I find it highly ironic and indeed disturbing, that a short while after senior police officer Sarah Thornton, of the National Police Chiefs Council, called for police forces to spend less time of hurty feelings ‘hate speech’ ‘offences’ and more time fighting genuine crime, that this happens.
Image courtesy of Ambush Predator
Yes, it’s another of those worthless and oppressive ‘hurty feelings’ arrests that Ms Thornton so publicly decried.
I’d like to ask the readers of this blog if they’ve ever seen such a useless waste of police resources than these arrests for what is basically a bloody non crime, at least since the Dankula ‘Nazi Pug’ case? I must admit I don’t think I have. I don’t think that anyone, no matter how sick the joke they crack should be arrested, possibly charged and be placed at risk of gaol, for merely telling a joke or making a joke video. What these arrests represent is the State telling its subject what jokes they are allowed to tell and which ones they are not.
This case also shows that in today’s Britain there are things we are encouraged to grieve about, in this case a tower block fire in which it was mostly minorities that have perished, and the things that the government don’t want us to grieve about, such as the increasing number of deaths from Islamic terrorism for example.
For Grenfell the governing classes want us to weep and abase ourselves in public grief, you know the sort of public grief that is compulsory in North Korea when one of the ruling family dies. However these governing classes want us to ‘not look back in anger’ when it comes to over a score of children and young people murdered by an Islamic savage in Manchester. A double standard there surely?
Here’s how BBC News, an entity that long ago sank down the Lefty drain has covered this story:
Five men have been arrested on suspicion of a public order offence in connection with a model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire.
A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd.
The Metropolitan Police said the men – two aged 49 and the others aged 19, 46 and 55 – handed themselves in at a south London station on Monday night.
Prime Minister Theresa May had called the video “utterly unacceptable”.
The footage shows a large model bearing a Grenfell Tower sign, complete with paper figures at the windows, being set on fire.
Laughter can be heard off camera as the effigy is set alight, with onlookers shouting “Help me! Help me!” and “Jump out the window!”.
As the blaze takes hold, a voice can be heard to say “All the little ninjas getting it at the minute” while the camera focuses on a paper cut-out with a face covering.
At the end of the clip a person can be heard saying: “That’s what happens when they don’t pay their rent.”
Yes of course it is a sick joke, one of many sick jokes that anybody can encounter online or in the pub or amongst friends. However, just because someone tells or makes a sick joke does not and should not mean that they are treated as a criminal, yet here we have five people who are facing charges under Section 4a of the 1986 Public Order Act, on the grounds that they ‘caused harassment, alarm or distress’. Section 4a is one of those highly flexible legal instruments that can be used for just about anything and everything as there is always someone somewhere offended or disturbed by something, In fact Section 4a is so flexible that it carries with it the problem that it is very easy to abuse in order to silence dissidents, protestors or as we can see in this situation, those who refuse to take part in approved grieving processes.
The behaviour of the rest of the mainstream media and the political classes to a group of people refusing to join in with the approved grieving process is little more than full on virtue signalling. Sky News has been banging on about how the garden where the bonfire happened is being searched by police and how the judge in the Grenfell enquiry is expressing his disapproval of the video. The Home Secretary Sajid Javid put on his apoplectic mask and expressed his ‘disgust’ at the video. I haven’t seen Mr Javid this worked up about something since he claimed that he had received a ‘Punish a Muslim Day’ poison pen letter. He certainly has not been as apoplectic as he has been over the ‘mini Grenfell’ incident over the issues of Islamic Rape Gangs, Islamic terrorism or Britain’s shamefully porous borders.
See this tweet by Sajid Javid culled from the timeline of the mendacious grievance mongers of Tell Mama
https://twitter.com/sajidjavid/status/1059456040092295168
Although I personally find this joke deeply unpleasant it is by no stretch of the imagination anything that the man on the Clapham Omnibus, that fictitious everyman, would want to see police resources wasted on punishing. Comedy is personal, very personal, some people like sick jokes and others do not. Arresting people for mockery, even when they are mocking a disaster is an act of oppression pure and simple.
Daily I come across jokes that I do not like, will not repeat or think ‘well for me that goes a little too far’. What has happened in this case is what many warned about when the Count Dankula case ended in Scotland. People warned that henceforth it is now the State that sets the context of jokes.
