Yvette Cooper has been accused by the Free Speech Union of suggesting everyone arrested in connection with the recent disorder is guilty. The Telegraph has more.
In a letter to Ms. Cooper, the Free Speech Union raised concerns that the post on X, formerly known as Twitter, risked prejudicing the trials of those yet to appear in court.
The message was posted by the official Home Office account on Aug 14 after two weeks of unrest in British towns and cities.
It contained a graphic saying there had been more than 1,000 arrests underneath the caption: “These criminals will face the full force of the law.”
These criminals will face the full force of the law
— Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) August 14, 2024pic.twitter.com/HXOHzjCwYT
Toby Young, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, warned the tweet risked breaching the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
In the letter he said Ms. Cooper was “ultimately responsible” for the content of the Home Office’s account and should order the deletion of the post.
He wrote: “We are concerned that this post referred to all the people who have been arrested in connection with the recent public disorder as ‘criminals’, including those who have not been charged, or who have been charged but have pleaded not guilty and have not yet been tried.
“For example, one of our members, the 55-year-old woman who was arrested last week for wrongly identifying the attacker in Southport as an asylum seeker on X, has not been charged or made any admission of guilt.
“If she is charged, and if she pleads not guilty, we fear that there may be a risk that her trial is prejudiced because some of the jurors in her case may be one of the 2.3 million people who have seen the X post.”
Worth reading in full.
You can read the Free Speech Union‘s letter to Ms. Cooper here.
Stop Press: If you want to write to your MP to express your concern about this Government’s assault on free speech, you can do so using this template letter courtesy of the Free Speech Union. Sending it only takes a couple of minutes.
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In the final stages of their grasping attempt to keep control they will make more and more blatant attacks on human liberty. At the same time the grasp will always be weaker than it was before. Like unto a Chinese finger trap where the more they try the weaker they become. The final few months will be nasty and when they leave the building there will be a nasty vacuum. It will take decades just to disentangle and rectify the evil structures that they have created
In fairness to the SC justices, the social media scum where only too happy to censor, the federal government and their agents where pushing at an open door.
I’m not sure they were to be honest, although they are large organisations now with many people, some of whom perhaps were happy to be censors.
But on the whole, companies don’t want to be regulated. Social media companies much prefer the early days when anything went and nobody bothered them about what was on their platforms.
So that the government was coercing social media companies to censor people isn’t refuted. It’s just that the harm previously or ongoing to the plaintiffs is unproven, is that it?
The law is an ass.
I think the issue is that the previous concrete harm is now over and the present and future harm is hypothetical. It’s just about plausible, though Thomas dissented and I rarely disagree with him about anything. The underlying principle is that the court isn’t there to scrutinise the executive or legislative branches, but to resolve ongoing disputes between injured and injuring parties – I think that’s a good principle, perhaps in this case not applied correctly.
It’s already important that the censorship is recognised and recognised to be probably illegal. Maybe the mistake was not to have dealt with this while the censorship was ongoing.
In better news the court ruled here that federal courts have the authority to say what the law is even if “expert” executive agencies disagree with them about what the law says. This overturns precedent whereby the court deferred to “experts”. This has potential implications for example on the leeway a body like the CDC has: 22-451 Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (06/28/2024) (supremecourt.gov)
I don’t even know why it comes a surprise that corporate and state power have become fully merged. Surely this is the obvious goal and ultimate endpoint of power centralised to the maximum. And of course it is a mathematical surety that this snowball will accelerate as it fattens. A runaway train doesn’t do it justice because a runaway train gets faster but doesn’t get bigger. We enter a time of the giant snowball where they are defeated internationally and the only option left to them is to cannibalise their own countries in an effort to extract the last drop of blood. And they will do that because they don’t just want 99 percent of your vitality they want all of it.
The similarities between this case and the Finch / Surrey Council case are remarkable but in contradictory ways.
Leggatt in the Finch case managed to extend the law, albeit in only one direction, such that he deliberately flouted the bedrock of law itself and effectively disregarded the reasonableness principle which is that determinations should be based on what would be reasonable to the common man. To infer that a decision to grant a drilling permit such that the potential outputs of the drilling should be taken in to account is proper cart before the horse stuff. Leggatt made the grotesque assumption that any oil derived from drilling would lead to CO2 emissions without even taking in to account the many ways in which crude oil is used. Furthermore, and by extension he obviously was of the opinion that CO2 is in itself bad. His opinion,which many dispute, was used to rewrite law. Perhaps he could advise his scientific credentials.
In the US the majority judges chose to shrink their viewpoint – just because Government agencies have threatened social media companies in the past does not mean they will use similar tactics in the future. And Joe Biden is really a saint sent to save the U. S. A.
Like virtually everything in the world today language is being stretched, manipulated beyond reasonableness and mangled in order to serve political purposes. Wholly symptomatic of this abuse is the now frequent appearance of the word ‘lawfare’ where the law is being routinely abused in search of malevolent ends – the above two cases being prime examples.
On a more vicious front lawfare is being used to shut down dissenting voices eg Tommy Robinson, Reinar Fuellmich, the ex Ambassador to Azerbaijan (?), Alex Bellfield, Julian Assange and certainly others I have missed.
Orwellian times indeed.
I think the Finch case is nuanced. There is not necessarily anything wrong with the notion that a licence for a new product should include understanding and accounting for the known knowns, and how or if it will leave a trail of pollution, such that you might not want it after all. The problem with the Finch case is that the judges on the one hand believe we know more than we do, and on the other have not invoked a reasonable cost benefit criteria for assessing what we do, and finally have not sought to remedy unclear regulation by sending it back to parliament and have instead made a decision themselves – which actually makes everything worse.
” “That’s a nice little social media platform you’ve got there – be a real shame if the Federal Trade Commission opened an antitrust investigation into it,” etc”
That’s not so subtle. What they are doing is bypassing the 1st Amendment onto social media platforms.
We should remember the social media platforms were very willing to do the Administration’s bidding on most things. The radical left seem to be in control in the whole of the swamp and most of the boardrooms of America.
This is outcome of this decision is best discussed by a constitutional legal expert. Do you have one daily sceptic?
Hi Freddie
The American principle of “a man of standing” i.e. someone who is actually inured and so there is a case to answer (which is a principle which may of course apply elsewhere), is a key reason why the American constitution did not save its people from the overreach of covid, and also will not do so over net zero issues – when in principle it should. It can only fight a rear guard action when of course it’s too late and people have been injured.
The principle skews the basis of law making in favour of the meddling progressives.
Surely any new law or action is not required to have a single man of standing. Instead new laws are based on cost benefit analysis based on your average man in the street – not some literal man of standing.
So where the defence of a constitution is concerned the same principle should apply. If the Government or someone were to do such and such it would likely undermine people’s constitutional rights.
Until we get ‘constitutional court systems’ which can actively defend constitutions based on principle rather than waiting for someone to be injured and then them being able to afford to stand up to a government in court, injustice will continue to reign.