompson made a good case for the presumption, in a democratic society, that broadcasters and authors should “publish and be damned”.
But it is pertinent to ask whether the defendants would have aired a show ridiculing Islam, given the reaction to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
If the answer is no, because of the potential for violent protest, then the conclusion must be that there is one standard for Christianity, whose adherents would be likely to stay within the law, and another for religions whose followers might feel no such compunction.
