of the Broadcasting Act 1990). The last successful blasphemy prosecution (also a private prosecution) was Whitehouse v. Lemon in 1977, when Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, was found guilty. His newspaper had published James Kirkup's poem "The Love that Dares to Speak its Name", which allegedly vilified Christ and his life. Lemon was fined £500 and given a suspended sentence of nine months' imprisonment. It had been "touch and go", said the judge, whether he would actually send Lemon to jail. In 2002, a deliberate and well-publicized public repeat reading of the poem took place on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square, but did not lead to any prosecution. In 1696, a Scottish court sentenced Thomas Aikenhead to death for blasphemy. The last prosecution for blasphemy in Scotland was in 1843. The last person in Britain to be imprisoned for blasphemy was John William Gott on 9 December 1921. He had three previous convictions for blasphemy when he was prosecuted for publishing two pamphlets which satirized the biblical story of Jesus entering Jerusalem (Matthew 21:2–7), comparing Jesus to a circus clown. He was sentenced to nine months' hard labour. In 1985, the Law Commission (England and Wales) published a report, Criminal Law: Offences against Religious and Public Worship, that concluded that the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel should be abolished without replacement. On 5 March 2008, an amendment was passed to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 which abolished the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales. (Common law is abolished, not repealed.) The Act received royal assent on 8 May 2008, and the relevant section came into force on 8 July 2008. Blasphemy remains an offence under the common law in Northern Ireland. The 1989 film Visions of Ecstasy was the only film ever banned in the UK for blasphemy. Following the abolition of the blasphemy laws in England and Wales in 2008, the film was eventually classified by the BBFC for release as 18-rated in 2012. England and Wales abolished their blasphemy law in 2008. On 24 April 2020, the Scottish Government published a new bill that sought to reform hate crime legislation to provide better protection against race, sex, age and religious discrimination, and also decriminalised blasphemy. This bill was approved by Holyrood on 11 March 2021 and the Hate Crime and Public