There was a great deal of fuss both on social media yesterday over claims in the Sunday Express that the Home Secretary Pritti Patel is backing those free speech oriented MP’s such as Andrew Bridgen the member for North Leicestershire and members of the Common Sense Group of Tory MP’s, with regards to Britain’s increasingly hated ‘hate speech’ laws. The Express is claiming that the Home Secretary is looking at ‘reform’ of these laws and that Tory MP’s who want a complete repeal of such laws are being consulted by Home Office Civil Servants.

This all sounds very positive to the ears of Britons such as myself who want to see freedom of speech restored and the capricious and inequitably enforced ‘hate speech’ laws removed. But is there any substance to these claims by the Express or is it all just yet more bullshit from a government that seems to be mired in the stuff?

The arguments for the idea that the story from the Express is just sound and fury signifying bugger all, sadly are strong ones. The first alarm bell to ring for me is the fact that the Express has used an anonymous source for confirmation of this story. Now as a former media type, I understand that occasionally the use of an anonymous source is justified but in this case what the anonymous source has merely said that ‘reform’ is on the table. It doesn’t mean that the Home Secretary will restore the freedom of speech stolen from us by the Labour Party and which has been kept from us by successive Coalition and Tory governments? ‘Reform’ is a slippery word and whilst is being taken by some to be indicative of a restoration of freedom of speech, it could equally mean that the Home Secretary is minded to take the advice of the Law Commission for England and Wales, which wants greater and more intrusive curbs on freedom of speech?

Secondly we have the reputation of the Home Office itself and that of the current holder of the office of Home Secretary. The Home Office has shown itself over the last decade or two to be no great friend of freedom of speech nor has it shown any willingness to engage with those issues that most bother the public. Their record on curbing migration has been absolutely dire and they have been shown to be totally ineffective on the issue of the Channel boat invaders. Then there is the matter of the Islamic Rape Gangs which operate in towns and cities up and down the country, they have not been properly or effectively tackled under her watch. We should also never forget that it was Home Office civil servants who stymied former Home Secretary Sajid Javid’s promise that there would be a full and open enquiry into the issue of Islamic Rape Gangs. It was these same civil servants who hid the report, threw out evidence from those who knew and understood the problem and published what is quite frankly a whitewash that was not taken seriously by those members of the public who have to live with this problem every day of their lives.

Pritti Patel herself, whilst she is a person whom I once admired and who I thought could possibly be a future ‘Thatcher II’, has shown herself at the Home Office as being considerably less effective than a simulacrum of Margaret Thatcher should be. This is especially the case with regards both mass migration and over the issue of the Islamic Rape Gang report. In both these cases Pritti Patel allowed herself to be outmanoeuvred by her civil servants and was also subjected to what looked to me like specious and tactical claims of ‘bullying’ by senior civil servants. The Home Office is full of civil servants that have their own culture and their own policy goals that often clash with those of both the Home Secretary herself and those of the nation as a whole. Pritti Patel’s first priority should have been to put these civil servants in their place and make them follow the policy of the elected government rather than that of the unelected swamp of the adminisphere. She didn’t do that and we can see the results.

The final reason why I believe that these claims by the Daily Express are false and that the little miss do nothing who is our current Home Secretary will again do nothing is the complete lack of comment from some of the Islamic and leftist grievance mongers that I looked at this morning. One of them, a group with extremely good connections to government, had nothing about this on either their Twitter or Facebook feeds. Now this could merely be that this group had not yet formulated a response to this story but it could also mean that this Express story is one that has nothing behind it, at least when it comes to the issue of the claim of Home Office support for the end of ‘hate speech’ laws.

Of course I support wholeheartedly the Members of Parliament who are calling for the end of Britain’s hated ‘hate speech’ laws as they are inequitably policed, have a chilling effect on public debate and rely on something that is completely ephemeral and untestable in a court of law, that of the ‘offended’ person’s ‘perception’ that they have been ‘harmed’ by mere words. However, I’m extremely suspicious of both Pritti Patel and the Home Office machine. I don’t believe that either the Home Secretary nor the Home Office civil servants want to give up the power to imprison people over opinions that some may find ‘offensive’. In addition to that I don’t believe that Ms Patel has the strength of character to undertake the mammoth task of removing these hated and dangerous laws from the statute book and if she tried then she would, just like over the issue of the Islamic Rape Gang report, find herself faced with massive obstruction from the civil servants of the Home Office.