Islamophobia and free speech

Two recent speeches by Nick Timothy MP

Jul 30, 2025

In the context of censorship and attacks on free speech, I thought it worth highlighting a couple of recent speeches by Nick Timothy MP.

UK readers may remember Timothy as Joint Chief of Staff, along with Fiona Hill, to Prime Minister Theresa May. He resigned following the 2017 “strong and stable” election campaign in which, in his words, “our social care proposal blew up the manifesto”. At last year’s election, he was elected MP for West Suffolk.

But whatever you think of the above, please do not let it put you off listening to what Timothy has been saying recently, not least on his Substack, which features articles such as Our free speech is under attack, Your government is afraid of you and The state is not just failing us — it is actively working against us:

I wonder whether he has given — or will give — any warnings about digital ID, something which I think is an increasingly good litmus test of who to trust in politics.

Given that his Substack articles are all behind a paywall, and I am not a subscriber, it is hard to judge. That said, the first few hundred or so words of each post, which are accessible to all, convey something of where Timothy is coming from, as does his About page:

Ten Minute Rule Bill on Freedom of Expression

In particular, Timothy has been more vocal than most on the subject of Islamophobia and free speech, as evidenced by this Ten Minute Rule Bill that he introduced last month:

His speech can be watched here (along with some commentary). And there is a transcript below that is more accurate than the Hansard link above:

