The shocking police doorstepping of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson last week has rightly sparked grave concern about the parlous state of freedom of speech in Britain. For a tweet she posted last year, Pearson is under investigation for “stirring up racial hatred” under the Public Order Act 1986, which regular readers will know can carry penalties of years behind bars. In a period when pro-Gaza marches were flooding the capital every Saturday, Pearson reposted a video showing two south Asian-looking men holding a green and red flag on a British street next to a group of police officers. “How dare they,” she wrote. “Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”
It has struck me that many of the free speech advocates to criticise the authoritarian investigation into Pearson this week have done so on what one might call empirically minded lines. Where is the evidence, for instance, that any disorder did actually result from Pearson’s post? One prominent human rights lawyer, arguing in the Telegraph that Pearson did not deserve a visit from the police, has said that an investigation should only have proceeded “if damage has demonstrably been done during the time [the tweet] was up”. Assessing whether or not the tweet ought to have merited such a heavy-handed response, Pearson and her lawyers have looked carefully at the wording and concluded that it does not meet the “threshold” for criminality.
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In the meantime, could someone run online or in-person training on how to survive in a totalitarian state as ours has become. Perhaps someone who has escaped China or the USSR could instruct us or perhaps one of the many oither authoritarian nations.
I can help you, having had some first-hand experience.
In general, there are about three ways you can live your life:
1.) You can survive and live an impoverished, crap life as long as you don’t rock the boat, submit to the authorities, don’t question anything and comply with the propaganda. Escape into a hobby. Grumble in the select company of a few friends who you trust.
2.) If you want special privileges, you will have to be a loud, spineless supporter of the regime, ready to denounce your colleges, report people to the authorities and in general, sell your soul for a few scraps.
3.) You can oppose the system and then accept the consequences, which range some simple harassment from the police to imprisonment. Or emigrate, if you can find a country that will take you in.
To add to that, for mental preparation and general enlightenment you (EB) could read the novels and writings of Milan Kundera. He also experienced life in a totalitarian regime at first hand and his works bear out the points MM makes in human and thought-provoking ways.
Good suggestion.
Fortunately there are some quality novels available to prepare you for the experience.
Although I have to say, the situation is worse now because in Central Europe there was still some social cohesion – believe it or not, people had actual, real, personal friends! Amazing, I know…
Here in Britain society is so atomized, most people will find they will have no personal sphere to escape to.
A good church group can help, but of course that doesn’t work if you are a secular atheist.
Former People by Douglas Smith is excellent. Though not a novel. Dissent in any stratum of society will mark you out. Russian postmen in the new USSR for instance came into this category not just the former aristocracy on the basis they previously worked for Imperial Russia.
I can tell you, this isn’t even funny
Learn to love Big Brother, as whatsisname wrote.
There were good reasons for writing the US Constitution, in this case especially including the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, to exactly protect ‘the people’ from government excesses.
In my opinion, anyone should be able to write anything they like, and anyone else should be able to contradict it or not.
As soon as you start thinking of exceptions, you open the door to exactly what we are experiencing now.
And our police would be able to spend less time sitting in front of computer screens and more time outside protecting the public and answering calls to investigate crimes.
By the way, what a horrible and intimidating photograph.
two quotes come to mind every time I read something like this.
Marcus Aurelius.
Oh for the want of intelligent leadership.
‘In my opinion, anyone should be able to write anything they like, and anyone else should be able to contradict it or not.
As soon as you start thinking of exceptions, you open the door to exactly what we are experiencing now.’
So you think it should be legal for a journalist to write a superficially convincing article (but actually based on lies) claiming that you are a pedophile. Really?
Of course, you would attempt to contradict it, but some people would say or think ‘he would say that wouldn’t he, of course he would deny it!’ How much of your time would be taken up trying to convince everyone that the claims are totally untrue, if there is nothing to stop journalists making such false claims?
I think the libel and slander laws are quite narrow
Yours is a very poor example now when any evil criminal, or anyone with a grudge, can create Fake Porn Websites using an innocent person’s name and fake photoshopped images to drag the victim’s reputation through the mud.
And unless you are rich and famous, like Italy’s Giorgi Meloni, who successfully sued criminals who did this to her, it is futile for ordinary citizens to take the criminals to court, because the judge will let them off with a slap on the wrist, as in one case, a £400 fine. The criminals can easily just set up another Fake Porn Website in your name, and do it all again.
