Labour has turned our constables into commissars

 

The Prime Minister cannot distance himself from speech policing; this Government has encouraged these shocking arrests

The stirring up racial hatred offence, first created in the Race Relations Act 1965, is very, very serious. It carries a potential penalty of up to seven years in prison. It is also disturbingly vague: What does “stirring up” actually mean? Who gets to define “hatred”? Unlike American speech laws around incitement to violence, speech doesn’t have to be “likely” to stir up violence to count as criminal, but merely “intended” – meaning it strays into policing thought crime. To safeguard free speech, any such charge requires the consent of the Attorney General to proceed.

 

Once, it was used sparingly and for relatively extreme cases. Among the first convictions, in 1967, was the leader of the British National Socialist Movement, Colin Jordan.

But as our justice system gets more politicised and the state grows more censorious, arrests and prosecutions under this once-rare offence have expanded massively. Just one person was convicted of the offence in 2015, compared with 44 last year.

 

Last year, Essex Police used this offence to go after The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson over a tweet in which she criticised two-tier policing, before the force shamefacedly dropped the charges after a major public outcry. And as even the White House now knows, childminder Lucy Connolly received a 31-month prison sentence for stirring up racial hatred over a single, hastily deleted tweet on the night of the Southport massacre.

Then there was personal trainer Jamie Michael, who stood accused of stirring up racial hatred over a Facebook monologue in which he urged people in his area to protest peacefully against illegal migration. The case was against him was in fact paper thin: in February, a jury found the former Royal Marine not guilty in just 17 minutes.

 

The latest example highlights just how bad things have got. Pete North, an online political commentator and veteran of the Brexit movement was arrested for stirring up racial hatred in his home late last night over a meme, before being driven 30 minutes to Harrogate Police Station, where he was interrogated in the dead of night over his alleged motivations.

 

Reportedly, the post in question was a picture of a Palestine flag which read: “F--- Hamas, F--- Palestine, F--- Islam. Want to protest? F--- off to a Muslim country and protest.” These are strong sentiments, which many may find distasteful, but in a free country people should be able to voice robust opinions without the police knocking on the door.

Mr North has said that he had “not intended to stir up racial hatred”, adding: “I am entitled to dislike a religion.” He isn’t wrong: the law is not supposed treat Islam, a religion, as equivalent to a race, though increasingly the boundary between the two is being blurred, not least through Labour’s efforts to conflate the two in its “Islamophobia” rules.

 

Lord Young, director of the Free Speech Union, said: “The police and the Crown Prosecution Service are defining this offence incredibly broadly to justify arresting and, in some cases, prosecuting people for social media posts. Muslims are not a race, yet Pete North is being investigated for intending to stir up racial hatred, and asylum seekers aren’t a race either, but Lucy Connolly was charged with the same offence.”

If police and prosecutors are interpreting this offence more broadly than ever under, that’s because this Labour Government has repeatedly encouraged them to do so.

Labour had been in power less than a month before it effected a punitive crackdown on online speech during the Southport unrest. Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, advised Sir Keir Starmer that it would be lawful to charge social media users with stirring up racial hatred online. Indeed, Hermer consented to 17 separate charges of this offence related to Southport, later crowing that people could not “hide behind a keyboard” following convictions. Sir Keir, meanwhile, has publicly backed the prosecution of the most high-profile of these, Lucy Connolly.

 

The Prime Minister may wave away free speech concerns when Donald Trump is in town, but shocking arrests like these are his responsibility. After comedy writer Graham Linehan had his collar felt earlier this month, Starmer tried to distance himself from such speech policing, saying: “We must ensure the police focus on the most serious issues.” Yet the fact is, the message Labour has been sending in Government is quite the opposite. The public are right to draw a link between arrests over speech and “two-tier Keir”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1c04c52b10a4ff8c