[Nick Timothy MP] I beg to move that leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about freedom of expression in relation to religion or belief systems; and for connected purposes.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I do not believe that Mohammed was a Prophet sent by God. I do not accept the instructions he said he received from the Archangel Gabriel. I do not accept that the Sunna, or body of Islamic laws, has any relevance to me.
I respect the religious beliefs of others, but I do not mind if Mohammed is satirised, criticised or mocked. I am not a Muslim, and I choose not to live by the moral codes set out by Islam. I am a Christian, and I should make it clear that I don’t think anybody should be prosecuted for satirising, criticising or mocking Jesus either.
England and Wales abolished blasphemy laws in 2008, and Scotland abolished them in 2021. But even then, those laws had not been used for decades. The last blasphemy trial took place in 1977, and the state has not brought a public prosecution for blasphemy in more than a century. But now, blasphemy laws are back.
I have been advised not to refer to two high-profile cases of people being arrested, charged and prosecuted for causing harassment, alarm or distress to Muslims or even, nonsensically, to Islam itself. So while I will keep my speech to the conceptual, I invite the House to recall that there are real examples of what I raise in the criminal justice system right now.
The issue is the way that sections 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 are being used — far beyond the intent of Parliament — to police what we can and cannot say about Islam. I will come to the details of sections 4 and 5, but first I want to say something about the intent of the Public Order Act.
The long title of the Act makes clear that its purpose was to abolish some common law and statutory offences to make way for new offences relating to public order. Nowhere in the Second Reading debate from 1986 did anybody raise the need to protect religions or followers of religions from offence. The context of the Act was football hooliganism and the riots in Brixton and Broadwater Farm.
It’s true that part III of the Act created new offences relating to racial hatred; and this was amended to include religious hatred by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. But in part III, in section 29J, to which we will return, the Public Order Act says:
“Nothing in this Part 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.”
We can therefore be confident that the Public Order Act, even as amended, was never intended to become a blasphemy law. This obvious conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the controversies regarding blasphemy and Islam in this country began two years after its introduction, in 1988, with the publication of The Satanic Verses.
Since that year, and the protests and fatwa against Sir Salman Rushdie, our public conversation about Islam has been limited through a mixture of self-censorship and more official restrictions, such as the definition of Islamophobia accepted by many public bodies. These restrictions are motivated not by a desire to avoid offence — consider the criticism and mockery made of other religions — but fear of a violent response by those who are offended.
Some say public order offences are not the same as a blasphemy law, and that it can be legitimate to prosecute somebody for saying something that might cause wider disorder. Perhaps in some circumstances this may be so, but we should interrogate this line of thinking.
First, the Crown Prosecution Service gave the game away by charging one man with causing “distress” to the “religious institution of Islam”, which is pretty much the dictionary definition of blasphemy.
Second, twisting the law to make a protestor responsible for the violent reaction of those who will not tolerate the opinions of others is wrong; it destroys our freedom of speech. Some argue that while this may be regrettable, it’s now an unavoidable consequence of the multicultural society in which we live today.
By this logic, the state must police the boundaries between different ethnic and religious groups to avoid disorder. But we should be clear that that means state intrusion and a loss of liberty on some occasions, and mob rule on others. This is the very essence of the two-tier policing row we have seen recently: 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 using the Public Order Act to prohibit us from saying what we like about a religion. A person may be found guilty because of the violent reaction of those offended by their actions. From Sir Salman Rushdie to the Batley teacher still in hiding with his family, the threat of violence is what lies behind these new blasphemy laws.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. There are at least 14 Muslim-majority countries where the penalty for blasphemy or apostasy is death, and we have significant diaspora populations from many of them. With the number of people… here who came from those countries growing, and the increasing assertiveness of organised political Islam in Britain, this is a problem that seems likely to only get more severe. But the answer is not to surrender to the mob; it is to hold the line, and that is why today I bring forward this Bill.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I said earlier that section 29J of the Public Order Act protects “criticism”, “insult” and even “abuse” of “religions and the beliefs or practices of their adherents”. But this only applies to part III of the legislation, because part III introduced offences relating to racial hatred, later amended to include religious hatred. Nobody thought sections 4 and 5, which in part I of the Act make it an offence to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” by using “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” would be used to criminalise the expression of opinions about religious belief.
This Bill therefore extends the scope of [section] 29J to the whole Public Order Act, thus preventing the use of sections 4 and 5 as a de facto blasphemy law, and applies section 29 also to section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
In doing so, this Bill would restore free speech as it applies to religion in England and Wales. It would stop the police, prosecutors and judges from creating a blasphemy law from legislation that was never passed for that purpose. It would send the strongest powerful message from this place, where political power legitimately and democratically resides, that this country will not tolerate intimidation, violence or censorship, that there will be no special treatment here for Islam, and that there will be no surrender to the thugs who want to impose their beliefs and culture on the rest of us.
[Deputy Speaker] Who will prepare and bring in the Bill?
[Nick Timothy MP] Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. John Cooper, Luke Evans, Richard Holden, Robert Jenrick, Rupert Lowe, Rebecca Paul, Jack Rankin, Alec Shelbrooke, Bradley Thomas, Tom Tugendhat, Gavin Williamson and me.

A further contribution

And here is a further contribution from Timothy, made a week or so later, in the context of the Crime and Policing Bill:

The speech can be viewed here, and a transcript, again more accurate than the Hansard version, is below:

[Nick Timothy MP] Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker…
This Bill… presents an opportunity for the Government to support my amendment… new clause 108 to protect freedom of expression. This is urgently needed, because existing legislation has been manipulated to create a blasphemy law for the protection of Islam from criticism and protest. As I said in my speech last week… I am not a Muslim, and I reject any attempt to tell me that I cannot say what I think about any religion. No ideas or beliefs should be above criticism or scrutiny.
The transformation of the Public Order Act 1986, which has become Britain’s de facto blasphemy law, needs to be reversed. Sections 4 and 5 of the Act are now used to prosecute individuals for expressing legitimate opinions. The law has being twisted, making the protester responsible for the potentially violent reaction of those who cannot deal with criticism of their beliefs.
The introduction of offences for religious hatred back in 2006 raised enough concerns about free speech from parliamentarians across the spectrum to lead to what is now section 29J of the Public Order Act. The legislation protecting freedom of expression states clearly:
“Nothing in this Part 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.”
This was very welcome, but it applies only to part 3 of the Act. That’s why my amendment would extend 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.
People from across the country have written to me expressing their support for my new clause, as I introduced it in a similar form in a Ten Minute Rule Bill last week. And I thank in particular Fiyaz Mughal from Tell MAMA [a public service that records and monitors anti-Muslim incidents and helps victims] for his support. Some have expressed concern for my safety in making this case, and, in so doing… they reinforce just how grave the crisis of our freedom of expression has become.

