OPINION
14 October, 2024
My apologies for the delays in producing this piece, but it is difficult to know where to start and what to include.
I have had very little free time as I am preparing for my next short assignment, which involves travel to Bangladesh and possibly Myanmar.
After the recent riots the resulting court cases included the imprisonment of a 53-year-old woman for 15 months after pleading guilty to sending communications threatening death or serious harm (S181 Online Safety Act 2023).
A spokesperson for Cheshire Police said:
Since the start of the recent disorder in other areas of the UK, we have been clear that we will not tolerate this kind of behaviour in Cheshire, including those who post abusive and threatening messages online.
Her post was at the top end of abusive comments, although allowances should have been made for whether it was a serious threat or not.
Make no mistake: what she wrote was wicked. In response to a Facebook post featuring a photo of people helping to repair the mosque in Southport after it was damaged by riotous bigots, Sweeney said: “It’s absolutely ridiculous. Don’t protect the mosque. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.” What a vile sentiment. That she thought it is bad enough; that she wrote it down and pressed publish is insane.
She committed a criminal offence. Some of us would like to liberalise the laws around ‘harmful communications’, to ensure that speech that is merely offensive, unwise or alarming is not policed too severely by the state. But the fact is that in the UK in 2024 it is against the law to make a statement as reckless and inciting as “blow the mosque up”. It was inevitable that the cops would come knocking for Ms Sweeney.
But a long custodial sentence? Apologies for sounding like a bleeding-heart liberal, but is this necessary? Sweeney has been a carer for her husband since 2015. She has never troubled the law before. She has led a “quiet sheltered life”. She accepts her post was ‘stupid’ and in fact she deleted it not long after posting it. She pleaded guilty to the charge of sending a threatening communication.
Could her sentence not have been suspended? Could she not have been sent home to her husband and her ‘quiet, sheltered’ life, with certain conditions imposed by the court? For instance, she could have been instructed to stay off social media. But 15 months in a cell? For someone who, by all accounts, had a moment of madness online during an explosion of street disorder?
Many will be asking why certain forms of inciting speech seem to be punished more severely and more swiftly than others. We’ve all seen gender crusaders say things like ‘Kill all Terfs’. ‘Decapitate Terfs’, said a banner at a pro-trans rally in Glasgow last year. A year on and Police Scotland insist the case is ‘still open’. Where was the uproar? It’s wrong to say violent-minded things about Muslims but okay to say them about women who believe in women’s rights? Two men have been charged with allegedly chanting about the massacre of Jews on the streets of London in 2021, and yet their trial has been delayed for years. No ‘swift justice’ there.
Source: Brendan O’Neill, Spectator 15 August 2024.
The difficulty that I (and most people in the media) have with this is finding a definition of what is abuse.
It is sailing close to the wind on allowing restrictions on free speech to seep into how the government react to comments from the media. The phrase mission creep springs to mind. Even though I post my letters in a New Zealand-based media outlet, I am still subject to UK law and so I have been waiting for a response from a friend of mine who is a lawyer in a top London law firm before resuming my posts.
I am reminded of the old Aston Villa footballer Peter Withe, who, being aggrieved by a referee’s decision, asked him, “What would you do if I called you a p***k?” The referee replied, “I would send you off.” Peter then asked, “What if I think that you’re a p***k?”
The ref stated that that was OK and he could do nothing about it. Peter then told the ref, “OK, I think you’re a p***k.”
If I printed that Sir Keir Starmer is a p***k, would this pass the abuse threshold? Is it OK just to think that? Now this is where it gets interesting.
This is relevant to the news as it is now an offence to sit in silent prayer close to abortion clinics, and, even more worryingly, the Scottish Government are passing a law that will make it an offence to silently pray within 200 yards of an abortion clinic, even if you are in your own home in that 200-yard area.
So, if I am in an exclusion zone and silently pray for Starmer’s soul (if he has one) because he is a p***k, will I have committed an offence?
Goodness knows how this will be policed, but I am sure they will find a way.
Finally, it appears that if I march through London shouting “I love Hamas,” I am ignored by the police, even though Hamas is a proscribed organisation.
Something doesn’t seem right in this country.