Such an environment where visual jokes about Grenfell are criminalised could even possibly criminalise an anti Nazi joke I was once told by someone who had survived one of Hitler’s concentration camps. The joke was: ‘You can say this for Hitler, we was at least an equal opportunities mass murderer, he didn’t care if you were Orthodox, Reform or Liberal, he murdered them all’ Now I thought that joke was a little beyond the pale when I was told it but I do not believe that such a joke should be a criminal offence. Now however through the use of the Public Order and various ‘hate speech’ legislation it is conceivable that my survivor interlocutor could be arrested for his joke and face imprisonment. Britain, or rather its current political class really have gone stark staring mad.
Maybe instead of immediately hitting the virtue signalling button as Sajid Javid has done, it would have been better if him and those like him had looked into the background for this joke. Without a doubt the Grenfell Tower fire was a great tragedy, people did lose their lives. But there are aspects of the aftermath of this disaster that have really started to piss people off. One of the first ones that I noticed came from a friend who said to me: ‘I was impressed with the fact that the Muslims helped out with the rescue’ then he added: ‘But it seemed they were only getting stuck in because it was their own people in peril’. Now this may be correct or incorrect view to take, but that was his perception of what happened from how the matter was reported in various broadcast news outlets. Some others I understand have had a similar perception of what happened as my friend did.
When the fire had been put out and there was a political aftermath to the disaster various bits of government did things that as I said really pissed people off. First there was the revelation that there were a lot of alleged illegals living in Grenfell and also that there was an awful lot of illegal subletting going on. This induced a lot of people to ask ‘WTF! How many illegals?’ Then came what looked to some like government capitulation for the sake of image with the reassurance by the government that illegal migrants caught up in Grenfell would not face deportation. Following that action from Government came the vast amounts of money that the taxpayer was going have to spend not just on the Grenfell residents but on pandering to and placating the various interest groups, racial and religious grievance mongers and similar who have attached themselves to the Grenfell campaign with all the tenacity of a limpet and appeared with the swiftness of a primary syphilis sore. The public has been given the impression by government and the media that they will bend any law, spend any amount, and kow tow to any grievance interest group that comes along, in order to make things good over Grenfell. Some people have looked at this apparent pandering and excess and felt little but disgust that those who should never have been here may well be being treated better than many Britons are treated. You may not like that point of view or that attitude but it is one that exists.
As regards disgust, this has been the feeling that many have felt over the behaviour of some of those displaced by the Grenfell fire. Lurid tales of often illegal migrant displaced people living the apparent high life in what are said to be quality hotels and turning down permanent housing on trivial grounds, have not endeared the survivors of Grenfell to the public. Then there is the shocking level of frauds that are connected with Grenfell. I have counted eight well publicised frauds so far I think, where chancers have taken advantage of the Govts’ Grenfell pandering and have swindled tens of thousands of pounds from the taxpayer. These chancers have had hotel stays, cloths and cash out of taxpayers and possibly from the vast amount of money that the very generous British public contributed after the Grenfell fire.
There has been, if you have been paying attention to what is going on, a lot to get pissed off about with both the Government’s response to Grenfell and the behaviour of those who have been displaced by it. This is the background to the ‘mini Grenfell’ bonfire joke that has led to five people being in my view unjustly arrested. The mini Grenfell bonfire joke did not appear from nowhere, it came from anger at what some may see as waste, piss taking and government capitulation for reasons of virtue signalling. It, and the subsequent arrests, are signs that the population is getting to the limit of what it can put up with when it comes to political correctness or perceived pandering to minorities and the State’s reaction to public anger when it is expressed like this. In addition it is an indication of how far the State will go to intimidate people who do not think, or in this case grieve, how the State tells them to.
Needless to say that these arrests are already starting to back fire and the Streisand Effect is kicking in. Already I’ve started to see much criticism and mockery of these arrests and no doubt the internet will be buzzing with ‘nicked for mocking Grenfell’ memes and some amusing if sick and darkly comic images, just like this one below which I lifted from Gizzy Strype’s (@Gallagizzy ) over at gab.ai
