There has been much said about the latest assault on the rights of Britons to speak freely about the issues that concern them which is posed by the latest ‘online hate crime’ guidance coming from the Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders. Many well known campaigners for free speech have denounced this policy and this blog has called it a ‘charter for liars’ as it relies almost entirely on ‘feelings’ that cannot easily be examined or challenged in a court of law.
This piece from Kathy Gyngell of the Conservative Woman blog is an excellent take on how Saunder’s stance against the dubious phenomena of ‘hate speech’ is flawed and how these new rules will stifle people’s right to speak about stuff that others may find ‘offensive’.
Ms Gyngell said:
Well before the end of the last century, Britain had established a democratic rule of law and civil society that was the envy of the world.
Ask almost any immigrant arriving in this country in the last 50 years why they chose to come here instead of elsewhere and they will tell you it was for the rule of law. That is how the once Filipino, now British, man at the till of my local Waitrose put it to me the other week. To live safely in a civil society was his primary desire – above and beyond even getting a job or speaking a known language. If there was any remaining concern about equality under the law, it was dealt with by new anti-discrimination laws in the 1970s
Now the DPP is set on destroying the very civility so valued by these new arrivals through a corruption of the purpose and principles of the law, representative of less open and more totalitarian societies.
This is what Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, is doing with her newly constructed online hate crime law campaign. It is a pity she cannot be laughed off as a bossy head girl. But, as Laura Perrins tweeted yesterday, Robespierre would be proud.
Hate crime law is flawed in the first place and a licence for paranoia. It does not just punish the act, it speculates as to the motive, muddling the distinction between bad acts and the ‘bad thoughts’, which it attempts to judge.
The case against it is that it is social construction, based on the questionable idea that we are beset by prejudice. Arguably we have never been freer of it or more tolerant. Hard cases make bad law at the best of times.
The fact is that crime is not synonymous with the prejudice problem; there is little overlap between the two. As Jacobs and Potter (1998, p. 153) point out: “With the important exception of crime against women, most crime is intraracial and intragroup. Hard core ideologically driven hate crimes are fortunately rare”.
Yet Saunders is set on extending this construct to online verbal abuse or mockery – treating it as seriously as a real life attack.
This is not just totalitarianism in action but a recipe for ever angrier and more resentful behaviour. It is, as Brendan O’ Neill has described it, a ‘snowflakes’ charter’ on whose behalf our already hard-pressed police will be encouraged to be as vigilantes – policing these ‘safe spacers”Twitter feeds for abuse. They all also have to be there for any resentful individual or lobby with an axe to grind.
It is true that the anonymity of Twitter encourages bad and base behaviour. But if Saunders had any understanding of what makes for a civil society, she would know that policing words and thoughts (as opposed to actions) will discourage civility and increase fear.
A properly functioning civil society is maintained by social sanctions as well as by the law. Prosecuting thought is no way to instill codes of good behaviour. We once expected our spiritual leaders to guide us in the virtues of kindness, sensitivity, understanding and gentleness. Now sadly they just compete in expressing their own virtue
No law can replace moral guidance.
Saunders’s moral priorities are anyway dangerously skewed. For example, there has not been one, not one, successful prosecution for FGM. Yet she believes that something called bi-phobia – a social construct if ever there was one – should be prosecuted. Saunders is not just setting the culture of complaint into law, she has invited the chief identity politics complainants to frame the law in their own interests. For once legislatures begin to enact hate-crimes laws, everyone — that is every constituency with political clout — gets into the act of agitating to be included.
Read the rest of this article via the link below:
http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/kathy-gyngell-policing-twitter-returns-us-dark-ages/
Ms Gyngell is correct when she says that once Britain was admired and indeed envied throughout the world for its culture of freedom of speech. Those who said offensive things were indeed kept in check by social pressures and the law never needed to become involved. The advent of ‘hate speech’ laws has ensured that those freedoms that we once held sacrosanct and treated with relative nonchalance are now almost destroyed. The great tyrants of the past such as the aforementioned Robespierre would have approved of this policy. Saunders has indeed invited the most thin skinned and sometimes completely dishonest advocates of communal division and separatism to basically write our laws. This should be unacceptable to the rest of us. We are now seeing the fruit of allowing various grievance mongering charlatans into government and these fruit are policies that treat someone merely saying ‘I don’t like Muslims or Islam very much’ the same way as someone punching a Muslim person in the face.
