Introduction

First of all let me apologise for the length of this introduction of what is for me is in itself an exceptionally lengthy post. It is however necessary to outline where we are in the UK at present as it will put the rest of this post into some form of context. It’s also necessary to describe the extremes that the British state will go to in order to silence the populace.

As someone who believes in the freedom of speech that my ancestors and others fought so hard and at great cost to achieve, I find myself weeping for what has been done to that right by successive UK governments. Whilst it’s quite right and proper in my view to prohibit or restrict statements that can be shown or proven to be direct, credible and immediate threats of violence (which is the US standard for restrictions on the First Amendment), my own view is that people should be allowed to say what they want, even if it is wrong, stupid, crazy or offensive. It is quite right and proper in my view that such speech is allowed in order for it to be displayed in the marketplace of ideas and thereby be challenged.

I admit quite freely that there is bad speech out there, some of which turns my stomach and some of which amuses me and which I delight in mocking such as anti vaccination idiots and the sort who see a ‘Zionist plot’ everywhere. There are indeed lunatics out there who believe and speak about all manner of oddball stuff ranging from claiming that the Holocaust didn’t happen or Joseph Stalin did nothing wrong right through to those who treat tin foil hat stuff, such as the claim that ‘vaccines cause autism’ with a lot more credulity that such stuff deserves. Some may feel that the best way to deal with lunatics is to suppress them but that doesn’t make the lunatics go away, they end up festering in dark corners and what’s worse is that they fester without any challenge to their ideas.

I don’t believe that it is either morally right or indeed possible to beat bad or erroneous speech with speech restrictions. I believe in a similar line of reasoning to that taken by the American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. He has said that the only proper way to beat bad speech is with more speech. In other words what Mr Shapiro is saying is that you don’t stop bad views by the hammer of the state, what stops this is countering these views by better or more accurate information. There are a lot of ideas that I dislike in this world and some that I find grossly offensive, but I don’t believe in suppressing these views, but instead challenging and mocking them. These views that may be a bit out there or just plain wrong, can only be challenged if they can be heard. Personally I want those who hate me or who I am or what I believe to be visible because a visible enemy is much easier to counter than an invisible or hidden one. I dislike immensely both the far Left and neo-Nazism to put it mildly however I believe that those who espouse either of these abominable ideologies should be allowed to speak without fear of criminal sanction on the grounds that we need to hear the ideas of nutters in order to challenge them.

A good example of how this works and how free speech can take down those with out there views can be found on the Myles Power site ( video linked here) where he uses freedom of speech to discredit a bunch of Holocaust deniers. Because in the jurisdiction where the Holocaust deniers operated they were allowed to speak their brains (such as they were) but equally importantly their views were out there and able to be challenged in the court of public opinion, or in this specific case by Mr Power.

Unfortunately the governments of some nations, for example Britain, do not see free speech as something to be protected or enhanced. These government’s see free speech to be something to be feared either because the voices of dissidents discomforts the ideologies of those in authority, or because they fear civil disturbance if some speech is voiced. In the first instance the government sees freedom of speech as going against deeply held beliefs of those in government in things like for example multiculturalism. The average British citizen, including those such as myself who have marched against the National Front in the past and who believe deeply in MLK’s dream that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, get attacked by a left leaning governmental and non government leftist activist class for merely asking the question ‘has multiculturalism failed?’ It’s also obvious that the governing classes fear that allowing free speech will allow bad speech and bad ideas to spread and gain credibility and thereby produce some sort of new Hitler character. Such a view is not just erroneous but also deeply insulting to the British public who I believe have the mental capacity to discern between ideas that are good, which should be supported and ideas like Hitlerism which are quite awful and should be rejected.

‘Hate speech’ laws, censorship laws and their deleterious effects on freedom.

Despite producing the 18^th century political philosophers that created the groundwork and the thought that was then exported to the nascent United States and eventually became the foundations for the US First Amendment to the Constitution, Britain is now no longer a free speech nation.

