Batley Protests: Them and Us in Modern Britain.

The Batley Protests ask a profound question about who we are. No-one seems to have noticed.

Batley Grammar School is locked down in the middle of a lockdown. Protestors gather around the gates. Asian British men standing in small groups. They stare at each other. They check their phones. They watch the nation’s media watching them.

The school is quiet, empty. Pupils stay at home. It is March 7th for them all over again. Laptops out, cameras off, teachers teaching into the void. Apart from one.

The press says he is in police protection. The headmaster says he is sorry. The Cabinet Minister says he shouldn’t be. The columnists say everything. All of if definitively. “The teacher was in the wrong”. “The headmaster is in the wrong”. “The protestors are in the wrong”. “This is everything that is wrong in modern Britain.” What on earth is actually going on?

The day was so normal, well ‘new’ normal. Children came to school. Lessons were taught. Masks were worn. Bells rang. Time slowed in a normal RE lesson on a normal day in a normal school as the teacher showed the class some images. Images of the Prophet Mohammed.

On twitter, someone must have offered a prize for the most blatantly obvious statement. I learn that ‘Britain is not part of the Middle East’, that ‘Sharia law isn’t the law of the land’ and ‘this isn’t Pakistan neither’ that ‘it isn’t illegal to blaspheme’. So much has changed this year, maybe I should be glad for these certainties.

Amidst the noise, there is the echo of an agreement. Everyone agrees that what Batley is about. It is about freedom. Our freedom. Your freedom. My freedom. The debate about Batley School is about our freedom to live in a free country doing things freely.

Except it really isn’t.

Here’s the thing about the things in those ‘blatantly obvious’ tweets. They are blatantly obvious. Britain isn’t in the Middle East. Sharia is not the law of the land. This indeed isn’t Pakistan. It isn’t illegal to blaspheme. Here’s another one. It never will be.

It’s not a debate if everyone agrees. It’s a rally.

Of course you can find some Brits who say they would like Sharia to be law. Of course there are some who claim they would like blasphemy to be illegal. But surely you don’t really believe that someone in power is listening to them?

There is more chance of a Boris Johnson banning Eurovision than banning blasphemy. We will see the US government ban guns before we see the UK government ban Mohammed’s image. Loudly demanding your right to produce the images of Mohammed is as mad as loudly demanding your right to sing Enya songs. No-one wants you to do it but no-ones planning to stop you. It is a fake battle against an non-existent threat. Fighting for this critical right allows us to feel brave and righteous while entirely missing the point.

Here’s the point. The debate around Batley isn’t a debate about freedom at all. It’s a debate about identity. It’s not about what we can and can’t do. It’s about who we are.

Imagine for a moment that the teacher hadn’t shown the class an image of Mohammed that day. Imagine instead that he had shown them a collection of remembrance day poppies. Ten, maybe twenty of them, resting together in a metal bowl, placed in front of the class. Let us imagine that, from his pocket, he had produced a box of matches. He took out a match, lit it, dropped it and set the poppies ablaze. Once the fire had gone out, he turned the bowl upside down and stamped on the ashes.

Or perhaps he hadn’t done this. Perhaps instead he had brought in an article from the 1950s America about race relations. He had read it aloud without noticing that in the third and firth paragraph was the n-word. He had not stopped but had read it out. He had then spent some time loudly discussing exactly how to pronounce the word.

Or maybe he did neither of these. Maybe he brought in a picture of the Queen and taught a lesson on republicanism. In the middle of the lesson, to illustrate his point in a way everyone would remember, he spat at the picture and ripped it in two. Or maybe he decided to act out Othello. To catch everyone’s attention, he arrived in class in blackface.

If he had done any of these four things, what would you expect to happen?

I think an apology would be pretty essential. If I was the Head I would probably make my own apology as well. I would likely suspend the teacher temporarily while I conducted a short investigation. This, of course, is exactly what has happened so far in Batley.

But hang on. I thought we lived in a free country! The teacher hasn’t broken the law. Why on earth should he apologise for burning poppies, using the n-word, spitting on the Queen or wearing blackface? But most of us think he should. We don’t think he should be fired. He definitely shouldn’t be arrested. But an apology feels like the right thing to do.

Why is this? He hasn’t actually hurt anyone. No-one was harmed by the poppy-fuelled fire. No-one got even a paper cut off the picture of the queen.

But this isn’t about harm. It is about the fact that some things feel to some of us – for want of a better word – ‘sacred’. In a way we can’t fully explain, these actions – burning poppies, using the n-word, abusing our head of state, wearing blackface – deface something that is sacred to us.

But who counts as ‘us’?

This is what Batley is really about.

All of us have things that are ‘sacred’ to us – from the queen to the flag, our race to our faith. The question is: whose sacred things matter and whose don’t?

When I was at school, if a teacher had read out the n-word or dressed up in blackface, no-one would have apologised. These things were not sacred to ‘us’. Today, that has changed. Some will see this as a sign of wearisome ‘wokeness’. I don’t agree. It is a sign of unity. A small recognition that ‘us’ includes Brits who are Black as much as anyone else.

The protests in Batley have provoked a pointless debate. Should it be illegal to show pictures of Mohammed. Of course it shouldn’t and it will never will be. They should be provoking a much more profound debate. Who are we and who gets to decide what is sacred and what isn’t?