Scottish Labour secured a surprise win in yesterday’s Scottish parliamentary by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, defeating the incumbent SNP and staving off third-placed Reform UK. Labour’s tally was actually down two points on its vote in 2021, says John Curtice in The Times, but Reform ate enough of the SNP’s share to give Labour the victory. Elon Musk has called for Donald Trump to be impeached as the relationship between two of the world’s most powerful men imploded in a social media spat. The Tesla chief suggested Trump’s tariffs would cause a US recession, threatened to cut links between SpaceX and Nasa, and insinuated that the president was involved with Jeffrey Epstein. David Beckham will be knighted next week as part of King Charles’s birthday honours list. The former England football captain, who is an official ambassador for the King’s Foundation, has been in line for the accolade for more than a decade. His wife Posh Spice will be known as Lady Beckham.

Don’t let fundamentalists define Islam

Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s call for a burqa ban has been widely dismissed as “Islamophobic”, says Kunwar Khuldune Shahid in The Spectator. But that’s nonsense. At least 10 Muslim-majority countries ban not only the burqa but also the niqab, a partial face covering. They include nations as geographically and ethnically diverse as Algeria, Azerbaijan and Bosnia. Kyrgyzstan has called the face covering a “threat to public safety” because it allows people to hide their identity; officials in Senegal and Chad say the headwear doesn’t represent their culture. There is nothing in the Koran mandating the face veiling – the practice only really emerged in the modern era after the advent of the puritanical Salafi strain of Islam in the 19th century. If countries where Islam has been the dominant religion for centuries are happy to ban these face coverings, why can’t the UK do the same?

This isn’t the only area where we’re letting the extremists within Islam dictate terms, says progressive imam Taj Hargey in the Daily Mail. This week Hamit Coskun, a Kurdish-Armenian protestor, was convicted of a “religiously aggravated public order offence” for burning a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London. Our country has been without blasphemy laws since 2008, so why should Islam suddenly be the exception? There is certainly nothing in the Koran forbidding blasphemy. The ancient text explicitly preaches freedom of religion, with one striking verse reading: “To you, is your religion, and to me, mine.” Sadly Islam, particularly in the West, has been captured by fundamentalists, who honour the Hadith (the supposed sayings of Mohammed, compiled centuries after his death); Sharia (a “patriarchal concoction of medieval codes” justifying authoritarianism and denigrating women); and Fatwas (the “risible opinions of self-important and politically-motivated clerics”). This “toxic trio” is not meant to promote spiritual enlightenment, but to enhance the power of dictators. They have “no place in a liberal democracy like Britain”.