Britons used to say ‘it’s a free country ain’t it’ when being challenged by others for voicing opinions that might not be shared by their peers or their audience, whether those views be ones with roots in the Left or the Right, the Centre ,were religiously based or were opinions that fall outside of politics or religion such as sport for example.

Sadly we cannot say, with hand on heart, that Britain is a free country any longer. Successive governments of both major parties, Labour and Conservative have either brought in legislation that has severely curtailed the rights of British subjects to speak freely, Acts such as the 2003 Communications Act, specifically section 127 of that Act, the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act, the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act and the 2003 Criminal Justice Act. What is even more worrying is that despite having a Conservative or Conservative led government for the last ten years or so and despite many Tories saying that they are in favour of free speech, the Tory government has done nothing to remove these awful restrictions on free speech from the statute book.

The way that section 127 of the Communications Act is worded which criminalises speech over a network that is ‘grossly offensive, obscene, indecent or threatening’ is extremely vague and vague laws make for real world injustices. There is much that I would find either online of offline that could conceivably meet the definition of the Communications Act but as I’m a bit of a liberal, classical liberal that is, I feel no need to bitch to the police about what I’ve seen, heard, watched or read. All my devices have an off switch and a means of changing what I see to something that is more to my taste. The danger with the Communications Act is that all the definitions of what makes an offence are very very subjective. What I might find grossly offensive might be water off a duck’s back for someone else. What the Communications Act does do is that it gives a legal tool to those who might have bad intent such as those who want to inhibit debate about certain issues. All such people need to do is to make a complaint or create some complainants who will say ‘ I was grossly offended by X’ and our spineless and politically biased police will comply and go after the speaker who has ‘offended’. Section 127 of the Communications Act is bad law that invariably gets exploited by people with bad intent.

If the Communications Act is bad then the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act is even worse. This act makes punishable by up to seven years imprisonment the possession of ‘offensive material’ and, in a move that turns the presumption of innocence on its head, puts the burden of proof on the accused to show that this material was only in their dwelling and not for public display.

Section 127 of the Communications Act at the very least requires some actual evidence to show that those targeted by it have infringed it. The 1998 and 2003 legislation reference above doesn’t even require that. The mere ‘feelings’ or the ‘perception’ of a complainant are enough to warrant the law being enforced on a British subject. It also allows third parties to be ‘offended’ on the part of others and set the police on the ‘offender’. The 1998 and 2003 Acts have had a chilling effect on freedom of speech as an individual can claim, whether honestly or dishonestly, that their opponent in for example a debate or an online conversation had ‘targeted them because of their race or religion’ and silence them or even have them imprisoned.

The existence of these and other pieces of legislation that impinge on speech that was, even if it was offensive to some, legal within living memory has not only empowered race and religion grifters, or people with no sense of proportion or who are thin skinned and those who for various reasons want to censor the view of others, has also created a lot of injustices.

These laws create injustices in two particular ways. The first is that they penalise people, sometimes extremely harshly for jokes, distasteful comments or for expressing dislikes of groups or individuals for stuff that from a classical liberal perspective should not be criminalised. The second way that they create injustices is that these laws are very rarely enforced evenly or equitably.

For example: A Christian preacher can be dragged off to the police cells and harshly questioned and possibly prosecuted for standing on a soapbox in a town square and stating his belief that homosexuality is wrong. But when an Islamic headcase publishes a video online stating his belief that jihad against Israel would be a good thing, then the police and prosecutorial authorities leave him well alone. You would not for example, if you were Muslim be arrested for calling a Christian or a Jew in the street a ‘dirty kuffar’ but you would be arrested, if you were a non-Muslim for calling a Muslim a ‘dirty Paki’. Both statements are equally as offensive to the hearer, but only one will be considered as actionable. These censorship laws and laws that protect certain groups and not others are a blight on our legal system. They are not and I believe cannot be enforced equitably and it’s long past time that they were gone.

