Hello and welcome back to the Spike podcast. I'm Fraser Myers. No Tom Slater this week,

but I am delighted to be joined by Spike columnist Ella Wheelan. Hi. And trade unionist Paul Embry.

Hello. Absolutely loads to discuss today. We'll be talking about Labor's Islamic

blasphemy law, the reform surge in the polls and Trump's ban on men in women's sports.

Before we get into all that, I just wanted to remind everyone that spiked supporters can come to Spike's 25th anniversary bash.

It's on Thursday the 27th of February and you can get your tickets now if you're a Spike supporter by logging into the supporters hub or look out for it on the website.

So get your tickets now before it's too late.

Has the UK suddenly ended up via the back door with Islamic blasphemy laws?

Two things happened this week.

One was the conviction of a man of a hate crime for burning the Quran in Manchester.

Also, we learned about Angela Rainer's plans as community secretary to set up a council that will define Islamophobia,

which many critics warn, is essentially going to bring in Islamic blasphemy law

via the back door. It will essentially allow criticism of Islam to be banned. Ella, what have you

made of this week's development? Should we be worried? Well, definitely. There's already a pretty bad

kind of climate of discussion around Islamophobia.

It's not like at the moment there's great freedom of speech

and this is now going to pose threats to it.

Obviously, what happened in Manchester with their individual being arrested,

shows that there's already a problem with a sort of quasi-blastominy law.

But the way in which Angela Rainer has gone about talking about this seems to me to be, you know, one, a massive kind of basic virtue signal.

This sort of, we're doing something in capital letters about Islamophobia.

And if you look at the detail, number one, one of the

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