According to this recent report, Tell MAMA (where MAMA stands for Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) faces closure due to withdrawal of government funding:

[Nick Timothy MP] It has been encouraging to receive cross-party support for my amendment, but I am disappointed — although not terribly surprised — that not one Member from the Liberal Democrats has supported it, or voiced their opposition to the revival in this debate or… recently… of blasphemy laws. It’s not very liberal, it’s not very democratic, and not very appropriate for the party of Gladstone.
This Government and political leaders in general must be much braver and more honest about how we deal with the threat to free speech from the threat of violence. But we are seeing the opposite. Ministers, when I have asked questions about this, have stuck to their lines to take, insisting we don’t have a blasphemy law in this country, when everyone knows, in effect, actually, we do.
And worse, the Government now plan to impose a definition of Islamophobia on us that would stop criticism of Islam and Islamic practices, clamp down even more firmly on free speech, and empower extremists while letting down the pluralists and moderates in the British Muslim population.
[Cat Eccles MP] I thank the honourable gentleman for giving way. He is making a really impassioned speech, and, in some ways, I do agree with elements of what he is saying. I was involved in extensive discussion with the humanists recently about exactly this issue, where a gentleman was prosecuted for burning a Koran, and he himself just wanted to express his displeasure to the Turkish Government.
Does he not think it would be preferable to ensure that the law is being adhered to correctly by those who administer it in the courts, rather than trying to bring in an additional law that could damage religious relations in some way?
[Nick Timothy] I thank her for her contribution. I think the point is that the courts are interpreting the law as they see it. And it’s the job of us in this place, if we believe that [interpretation] to be wrong, to correct it through legislation. And I think the appropriate way to do that would be to extend [section] 29J in the way that I describe…
[Jess Phillips MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department] I am fairly certain, in cases that I have taken… of harassment and malicious communications… cases of antisemitism and anti-Jewish hatred… have formed part of that in cases I have been involved with. Is he suggesting that criticising Jewish people should be allowed?
[Nick Timothy] No, I think she misunderstands my point. And actually, I was about to get on to a related issue, which is that hating and discriminating against people on the basis that they are Muslims, or indeed [members of] different religious groups, is already a crime. And if one was harassing Jewish people in the way that the Minister just described, that would be a criminal offence, even in the circumstances that my amendment passed.
But Islamophobia, as I was saying, is a made-up and nonsensical concept that elides protection of individuals from hatred with the protection of ideas and beliefs, and is therefore, in my view, completely unacceptable in principle.
[Shockat Adam MP] Can I ask [the honourable gentleman] what he would like me to tell the family of Mohammed Saleem, the 80-year-old grandfather who was stabbed simply for being a Muslim?
[Nick Timothy] That was obviously an appalling crime, and I remember it very well, but I don’t think that has anything to do with what I am saying right now in this debate. In a free… and pluralistic society, we have to be free to criticise ideas. There are laws to protect people, but we cannot have laws that protect ideas from scrutiny or criticism.
But the Government is pressing on with its work on Islamophobia. And only this week, on the very day Baroness Casey said the rape gangs were often not prosecuted because of the ethnicity of the perpetrators, Ministers launched a consultation on the new Islamophobia definition. That consultation is open only to carefully selected, invited organisations, lasts only four weeks, and allows contributors to remain anonymous. In other words, Madam Deputy Speaker, as lots of people have put it to me, it is rigged. And that is completely unacceptable.
Parliament repealed blasphemy laws years ago, and trials for blasphemy anyway had stopped many decades back in any case. But they are with us once more. And Parliament must act to restore our freedom of expression.