There is a growing list of people who have been targeted by ‘hate speech’ and communications laws not because they have breached a fundamental and easily understood moral standard, such as standing outside a building leading a mob and shouting ‘burn it down’, something any reasonable person could accept is wrong, but for exasperatingly minor stuff. People have been arrested, brought before the courts and sometimes gaoled for expressing out there opinions, quoting song lyrics, jokes, mocking ISIS, criticising the cult of Trans by stating that biological facts exist or expressing a dislike of certain religious paths, especially when the dislike is of Islam.

I’ve seen too many of these injustices and experienced a few of them myself to stay silent about them. Even though I’m the personal beneficiary of some of these laws such as those regarding religious hatred and the prohibition against giving offence, because I am Jewish and therefore protected by such legislation, I despise them. I despise them because they go against one of the fundamental rules of Judaism which is that courts and judges should show no fear or favour towards or against those brought before them. In other words justice systems, police and courts should have honest and not use bent scales. A great deal of the ‘hate speech’ and censorship legislation cannot operate without the scales of justice being bent. For my own part, I would rather let a lunatic anti-Semite speak than have on the statute books laws that treat one group or one member of one group one way and those from another group in a totally different often more advantageous way. After all a lunatic anti-Semite can be mocked or countered in debate and easily be made to look foolish, but laws that create advantaged classes of people don’t just affect the odd nutter, they afflict everyone and anyone and impoverish the fabric of our society by making people scared to express opinions.

The Louis Duxbury Case.

Before I embark on what is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of this story which is about yet another Briton who was and is being subjected to the injustices of state censorship and biased courts, I’d like to make a small note about sources and the need for political action regarding this story and others like it. This piece will look back on other articles that this blog has published concerning this particular case but it will also draw heavily on the truly excellent and praiseworthy article on Mr Duxbury’s case published on the Crimebodge website.

Crimebodge did an excellent video on the subject of Mr Duxbury’s case but You Tube have censored it by making it age restricted. Because of that I will be referring to a transcript of this video at times and have embedded a copy of the video at the end of this part of the piece. Other sources, such as the RAIR Foundation will also be used despite this source being very partisan and because I disagree with RIAR on some other issues unrelated this story. This is because I have checked with Mr Duxbury directly to ascertain whether or not the RAIR Foundation represented his case accurately. There are a few errors with the RAIR piece but they are minor, such as Mr Duxbury being a sports science student rather than a medical student. This may be down to different terminology used by the US based RAIR site rather than the UK centric Crimebodge site.

Finally I would counsel readers, no matter how angry they are about this case, to NOT contact any of those individuals or organisations named in this article. What I will advise is that you take up this issue of Mr Duxbury’s case with your local MP. The problem of the removal of the hard won free speech rights of Britons is a political issue which needs to be sorted by political means and by using the political system.

The Duxbury Case in detail

On the 3^rd June 2017, a gang of three Islamic extremists carried out a vehicular and knife attack on innocent people on London Bridge and in the area encompassing the southern end of the Bridge. This attack left eight people dead and 48 people injured. Six of the victims were stabbed to death by the jihadist savages and two were killed in the vehicular aspect of the attack. The London Bridge jihadist attack took place only a few weeks after Britons had been shocked by another mass casualty jihadist attack at the Manchester Arena on May 22^nd. The Manchester attack claimed the lives of 22 people, most of whom were in the process of exiting the arena following an Arianna Grande concert.

As you can well imagine, feelings were running very high among Britons at this time and it’s fair to say that a lot of people, including myself, were extremely angry that Britain had had not one but two attacks by extremists from the woefully misnamed ‘religion of peace’, in less than a month. The anger of Britons was compounded a couple of years later when it turned out that the UK security forces were not as swift or as accurate as they should have been in passing on details about the London Bridge attackers to relevant security agencies.

