The Director of MI5 said yesterday it will seek extradition of T Spritz Esq for inappropriate sarcastic content.
Said the Report Editor, "You can tell that mealy mouth Director General (of MI5) Ken McCallum he can kiss my fat ass. By the way, he looks like a big insect with those bottle cap glasses he wears. You hear that Kenny!"
Later in the day, Spritzler claimed his account had been hacked and he "had nothing but respect for the experienced rock steady leader of Britain's outstanding law enforcement arm".
Britain Polices Speech but Not Much Else
Officers investigated Allison Pearson over an ‘offensive’ tweet. There are thousands like her.
By Dominic Green, WSJ
Nov. 24, 2024 12:24 pm ET
British police last Thursday dropped their investigation of journalist Allison Pearson for a year-old tweet that offended an anonymous complainant. If she had been convicted of speech “likely or intended to cause racial hatred,” she could have been sentenced to up to seven years in jail. Ms. Pearson is a columnist for the Daily Telegraph (for which I occasionally write). Her defense attracted international support and an outcry that caused the police to back down. But hers is only one among thousands of similar cases, most of which receive scant attention. The British “bobby”—or police officer—previously armed with only a nightstick and common decency has become an Orwellian snooper. Britain, the font of law and liberty, has become a lawless place where a “two tier” justice system fails to prosecute criminals but takes Kafkaesque liberties with law-abiding citizens.
This year, Remembrance Sunday—Britain’s Memorial Day—fell on Nov. 10. Ms. Pearson was dressing to attend her local remembrance ceremony when two police officers appeared at her door and told her that she was being investigated for a tweet she had posted a year prior. That was little more than a month after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Anti-Israel marches were parading through the streets of London every weekend. Many of the marchers carried antisemitic signs and flags of terrorist organizations. The police stood by, and even claimed that calling for “jihad” at an anti-Israel march wasn’t an incitement to violence.
On Nov. 16, 2023, Ms. Pearson saw a post on X showing police posing with what she took to be anti-Israel marchers. She responded by criticizing the police for “smiling with the Jew haters.” Soon after, X users informed her that the event predated the Oct. 7 demonstrations. The police were posed alongside a flag of Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, a Pakistani political party. PTI, incidentally, does have a history of antisemitism. The party’s former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureishi said Israelis use their “deep pockets” to “control media.” But Ms. Pearson deleted her post and thought no more of it until a year later when officers knocked on her door while she was in a bathrobe.
Ms. Pearson’s “victim,” meanwhile, had spent the year thinking about it. A complaint was made to the Metropolitan Police, who passed it to Sussex police, where the aggrieved party lives. They sent it to the police in Essex, where Ms. Pearson lives. Essex police reportedly set up a “gold group,” usually established to handle major incidents such as terrorist attacks.
In March 2024, a Telegraph analysis found that in the previous three years, police had failed to solve a single burglary in 48% of English and Welsh neighborhoods. In the 12 months leading up to August 2024, Essex police solved 12.2% of reported cases of assault, 9.6% of sexual offenses, 6.3% of burglaries, and 11.5% of domestic-abuse cases, according to the Telegraph. They did manage, however, to solve 18.6% of “racially or religiously aggravated” crimes. Essex police are almost twice as likely to solve crimes of racial or religious offenses than sexual offenses.
The public’s loss of trust in the police is part of a wider social breakdown in Britain. A rudderless society is suffering a dual crisis of confidence and competence. Britain has been politically polarized since the Brexit referendum in 2016, and Covid lockdown measures only widened its post-2008 economic divide. For nearly three decades, a cross-party consensus agreed on the value of unskilled immigrants and multiculturalism. Neither Conservative nor Labour governments know how to handle the downside: surging street crime, simmering ethnic tensions that sometimes bubble into riots, apparently unstemmable illegal immigration, endemic Islamist radicalization and a steady drip of terrorist attacks. The police are overwhelmed by crime and undermined by a leadership that fears antagonizing “community relations.” Unwilling to address the causes of disorder, the state punishes the symptoms of disquiet, whether online or in the streets. Hassling law-abiding citizens for “hate crimes” makes the police the partners of bad-faith political activism and turns the courts into censors.
Ms. Pearson’s case, however, has forced a public debate on the decline of free speech and the police’s role in tightening Britain’s already-narrow speech laws. Essex police are now embarrassed by the spotlight, but police leaders helped to set the stage. Many speech-related complaints are pursued as non-crime hate incidents, or NCHIs. As with “hate speech” investigations, the threshold for NCHI investigations is minimal and subjective: “perceived” hostility or prejudice against any “protected characteristics.”
The Free Speech Union estimates that more than 250,000 NCHIs have been issued since the College of Policing invented them in 2014. The college is funded by the Home Office but operates autonomously as a quasi-nongovernmental organization. It was created under a Conservative government by Home Secretary Theresa May, who later became prime minister. Threats to public safety investigated as NCHIs include two secondary-school girls who said a fellow pupil smelled “like fish,” and four boys who accidentally caused minor damage to a copy of the Quran. The four boys’ NCHIs may appear on background checks for the rest of their lives.
The Court of Appeal has warned that the abuse of NCHIs has had a “chilling effect” on free speech. When Suella Braverman was the Conservative home secretary, she raised the bar for NCHI cases. Her successor, Labour’s Yvette Cooper, wishes to lower it again. In a further threat to liberty, Labour also favors legislation against “Islamophobia” that, critics argue, will criminalize public discussion of the role of Islam in British life.
John Milton made the modern case for free speech in his “Areopagitica,” a plea for the “Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing.” It seems British officials today prefer to annul that license. Many Britons wish they had a local equivalent to the U.S. First Amendment. Most would prefer that the police enforce existing criminal law without fear or favor. The stability of Britain’s society and the future of its democracy depend on it.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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