Ed West is on fire at the moment. He keeps writing one great piece after the next – and I’m almost ready to forgive him for being completely unsound on lockdowns. His latest Substack post is about the need for a First Amendment in the UK and, as usual, it’s a tour de force.
Today, Britain in effect has two sets of blasphemy laws. There is a de facto law protecting Islam, illustrated by the recent removal of a film depicting Mohammed. And there are the more official hate speech laws protecting people’s identities, which are treated with almost comically-absurd harshness by the courts, like with the ancient crime of asebeia.
Just this week an ex-police officer was jailed for 20 weeks over racist messages sent to a WhatsApp group. James Watts had sent 10 offensive memes during May and June 2020, “including one featuring a white dog wearing Ku Klux Klan clothing and another showing a kneeling mat with [George] Floyd’s face printed on it”.
The magistrate told him that “The hostility that you demonstrated on the basis of race makes this offending so serious that I cannot deal with it by a community penalty or a fine. A message must go out and that message can only go out through an immediate sentence of imprisonment.“
Well, that message has certainly been sent out.
To illustrate how jarring this sentence is with the usual standards of British justice, just a fortnight ago two men in Lancashire were spared prison after putting a complete stranger in intensive care for no reason.
The Watts ruling is not an isolated incident. A teenager who sent a racist tweet to Marcus Rashford was given six weeks in jail, a quite extraordinarily harsh sentence in a country where violent offenders regularly avoid prison. In contrast a young man the same age who set fire to the flag on the Cenotaph avoided jail. What does society consider sacred — racial identity, or the sacrifice of young men dying for their country? The judiciary have clearly given their answer.
Like all Ed’s pieces, this one is worth reading in full.
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Mr Hancock has some expensive overheads with these people acting for him. Hopefully, the crowd funded court case progresses and he is soon separated from that appearance fee
Toby/Isabel: Nice additional (free) publicity for our expose: thanks Matt.
Johnson should forever have a cloud of shame hanging over him for putting Hancock, the Dunning-Kruger poster-boy, in charge of Health during the Covid pantomime. It should go without saying of course that none of these people have the capacity for shame as that would require a conscience.
Bunter doesn’t do shame. It’s all a game to him. Winner takes all!
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/boris-johnson-paid-3-800-000-for-mansion-that-has-moat-to-keep-people-out/ar-AA1baOZx?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=11c060e5b574488fb066ed7952ba4c81&ei=44#image=1
Couldn’t happen to a nicer chap.
Bit disappointing that the Emmanuel Centre are such wimps though.
Excuse me for my antipodeant ignorance, but do people actually vote for this apparent narcissistic buffoon?
Or is there a way for certain British citizens to become senior ministers without having to go through the tedium of winning elections?
They voted for the Party; nothing more than that.
It’s probably more important for most people to be sceptical about the role of Ministers, compared with that of the Permanent Secretaries etc.
I think it’s possible for members of the House of Lords, who are not elected, to be cabinet (senior) level ministers, but it’s unusual.
As JohnK points out, people vote for the party. If an MP has been extremely distinguished or the opposite in the eyes of their constituents, they may out or under perform their party by some margin, but most are simply subject to the fortunes of their parties. There are swing voters but many only ever vote for one party their whole lives. Hancock is MP for a place that would normally elect Tories. Millions of Labour and Tory voters continue to vote for their respective parties without (or perhaps in spite of) noticing that those parties no longer represent people like them or their interests.
Perhaps the voters look at the alternatives available.
I used to vote for the “least bad” choice available but I think if that choice is still appallingly bad then one should either spoil the ballot paper or not vote at all
I ended up writing LIAR against every name on my ballot.
Conservative – Liar – what have the “conservatives” ever conserved?
Labour – Liar – stopped representing working natives decades ago
LibDem – Liar – campaigned on overturning the biggest democratic decision of the people in decades
They are all LIARS. That is all they do.
And presumably the Green Party. What did they do about face masks (and contraceptives) polluting the environment?
GangGreen, of course, are watermelons.
Shiny green on the outside, deep red inside the skin, and containing many hard pips.
Liars to shame even all the others.
Or indeed stand oneself, especially in local elections where no deposit is required.
Characters like Hancock are the people in authority who lord over the population making rules, spending money they confiscate from us and then some more.
They are useless, cretinous, morally vacuous individuals. And yet we are so primed to not only accept authority and leadership but beg for it. So we live in the constant hope that the people that replace the likes of Hancock might be somehow a bit better.
They’re all the same, with few exceptions.
If we don’t want these sociopaths constantly affecting our lives, the state needs to be shrunk and its authority and power drastically reduced.
I think it was Plato who said something like; some criminals we hang, others we elect to government.
Possibly, though when I read “The Republic” it seemed mainly like a long-winded explanation of why wise people like Plato should be in charge of everything.
Another candidate for a short sharp shock.
If anyone wants to help Andrew Bridgen successfully sue Matt Hancock, you can donate here, every little helps:
https://democracythree.org/en-gb/en-gb/the_day_democracy_died_andrew_bridgen?fbclid=IwAR3a9tWFC81JrNn6B1xx6e10OSu31Cc-RXbbPC-f4XU40Gr3JC8lAqf7VOo
Before you do that you might want to have a read of this.
A Bridgen Too Far… – Miri AF
https://miriaf.co.uk/a-bridgen-too-far/
Too late mate already donated as you can see from my comments above. Just have to pray hard and hope you’re wrong about the success (or otherwise) of AB’s lawsuit. It’s only money!
Me too, and it’s not my thoughts necessarily, just drawing attention to another point of view that makes quite a lot of sense. I didn’t see this feature until after donating, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have donated.
Already done. Not showing off but I actually donated twice as I forgot to put a good luck message on first time. Sorry Andrew but you only got a fiver the second time round! As for Hand Cock may he rot in hell.
Tickets on Eventbrite for the reception & dinner say 10th June (not 20th).
‘… he recently told an undercover reporter that his going rate for providing business advice is £10,000 a day, or “around £1,500 an hour”.’
Anyone dumb enough to take business advice from this shameless nitwit, even gratis, deserves to go bankrupt and probably would.
A ‘democratic’ politcian referring to recorded communication of him that’s political in nature and when there’s clearly a public interest in it becoming known (as in 13 months of When do we deploy the new variant?) is certainly gross. The people running the Emasculated Centre ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Absolutely. The material concerns government business that we were paying him to conduct hence it should be our property.
So that former health secretary has robbed ticket holders unable to switch to Tuesday of what they have paid for. And by the way, would it be going too far to suggest that that man should be in jail ?
“And by the way, would it be going too far to suggest that that man should be in jail ?”
At the very least. He’s the equivalent of a war criminal.
Or more precisely, equivalent to all those amongst the prison population, that the majority of the taxpayers would greatly prefer to be hanged. Piano wire and a lamp-post would reduce costs.
Who on earth would want any advice from Hancock even at £10 let alone £10,000