On the 4^th June 2017, the day after the horrific attack at London Bridge, a university medical student named Louis Duxbury went onto Facebook and, in the form of a video, voiced his views on Islamic extremists and Islamic terrorism. According to the various accounts I’ve seen of this and from Mr Duxbury’s interview with Vlad Tepes which is on the RAIR site, the motivation for Mr Duxbury’s video was the fact that his then girlfriend was in London at the time and could have been in the London Bridge area when the attack took place. Because Mr Duxbury’s girlfriend had not contacted him either during or after the attack, Mr Duxbury was frantic with worry and this worry was in my view a major factor in the choice of words in his video, for which the British state had him arrested amd put on trial twice before they gaoled him for eighteen months.

During this video, which I have not at the time of writing seen personally but about which I have accounts from trustworthy people like Crimebodge who have seen it, Mr Duxbury called for Islamic extremists to be ‘wiped out’ He also had a go at the authorities for not doing enough to counter Islamic extremism which is not only something that many Britons would agree with but which has been proven by the many stories of police and security failures following Jihadist attacks.

Crimebodge stated in a recent video that he has watched the video and never got the impression that Mr Duxbury was talking about ALL Muslims, he was only referring to Islamic terrorists. It’s important to remember here that a lot of people use the phrase ‘wiped out’ to describe an object of their dislike and how much better they believe that the world would be without that dislikeable object. Some people on the Right use it to describe the depths of their hatred the far Left and those on the Far Left use the phrase to describe their hatred of conservatives. I’ve seen it used most often online in the context of paedophiles. Twitter and Facebook and the various other online environments that accept comment are full of people screaming about how they would like for example to see paedophiles ‘wiped out’. However such comments are rarely if ever taken seriously by the police or the prosecuting authorities as they are seen for what they are which is people using this term as a figure of speech.

Regarding the use of the phrase ‘wiped out’, Crimebodge said:

Now, it’s important to know things about the two trials that were never reported in the press. Firstly, the offending remark jumped on with relish by the media, that Muslims should be “wiped out” was never complained of by anyone, nor was it mentioned by the police at interview. It was plucked out by the CPS at trial, and decontextualised, as a means to increase their chances of securing a conviction. I have listened to entire video several times and never once did I get the impression that he was referring to anyone other than Muslim terrorists.

This is important because there is a context to the use of these particular words, a context that the CPS didn’t want to elaborate on. Maybe if they had the CPS would have less of a case and a pretty weak case would have been made even weaker. Context is really important which is something we saw from the Count Dankula case. In that situation it was plainly obvious that Dankula was not a neo-Nazi, was not inciting violence or hatred against Jews but was merely getting the cutest thing he knew of to do the most abhorrent thing he could think of as a prank. Dankula got his partner’s Pug dog raise its right paw when the phrase ‘gas the Jews’ was spoken, for a joke made with the intent of winding up his then girlfriend (now wife). I can understand the context of the joke, it may not have been a joke I would have told or a prank I would have been involved in, my sense of humour is different to that of Dankula and humour is often a very personal and individual thing. But, I can say hand on heart, after seeing Dankula’s video loads of times that there’s no way that Dankula’s joke could have been misinterpreted as a genuine exhortation to people to carry out genocide or join a neo-Nazi group.

On the subject of context I’m really struck by the similarities between the Duxbury and the Dankula cases. In the Dankula case the prosecution and the court completely ignored the issue of context, something I believe was both a mistake and something that caused the injustice of the Dankula conviction in the Scottish Courts. In the Duxbury case, the prosecution have deliberately taken an active decision to decontextualise certain words to paint Mr Duxbury in a bad light. The CPS appear to have made the decision to unjustly sway the Jury in Mr Duxbury’s trials to make it seem as if Mr Duxbury had made a call for genocide, something that he plainly did not do. All Mr Duxbury called for was that which many people in Britain would like to see which is strong and effective action taken against Islamic extremists. I might not have chosen to use the same form of words as Mr Duxbury did, but I have no doubt in my mind that Mr Duxbury was NOT calling for genocide or anything like it. The only objects of his ire were the violent extremists that emerge on worryingly regular occasions from within Islamic communities which I need to add also contain the innocent or reform minded members of these communities, who are often the first to suffer the negative effects of Islamic extremism.

