Also writing about the government’s Religious Hatred bill in Index on Censorship, Rohan Jayasekera points to the wilful naivety of the framers of this law.

It also thinks it comes cheap. The Home Office expects to see fewer than two or three cases of incitement to religious hatred brought before the courts a year. Only 67 people have been tried, and 44 convicted, under 19-year-old legislation banning incitement of racial hatred in Britain. The government expects a sister law covering religious hate to be equally lightly applied.

But this calculation underestimates the religiously driven in Britain, their organisation, the focus for protest provided by the court option and the political fallout from a refusal to prosecute, let alone a failure to convict defendants in high profile cases.

Calls to prosecute the blasphemous will become rallying cries. Religious extremists will lead, fired not by fear of violence or threat of crime, but by the desire to bring their apostates and critics to court to be punished and silenced.

It’s a known condition. Former Indian Attorney-General Soli Sorabjee SC warns that criminal laws prohibiting hate speech and expression encourage intolerance, divisiveness and unreasonable interference with freedom of expression.

“Fundamentalist Christians, religious Muslims and devout Hindus would then seek to invoke the criminal machinery against each other’s religion, tenets or practices,” he has said. “That is what is increasingly happening today in India. We need not more repressive laws but more free speech to combat bigotry and to promote tolerance.”

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