Wrongly accusing someone of a crime is a crime. That’s because such an accusation is not just someone’s opinion but something the police and CPS are required to act on (to some degree).
Hm. A certain incident comes to mind where there is massive evidence in the public domain, and no action seems to be taken!
I think journalists write superficially convincing articles based on lies all the time! In particular when I listen to mainstream media news, I may just be able to believe a traffic report or a weather forecast, both of which can seldom be completely accurate, but the rest is inevitably propaganda of some sort: I am being given a message I should believe.
A journalist always has a boss who tells him what to write (unless working independently and dependent on building up a public support base), and that boss will also have a boss telling him what to write, and so on and so forth until you arrive at the owner of the relevant media. That owner will have obligations to other media owners, politicians or people dictating matters to the politicians. As nige.oldfart cites above, everything is an opinion or a perception.
There used to be truly investigative journalists who published in respected newspapers or magazines, but nowadays every report has a political message.
And, certainly, many people have suffered and do suffer false accusations, for example, of paedophilic tendencies. Particularly politicians can be open to wounding attacks which are indeed often difficult to repudiate – ask Donald Trump. But an attempt to ban speech of any form will just result in exactly what we have today, the subject of this DS article.
.That would be illegal unless true. Libel is very expensive to the perpetrator!
the judge felt moved to admonish her that: “It is strength [sic] of our society that it is … diverse … ”
I laughed out loud at this. If diversity really was our strength then the Left would oppose it. In any case, aren’t dissenting opinions a sign of diversity? Evidently not in the clown-world the judge lives in. Therefore, what the judge is really saying is that only government-approved diversity is okay. What he is advocating for is conformity of opinion – and not diversity.
And it makes a mockery of the notion of blind justice.
Import millions of people from very different cultures and races and make it illegal to say anything negative about it.
A very good article.
It’s all part of the trick and deception, isn’t it? The bogus category of “hate speech” is designed to facilitate our replacement by the very wonderful and extraordinarily splendid people currently flooding into the country.
That picture illustrates the Woke Paramilitary perfectly.
I got another suggestion for their sign….Nobody has the right NOT to be offended!
For all you US Constitution Wavers, the first amendment didn’t stop Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro going to prison. It hasn’t stopped people in America being told “You’re Fired” for wearing a MAGA hat.
I don’t know what Bannon or Navarro are officially in prison for.
Regarding being fired, the 1st Amendment applies to the Federal govt and by extension to the state and I believe to organisations that are state run/funded. It doesn’t apply to private businesses. A separate law could be written that stopped employers from firing you for speech in your capacity as a private citizen, though that would restrict the freedom of employers to hire and fire who they want – I am not 100% sure what I think about this.
They were banged up for political reasons just like with Rudy Giuliani. They even took his Grandfarther’s watch for some reason!
https://rumble.com/v5pm2he-i-can-prove-biden-took-corrupt-money-from-ukraine-rudy-giuliani-on-the-bide.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
They may well have been imprisoned for political reasons, but were they related to freedom of speech?
And I hear in Georgia that a woman was arrested for letting her 10yo walk a mile to a shop. That is the zero trust and safetyism that has grown in the US that end up in the rest of the West. That female officer should concentrate on losing some weight. Watch any old film from the 90s and before that and see how much freer everybody was. Georgia was also the home of the demolished Guide Stones with nobody any wiser to why they got blown up, then demolished the next day.
The left seem to forget that if a Trump like figure was in the UK, and things were turned around 180 degrees with people supporting Trans issues getting visited by the police because the Christian majority find Trans ideology offensive, Will the left wing commentators be so casual, saying those comments were offensive and two years in jail I have no sympathy etc.
Nature abhors a vacuum so it is no surprise that there will be a state religion with its blasphemy laws.
Wrongthink, innit.
Absolutely brilliant, powerful, courageous article by Laurie Wastell !!!
One odd historical snippet struck me last week, about the little-known fact that in the same year of 1965, Mass Immigration/ Race Relations acts were almost simultaneously shoved through both the United States Congress and the British Parliament, acts which have led to the Destruction and Replacement of the Ethnic Europeans who built both countries into great nations.
And both the US President Lyndon Johnson and the UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who approved these acts, had attained their leadership positions because of the mysterious deaths/ assassinations of their predecessors: Hugh Gaitskell and John F. Kennedy.