As an aside, before I comment further on the similarities between the Duxbury case and other like cases, it’s probably a good idea to talk about how the CPS has become overtly politicised in recent years. I believe that they’ve taken too much onboard the poisonous politics of identity and is quite frankly obsessed with the subject of ‘diversity and inclusion’. The CPS has also had and I believe still has some high profile and politically motivated advisors counselling them on the subject of Islam and ‘Islamophobia’ and my worry is that the advice that the CPS may be getting is politically biased. Some of these advisors have been those with massive axes to grind about such issues as the right to speak freely and when necessarily negatively, about Islam. If you don’t believe me when I say that the CPS has become obsessed with issues surrounding ‘diversity and inclusion’ then all you need to do to see this is take a look at the relevant section of the CPS website.

It’s quite obvious to me and may well be to others, that the CPS have worked extremely hard, especially in recent years, in the Duxbury case and other cases of this nature, to paint those who dislike Islam but not Muslims as if they were the modern day equivalent of Hitler’s SS, even when those accused of crimes related to the dislike of Islam are nothing of the sort. The CPS has done this to people who are not any kind of neo-Nazi and are often just people who express a dislike of Islam but who do not meet the standard of inciting violence. It should be remembered that the House of Lords when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act came before them in the early part of this century, baulked at the danger that this legislation posed to freedom of speech and insisted that free speech should be protected,which it was under Section 29J which is shown below.

29J Protection of freedom of expression

Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.

It is quite possible that the reason why the CPS took certain of Mr Duxbury’s statements out of context and hid the context from the Jury was in order to get around the free speech clause of the legislation that he was charged under? If this is the case then it not only paints the CPS in a very bad and shockingly dishonest light, but also might be grounds for a future appeal by Mr Duxbury. After all there have been plenty of people exonerated, one example here, in the past due to the prosecution failing to disclose vital evidence to a jury, evidence that would have weakened the Crown’s case.

Let us return to the subject of those similarities between the Duxbury case and other cases of a similar nature more specifically the Dankula case. In both these cases there was little evidence of anyone from either the Jewish community, in the Dankula case nor from the Muslim community being directly affected by Mr Duxbury’s comments about radical Islam.

In the Dankula case Scottish police actively went out looking for someone who might be offended and actively courted the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities and alerted them to the existence of the Dankula Pug video in order that they express how offended they were. In the Duxbury case it appears that no Muslims complained about the video, instead it was a non Muslim SJW fellow student who was ‘offended’ on behalf of Muslims. This individual, who is named and commented on over at the RAIR site, quite obviously has a political animus against Mr Duxbury and about conservative politics in general. Because of that I find that this increases my suspicion that the case against Mr Duxbury was motivated by politics and not by any genuine concern that Mr Duxbury’s words would have inspired someone to do physical harm to Muslims, I think that this idea that Mr Duxbury incited violence against Muslims or was a ‘call to arms’ against Muslims is just not credible and not something that would be taken seriously by the average hypothetical ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’.

Whilst I accept that in a court of law one side or the other will pick the evidence or emphasise evidence that they think will convince the judge, jury or magistrate. I believe that the CPS has gone further than this. They took something that had not been part of the police interview and which was not complained about and used it as their lead piece of evidence and what’s important to note is that they used it out of context..

This was not honestly presenting the evidence, this is the CPS going out of its way to twist, by removing from context, stuff that was not subject to any relevant complaint. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been in few courts as a court reporter and got to know how prosecution solicitors or counsel present evidence. Yes they will emphasise the evidence that is best for their side, for example pointing out how one accused armed robber being seen in the company of another accused armed robber, shortly before a robbery, could link the two to the armed robbery in question. That’s relevant evidence, it’s solid evidence and its contextual and most importantly it shows two people who might plausibly be involved in a joint criminal enterprise.

