It was just three weeks ago that Steerpike pointed out that Labour MP Naz Shah was being billed to speak at a charity fundraiser alongside a controversial imam. Now it seems the shadow minister for community cohesion has caused yet further headaches for her leader thanks to her speech on Monday on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
Just hours after Kim Leadbeater took her seat in Parliament, following a campaign dogged by questions about a Batley school teacher forced to go into hiding for showing children a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, Shah delivered an eyebrow-raising intervention likening such depictions to the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue.
This call from a frontbench spokesperson to treat cartoons of Mohammed as equivalent to actual public vandalism has caused something of a belated backlash, amid fears it would mean the restoration of blasphemy laws. Such restrictions were abolished in England, incidentally, by the last Labour government in 2008.
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