Michael Gove’s crackdown on extremism – launched last week in the British parliament – is outrageously authoritarian and doomed to fail. I argued as much on spiked at the time. Allowing the government to define and go after ‘extremists’ is bound to chill freedom of speech to the bone while driving the haters underground where we cannot challenge them. But at least Gove gets that there is a problem with extremism in our midst, unlike his more hysterical critics. In response to his speech, there was a desperate attempt to pretend that Britain hasn’t been rocked by Islamic extremism and full-blown Islamist terrorism of late, from the pro-Hamas protests to the murder of David Amess MP just two-and-a-half years ago. Meanwhile, the chattering classes have said that Tory right-wingers are the real extremists, as if Jacob Rees-Mogg banging on about small boats is the same as Islamists screaming ‘From the river to the sea’ on Whitehall.

A new report, published by the government’s Commission for Countering Extremism and produced by extremism academic Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, has lifted the lid on a form of extremism that the great and good are also desperate to downplay: Islamic anti-blasphemy extremism, which appears to have gained a grim foothold in the UK of late. Indeed, as Meleagrou-Hitchens details, the string of ‘blasphemy’ scandals we’ve seen in recent years – from the Batley Grammar school teacher, who was suspended and forced into hiding after he showed his students Muhammad cartoons; to the Lady of Heaven protests, which managed to shut down a supposedly ‘blasphemous’ film; to the Wakefield Koran incident, in which an autistic child and his family were menaced with death threats – were motored by activists with links to extremist anti-blasphemy groups.

The activists and imams who came to the fore during those shocking scandals – in which politicians, school leaders, cinema chains and police fell over themselves to cancel and condemn those accused of ‘blasphemy’ – were often at pains to say they did not support violence. As Adil Shahzad, one of the leading Batley Grammar protesters, put it, Muslims should make their views known in the ‘democratic way’. But, as Meleagrou-Hitchens diplomatically puts it, ‘the possibility of further anti-blasphemy violence is heightened by the activism of the groups and individuals’ in question. Not least because so many of the activists discussed in the report condemn violence with one breath and then praise murderous anti-blasphemy groups with the next.