However there’s something that smells really bad about the use of out of context evidence in this particular case. It’s the smell of politics. It’s the distinct scent of evidence being selected not for its relevance to a particular case, but of evidence being taken out of context deliberately in order to get a court result that is politically expedient and which matches the narrative pushed by the CPS and some of their advisors from the world of identity politics.

I was not present in the court for the Duxbury case but I’m wondering whether or not the defence picked up on this lack of context evidence and pointed it out to the jury? However to be fair the defence may have done this but it was not taken on board by the jury in the second trial that convicted Mr Duxbury.

The reason I ask this question is that the headline accusation that the prosecution appears to have made and the one that was picked up most by the mainstream media was the out of context statement about ‘wiping out’ jihadists, looks to me to be extremely weak. It’s something that I would expect to be challenged. The Crown’s other reported evidence such as memes that have been circulated very widely without any hint of people being picked up and criminalised for them, expressing views held by a great many Britons, the wearing of a MAGA hat and the statements given by the SJW student about Mr Duxbury’s conservative politics, is also pretty shaky.

Bringing up memes that few if any have been criminalised for, the word of one politically motivated witness, showing disgust, as many British people do, at the murder of Fusilier Rigby and showing support for the elected leader of a Western nation, doesn’t look to me like they are the makings of a watertight case. The one thing that the prosecution seem to have had is the statement that Mr Duxbury would like to have seen Islamic terrorists ‘wiped out’ and the only way that the prosecution could get this statement to stick to Mr Duxbury was by taking it so far out of context as to be little more than a meaningless slur. This slur had one job and one job only in my view and that was to emotionally manipulate the jury unfairly into a decision to convict.

My increasing feeling is that the Duxbury case is much more motivated by political concerns held by both prosecutors and police and the desire that some ‘Islamophobe’ needed to be made an example of and it didn’t matter who, rather than any concerns for public safety. There’s no evidence from what I can find that Mr Duxbury’s rant had any impact apart from getting some SJW to have a fit of pearl clutching. The timing of this case so soon after yet another jihadist atrocity also makes me wonder whether the motivation to proceed with this case was more to do with the political need to show the Muslim and social justice warrior groups that they were dealing with the ‘far right’.

The decision to prosecute rather than have the police give ‘words of advice’ or even at a stretch a caution may also have possibly been pressed in order to send a message to a British public that we should ‘shut up about Islam’ after all it’s a ‘religion of peace’ OK and to accept the State’s opinion of Islam – or else. The State wanting to frighten people out of speaking up about the excesses of Islamic extremism could well be a motive for pushing this case.

We should not forget that although many Britons have no problem with different races or belief systems and recognise ordinary Muslims as being as decent as anybody else, they do have a lot of concerns about the nature of the ideology of Islam. It has been shown that many Britons have some awkward questions about Islamic theology and culture with a Guardian article stating that one third of people surveyed by the far left group Hope Not Hate, thought that Islam is a threat to the ‘British way of life’. In a separate survey, the numbers look more ominous especially to someone like me who wants the peaceful political process that gave us multiculturalism and lots of Islam to be the tool that repairs the damage that multiculturalism and Islamic extremism has caused.

The Guardian article stated that in a separate earlier survey to the one mentioned above, 30% of Britons would take part in a campaign to stop a mosque being built. Worryingly when asked whether they would still support the anti mosque campaign if the campaign got violent, twenty one percent of respondents still said yes. The surveys mentioned above were taken in 2019 and 2018 respectively and encompass the period when Mr Duxbury was being prosecuted by the CPS for his comments about Islamic extremism. Despite the vast majority of Muslim Britons being thoroughly decent people and worthy of respect and security, the same can’t be said for Islam. Islam, I’m afraid, is not popular. You know it, I know it, the police know, it the political Establishment know it and of course the CPS, a group that has been significantly penetrated by those with identity politics concerns, they also know it. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the CPS was enthusiastic about pushing this case and stretching the evidence, not because there was any real harm likely to come from Mr Duxbury’s comments, but in order to try to flex the muscles of the State in front of a formerly tolerant population that is, for a variety of reasons, becoming less tolerant of Islam and its extremists.