NCHIs are being used by political activists maliciously. Our MPs should have seen that one coming and included measures to counter this. We now have a situation where the Police are complicit in being the activists’ private muscle to put the frighteners on dissenters.
Laurie Wastell is right to mention the unjust imprisonment of 23-year-old Indigenous British careworker Cameron Bell for Freedom of Speech.
In a shocking example of Two-Tier Injustice, Ethnic African “careworker” Ivy Mwangi from Redhouse (via Africa), driving illegally without a licence, killed a 14-year-old Indigenous British boy on his way to school, then brutally drove away without stopping to “care” for her victim.
ALL CHARGES AGAINST HER HAVE BEEN DROPPED, with no reasons given.
Parents of boy, 14, who was killed in a ‘hit-and-run crash’ just days before his birthday say they’re now fighting for justice after his ‘killer’s charges were dropped’ | Daily Mail Online
The liar Blair – a dedicated Marxist – caused so much damage to this country while fooling so many into thinking he was a moderate centrist, which included the majority of Tory MPs who signed up to Blairism. A proper conservative government would have spent the last 14 years unwinding all his evil.
No one in polite society defended or even mentions Tommy Robinson imprisoned over release of his excellent film “Silenced”.Worth watching in full as they say.
Well done for remembering “Britain’s Navalny”.
“… for speech to be deemed criminal, there was a “clear necessity of the connection between the words spoken and the likelihood of physical harm”.
Also mens rea – the thoughts and intentions behind a criminal act and knowing it was criminal. That latter part is important and is an element of the rule of law. Laws must be written so that an individual can know if they are breaching it.
So-called “hate crime” and “non-crime hate incidents” are so vague it is not possible to know when you are in breach particularly since it relies on a subjective judgement by even just a single person who finds it “offensive”.
Proving that what was said was intended to incite, and to prove it actually had the possibility to incite and did, presents a high bar for the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Much better to have a broad piece of legislation which makes words, phrases, offence taken, speech referring to special defined groups all ttes”proof” needed.
This whole “hate crime” thing has its origines with 1997 Tony Blair/New Labour’s policy to ram multiculturalism down everybody’s throats with mass immigration. They knew there would be dissent, challenge, widespread objection so to prevent this and shut down debate, the broad legislation through fear and uncertainty was meant to silence anyone who spoke out or communicated about the issue.
“Hate Speech=Crime” is a totally alien concept, originating in a desert tribe of the Middle East, who called it “LASHON HARA”, the code of silence forced upon Jewish parents to prevent them from protesting against “The Child-Rape Assembly Line” rife among Jewish rabbis, as Heroic Jewish Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg called it.
“Hate Speech=Crime” has NO PLACE IN A DEMOCRACY, and all reference to it must be eradicated from the Laws of the West.
Jesus wept. Another person being wrongly imprisoned just for posting words. British police and justice system are corrupt through and through. Please tell me how somebody posting their opinions online means they’re a bigger danger to the public than sex attackers, paedophiles and violent Muslims who are still free after assaulting police at Manchester airport.
”Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke, has sentenced an ex-soldier with PTSD, Daffron Williams, to two and a half years in prison for Facebook comments.
The same judge let off a CHILD RAPIST called Reese Newman because she said the prisons were overcrowded!
This is British Justice.”
https://x.com/UnityNewsNet/status/1858518544557695028
Where on earth are your legal experts Uk? Dear god what has happened to this country? Is socialist another word for police state? A disgrace. Your ancestors who fought for your freedoms must be turning in their graves. I am ashamed of every Brit I know for their silence, their ongoing “we must do as we are told” attitude. It sickens me.
No doubt as I write, human rights lawyers and NGOs are queuing up to bring appeals to e.g. the ECHR against judicial and state overeach
So basically, Senior Plod targeted her because she dared to criticise Senior and Junior Plod.
Being offensive is NOT an offense.
We all have a right to freedom of speech and that includes causing offence.
Hate is a perfectly understandable human emotion. The parents of a stabbed little girl are entitled to express their hate for their daughter’s killer and others who sympathise with them can do likewise. What they can’t do is extend that publicised hate to people in the same “community” as that killer.
The difficulty I meet is what if a lot of members of a particular community do hateful things. Am I banned from expressing a more general dislike of that group? I suspect I am. How then do I express disquiet that so many members of that community are being admitted to the country legally or illegally and promote a culture at odds with my country’s prevalent culture?