The UK is right to refuse entry to a Quran-burning activist

Nobody came well out of the Quran-scuffing incident at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield last month. Following calls from Islamic fundamentalists for severe measures to suppress any insults to Islam, the headmaster of the school concerned largely took their side rather than dismiss the incident as the school triviality it was; the council that employed him was equally pusillanimous. The police also chose to appease the hotheads by initially recording an entirely inadvertent cause of offence as a hate incident: only later it seems, with bad grace, did they condescend to gently reprimand a child over death threats to the boy who had dropped the book. 

It is hard to see all this as anything other than a threat to liberalism and democracy, and as presaging the reintroduction by the back door of a kind of blasphemy law we got rid of in 2008. One person who agrees wholeheartedly with this assessment is right-wing Danish politician Rasmus Paludan, founder of the Danish Stram Kurs party and well-known attacker of Islam, who is determined to keep the controversy going.