I do not see it as being a credible accusation that he called for all Muslims, both innocent or guilty, to be destroyed or targetted, he only referred to Islamic TERRORISTS. Basically someone has been convicted, gaoled and subsequently badly treated by the State for allegedly stirring up religious hatred not of Muslims per se but of terrorists. Mr Duxbury was only critical of those followers of Islam that don’t just make the lives of non-Muslims less secure because of terror attacks and extremism, but who also ensure that the Muslims who are under their influence live lives that are often nasty, brutish and short, as we can see from places like Pakistan, Afghanistan or the territory formerly held by the ISIS group. Does this mean that it is now contrary to law to criticise Islamic terrorists or call for their apprehension and punishment? Let’s hope not and let’s also hope that this particular case is challenged on appeal.

There might be grounds of appeal on the basis of the prosecution taking evidence out of context or something similar. But what I would like to know, whether it comes out during the appeal process or any other information that might leak out into the public domain, is how much influence is the ideology of ‘diversity, inclusion and equity’ (DIE) having over the prosecutorial motivations of the CPS? It’s plain to see that this DIE ideology is being very heavily promoted by the CPS both internally and externally and I wonder whether this is having any undue influence on which alleged ‘speech crimes’ or ‘thought crimes’ are being chosen to be proceeded with?

It’s become highly noticeable that when it comes to alleged ‘hate speech’ crimes, that there is a general unevenness in how they are dealt with. Many of us have noticed how rare it is to see any of the inciting statements about race promulgated by the BLM/Marxists end up in arrests or how the CPS has gone easy on statue topplers along with how cases against Extinction Rebellion have collapsed because the CPS have not done their job properly. It’s like the CPS has one set of rules for dealing with the Left/Islam and quite another to those who hold views counter to them.

Going by the uneven record that CPS has in going after the Left or Islamic groups who use fruity language, by which I mean it tends to leave the Left and the Muslims who call for jihad against Israel alone, there may be reasonable grounds to make the assumption that parts of the CPS have become politically bent. After all, with the record so far does anyone truly believe that the CPS or the police are paragons of impartiality?

What happened next to Louis Duxbury

The CPS eventually managed, after two trials, to get the conviction that they desired and the conviction that was most suitable to support their political narrative and that of the various identity politics groups that the CPS has come under the influence of. The first Crown Court trial ended up with a hung jury, one which could not agree that the Crown had managed to prove beyond reasonable doubt, that Mr Duxbury had committed the crime of which he was accused.

Whilst it is usual for the court to decide whether a retrial after a hung jury is in the public interest, it would not surprise me one bit if I found that this was a course of action that the CPS would have heartily approved of. To have this case dropped when the CPS had put so much effort into it after the first trial fell apart would have been a massive political embarrassment for the CPS especially as they’ve staked so much of their reputation on a drive to tackle ‘hate speech’ and are being pushed heavily by identity politics groups to go down this route.

According to Crimebodge, the second trial was riddled with issues that so plainly advantaged the prosecution that it almost guaranteed a conviction. Memes including the famous and decidedly not extreme ‘Everyone I don’t like is Hitler’ one that mocks the hair trigger sense of offence that many on the far Left have were brought on as ‘evidence’. This is not a meme that could in any way shape or form be evidence of extreme far right activity or sympathy. I’ve seen this meme used by people from across the mainstream political spectrum from centre rightists, through classical liberals to those who follow paths of the Left that can reasonably be said to be more sensible than others.

