Britain isn’t a free country

Take, for example, the story of a singer called Louise Distras who was arrested by police and questioned about comments she made on GB News about ‘trans-right extremists’. According to the Mail story, officers appeared at her door and proceeded to take her fingerprints and DNA.   She said she had not committed any crimes and was later told no action would be taken against her.

Or the six former police officers convicted of sending offensive Boomer memes in a private WhatsApp group called ‘Old Boys Beer Meet’, private messages deemed to be too outrageous for the fragile public to see for themselves.

They were lucky to escape jail. Last year another British citizen was sentenced to 20 weeks in prison for sending offensive jokes in a WhatsApp chat with friends.

Or consider the case of police in Edinburgh turning up at the home of a parent who had complained to the school about a teacher ‘being allowed to impose her gender ideology on a classroom of little kids’.

Or the teenager prosecuted for posting the lyrics of a rap song on her Instagram, because the music in question included the N-word. The 18-year-old girl, who has Asperger’s, was given an eight-week curfew and had to wear a tag, though the conviction was later overturned.

Or how about the Conservative MP found guilty of a racially aggravated public order offence and fined £600 because he told an activist to ‘Go back to Bahrain.’

Or the case of Newcastle United banning a fan for more than two seasons for tweeting that trans ideology was harmful. Perhaps that is the club’s business – after all, the Saudi Arabian-owned Premier League outfit are allowed to take a sincere stance on progressive politics – except that she was also interviewed by police.

Or the woman who was interrogated by police after photographing a sticker on a trans pride poster, after which the police logged a non-crime hate.

Or the Conservative councillor arrested for an alleged hate crime after re-tweeting a video criticising how the police treated a Christian street preacher.

Then there was the case of the teenager arrested over saying a policewoman looked like her ‘lesbian nana’.

Then there is the question of ‘silent prayer’, with police investigating Christians praying near abortion buffer zones, including a Catholic priest. This issue is admittedly less clear-cut than people being arrested for online comments, since there is the argument that it causes potential harm to women in a vulnerable state; nevertheless, it essentially means the authorities reading people’s thoughts.

Some of the individuals caught up by these illiberal laws are very unsympathetic or idiotic. There was a Northern Ireland man jailed for three months for posting a ‘grossly offensive’ animated image of a murder victim which he somehow hoped would ‘lighten the mood.’ Or the man convicted after posting a grotesque mock-up video of the Grenfell Tower; a horrible and bizarre thing to do, but worth a conviction? So no, Britain is not a free country, and it’s worth pondering why this isn’t of greater concern.

To show how disproportionate these punishments are, the six retired police officers received similar sentences to a teacher caught with 11,500 indecent images; last year’s four-month jail sentence for a man mocking George Floyd in a private WhatsApp chat came just a fortnight after two individuals were spared jail for putting a complete stranger in a coma. As I have attempted to show with my British crime thread, violent offenders routinely receive very short sentences, or escape jail altogether.

In fact, if you walk around the centre of almost any British city you will see petty crime unpunished in a way that contrasts with the strict laws around speech. Around the corner from the Home Office in Westminster you may even see people taking hard drugs openly in daylight. This is anarcho-tyranny in action.

Much of this is down to section 127 of Communications Act (2003), which creates very harsh restrictions on freedom of speech. The liberal Economist recently lamented of this law that: ‘For a government that portrays itself as the protector of free speech, this is a sorry affair. Conservative ministers may despair at “cancel culture” or the excesses of censorious students. Yet when it comes to something much more fundamental—restricting the ability of the state to jail someone for speaking out of turn—the government is happy to maintain a deeply illiberal status quo.’

It is also an illiberal status quo that tends to punish only certain opinions. Aside from the Glasgow man convicted of tweeting about Captain Tom, the vast majority of these cases seem to involve people who have offended progressive norms, or who are seen as being enemies of the progressive alliance. While middle-aged women who question the prevailing beliefs over gender are visited by police, and football fans are arrested for the smallest offence, extremist imams who preach jihad seem to get a relatively easy ride.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/britain-isnt-a-free-country/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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