Burning a Quran shouldn’t be a crime

England ditched its blasphemy laws back in 2008. No longer would it be an offence to engage in ‘contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous’ speech concerning God. No longer would any poor soul be hauled off to jail, far less to the stocks, for the crime of profanity. So you can imagine my surprise when a man was arrested in Manchester on Saturday after desecrating a copy of the Quran. Was blasphemy snuck back on to the statute books without anyone noticing?

Reading about Saturday’s arrest, I found myself wondering what century this is. The man allegedly live-streamed himself burning a Quran ‘page by page’. He executed his supposed sacrilege next to the Glade of Light memorial, which commemorates the victims of the Islamist suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena in 2017. Call me a free-speech fanatic, but is there really anything wrong with him doing that?

Sadly, Manchester’s cops appear to take a different view.