Flaming Idiocy

Six men have been arrested on suspicion of emulating a very naughty boy. Supposedly they set fire to two copies of the Koran, then posted a video of the auto da fé on YouTube. It is not known whether any members of our own Government intervened in order to try and stop them; but since the incident took place in Gateshead, which is part of the prole-haunted wasteland between Greater London and the Scottish border, it seems unlikely that the present ruling class would have bothered. The charge, if there is one, will be incitement to racial hatred, although it is far from obvious precisely how much hatred a film of half a dozen twits playing with matches behind a pub might hope to incite. In fact, such was the skill of their director of photography that, while police have apparently been able to trace the men involved, it does not seem entirely certain that the Koran was involved at all. Since Britain is not yet a totalitarian state and is only nominally a Christian one, and since laws against crass stupidity are regrettably impracticable, perhaps these particular crusaders should simply have been allowed to have their fun; provided that the books were bought with their own money and were not unique or historically valuable copies, and provided that they could legally have burned copies of A Journey or The Da Vinci Code or some other waste paper in the same place.