This is an appallingly authoritarian policy which tie up our police forces with often specious and even malevolent complaints from those who feel ‘offended’ at a time when proper policing of real crime is what British citizens both need and deserve. It seems that under the influence of some of those who should never have been given influence over the Crown Prosecution Service, and many readers of this blog will understand very well about whom I speak, the office of Director of Public Prosecutions has been turned into that of a modern day ‘Witchfinder General’.
These new rules will not make society more open or friendly or even tolerant. They will instead foster even more division, more hatred for those groups which are favoured greatly by this new policy and will increase the sense of disgust and derision that many of our politically correct police forces are currently held. I predict that no good whatsoever come from Saunders’ authoritarian policy. I further predict that some of the cases, especially those that are plainly aimed at shutting up dissenters, that will be brought under these rules, could end up as touchstones for protest against this draconian restriction on the liberty of all Britons, no matter their race or creed, to speak the voice of their conscience or their opinion without fear of a 2am knock at the door.
The Conservative, Labour, and LIberal parties are now engaged in a contest to show who can be the most oppressive, aggressive, and regressive in dismantling democracy and the basic decencies of life in Britain. They are now fully supporting positions that would have cost any politician their job only a few years ago.
The racists, sexists, misogynists, and anti-Semites are there in plain view – enthusiastically enabling the very behaviour that they claim to abhor. They claim to believe in freedom and sexual equality, but refuse to defend helpless little girls from the barbarism of FGM, leaving them to be mutilated and maimed both physically and psychologically for life, and then attack those who would defend them – think of Emily Thornberry’s unprincipled abuse of Paul Nuttal for trying to defend children.
They obviously believe that Pakistani women should be treated worse than white women – by allowing the oppression of women by Sharia courts. Would this fool Saunders find it acceptable if her sons took possession of the family home and threw her out onto the streets ? Of course not, but she’s totally fine with muslim widows being abused and disinherited in this way.
Would May accept that she should be kept a virtual prisoner all her life ? Not allowed to learn the language, not allowed out without a male family member, having to be covered and silent, not allowed contraception etc? Being beaten for having a female child when she was supposed to produce a son ? But she is fine with it happening to women of other races, if it keeps the immigrant population quiet. There is your racism and discrimination – right there from the cowards in charge – not from the supposedly “reactionary” conservative-minded people who can see the dangers of totalitarianism and Third World cultures.
Faced with genuine racism and sexism, all those who were loudest in shouting about discrimination and “the patriarchy” have all fallen obediently into line, because as sensible people already knew, the Left’s only interest is in assuming power over other peoples’ lives, not in improving them,and they automatically side with tyranny.
Britain now has a choice of three Left-wing parties all determined to silence debate and criminalise opposition to what are essentially Marxist policies to re-shape Europe into a majority muslim continent. The falsifying of statistics* and the intimidation of critics through loss of income or dismissal is all classic Soviet/Nazi behaviour.
* the claims in the past few days that there have been hundreds of “right-wing” attacks in the USA over the past 16 years, and that “twice as many” / “three times as many” / or even “five times as many” people have died from “right-wing terrorism” as from jihadi attacks, is quite obviously a bare-faced lie. The deletion of crime reports after the mass sexual attacks in Cologne and in other towns and cities across Germany, is a further example, as are the covering-up or outright denial that other attacks have occurred. It has just been found that Dutch authorities covered-up a ramming attack in which 8 people were injured during Ramadan, claiming that not one of 15 security cameras at the railway station ( a typical target) captured the incident. The authorities in Europe are desperate to prevent people from finding out the scale of the problems, and being held responsible. In a few years, when there is no longer any possibility of an anti-immigration party taking office due to the demographic shift, they will stop the pretence and say “Well, it’s happened now, and there’s nothing that you can do about it, so shut up.” The fact that they are betraying both their own population and all those who came to the UK precisely to get away from Third World values, does not bother them in the slightest.
What that man said!