Pro-Hamas protesters desecrate the Union Flag at Manchester Piccadilly this weekend. In front of police officers. Apparently their freedom of expression is protected in another example of two-tier policing.
This weekend, the pro-Palestinian protesters were out in force once again, obviously deaf to the disgraceful scenes we saw last week during the return of a murdered Israeli family. In Manchester, they decided to destroy some Union Flags. (Not that this was covered by most of the the mainstream media.) Obviously the irony of destroying the flag of a nation where you enjoy the freedom to do so is lost on them. But then, rational thought doesn’t seem high on their agenda at the best of times.
As a subject of His Britannic Majesty, i.e., a UK citizen, of Caledonian flavour, I was angered and insulted by this act. I suspect that many many millions of fellow Britons were a lot more angry than I was. But we live in a nation with freedom of speech and expression so this is legal, no matter how distasteful it is.
Only, apparently, that’s now subjective in the eyes of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), who, earlier this month arrested a man for burning a Koran. “We have no blasphemy laws in the UK,” screeched pretend solicitor and Business Minister Jonathan Reynolds, when grilled about J.D. Vance’s assertion to the contrary. Reynolds made the argument that all Leftist authoritarians make these days, that apparently such an act is inciting racial hatred and a public order offence.
Okay, so it was a public order offence – presumably because GMP assesses that it would incite a reaction from Muslims. Fair enough, I get that, although I don’t understand what race has to do with religion. Maybe a Labour Party member can explain it to me.
So if the Koran burning was a public order offence which could incite a reaction, then what was the desecration of our national flag in a political protest? Why wasn’t that a public order offence? It offended millions and it creates a very real risk of violent reaction or reaction in kind.
This is the heart of the problem. You either have freedom of speech or you don’t. You either have blasphemy laws or you don’t. What’s happening here is that senior plod at GMP are subjectively deciding, off their own bat, what is acceptable and what is not. As these officers have been thoroughly brainwashed in the equality, diversity and inclusion training, where our institutions have decided to introduce Critical Race Theory and radical gender politics into their employee’s training (often at odds with their own internal policies on these issues and making unlawful assertions), it is entirely predictable that they see a Koran burning as heinous and the desecration of our national flag as not.
We see this in the continuing police persecution of Christians in our country. Apparently it’s fine for Islamist radicals to scream ‘Jihad!’ in our streets and to insult our soldiers returning from battle, to the extent that anyone who wears a military uniform in this country, including cadets, are advised (usually unofficially) not to wear it whilst traveling to their depot and not to wear it in public alone. But it’s not okay for street preachers like the incredibly courageous Hatun Tash to debate Islamists at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where she has been wrongfully arrested on several occasions, again using public order laws. The hulking bearded men who beat her in front of police officers are protected by our brave boys in blue who arrest a slight woman of Turkish ethnicity.
Look, I’m a Catholic. I don’t like seeing comedians insulting my faith. I don’t like seeing our churches and brothers and sisters being destroyed and persecuted (70 Christians were beheaded by Islamists in Congo last week – as usual it’s not a prime headline). I don’t like blasphemy. I know it upsets many Muslims to see a Koran desecrated. But that’s the deal, that’s the price we pay for living in a free society. If you can’t accept that then perhaps you’d be happier in Iran or Saudi Arabia. Despite my own feelings on blasphemy, I would not want to live in a Christian theocracy like 17th century Scotland or Spain.
There are clearly double standards in the application of public order offences here and this matters because Labour is using the public order offence to deny that it has brought in a blasphemy law by the back door. By denying that the Koran burnings are enforcement of blasphemy laws, Reynolds et al. have just once again highlighted the two-tier justice system in the application of public order offences.
It seems to me that the Labour Party and our criminal justice institutions want to have their cake and eat it and in doing so they are reinforcing the two tier justice system that is obvious to anyone paying attention in the UK. Justice is meant to be blind – only in the UK it is obvious that this is no longer the case: she’s peeking.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the UK’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.
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