Crimebodge also alleges that Mr Duxbury was ill served by his defence counsel who did not, as I would have expected them to do, press that hard to push a defence of freedom of speech, especially when both the Judge and the prosecution counsel appeared to work together to reject the freedom of speech defence. Crimebodge added that the defence counsel didn’t properly challenge why the sole complainant was not called to give evidence. Crimebodge also states that when it came for the time after conviction for the defence counsel to give evidence, the barrister stated that they ‘had nothing to say’.

As I’ve been a court reporter this sort of conduct regarding mitigation looks to me to be something extraordinary. Even in serious cases such as manslaughter or child sex abuse the counsel will normally say something in mitigation even if it is merely to point to the fact of an early guilty plea or to highlight relevant parts of the convicted persons life story that may have had a bearing on the offence. Sometimes mitigations are relevant and can make the difference between a convicted person getting a fair and just sentence that matches the severity of the crime, taking into account the circumstances of the criminal or an unjustly harsh one that may be handed out without the judge taking into consideration such things as the prior character of the person being sentenced. I’ve seen loads of defence counsel and solicitors giving mitigation for their clients. Sometimes they can be moving and tell us a lot about the whole person about to be sentenced. Occasionally mitigations are, as the Ambush Predator blog has pointed out, blatantly outrageous and sometimes laughable attempts by counsel to persuade the court that their client, despite being possibly the worse person on the planet, is not that bad really. I’m willing to forgive these sort of ‘creative’ mitigations on the grounds that everyone who is either convicted or pleads guilty in a criminal court is in my view entitled to the best mitigation possible. I can’t really understand why there was almost a complete absence of mitigation in Mr Duxbury’s case given by his counsel?

The result of the failure of the defence to push the concept of a free speech defence and what looks like a very obvious plan by both the Judge and the Prosecution to deny such a defence resulted in Mr Duxbury being convicted by a jury who took a remarkably short amount of time, 30 minutes to be precise according to the reports I’ve seen, to come to a decision to convict. When I was a court reporter I can’t recall a case where the jury had deliberated for such a short amount of time unless it was pretty clear that, from the defendants point of view, it was a no hope case and the defendant was bang to rights with clear and unimpeachable evidence of guilt. The Duxbury case doesn’t appear to me to be one of this type of case. Instead it was a case where there were a lot of subtleties regarding Mr Duxbury’s motivations and whether this his words were a deliberate and credible call to arms.

Most cases that I’ve observed the jury is out for at least an hour and often much longer. I’ve observed complex cases where jury deliberation can take quite a few days. To give some idea how short a time the Duxbury jury was out, even a Scottish exercise to study juries which used mock trials and mock juries allowed the relatively short period of 90 minutes to come to a verdict. For the jury to be out for only 30 minutes, which is really only time to elect a jury foreman and get the coffees in, looks remarkably short, too short in my view for the jury to properly consider all the evidence that they would have had in front of them and which had been produced to the court.

Although, quite rightly, the deliberations that occur in the room where the jury is sequestered in order to come to a decision, are considered to be as secret as a priest’s confession box, for a jury to only take 30 minutes to come to a decision in a case like this looks decidedly odd. Obviously I do not blame the jury, they have to go on the evidence presented to them and if the evidence from the prosecution is questionable, taken out of context or overly selective and the defence has not put up a robust defence, then conviction is likely. It is my belief from reading the various accounts of this case that the jury was presented with evidence that had been taken out of context, with the prosecution making inferences about memes that should not have been made and which was not adequately countered by the defence team. The jury was not to know about the out of context evidence or the prosecution’s pearl clutching over quite common memes or even that the defendant may not have been adequately represented, all they had to go on was what was presented in the court. Juries can sometimes be like computers in so far as it’s a case of ‘garbage in means garbage out’.

We move on now to the issues of the sentencing. I have little doubt that this sentence of 18 months with a requirement that Mr Duxbury serve two thirds of that sentence was overly harsh. When one compares what Mr Duxbury got to what real criminals who commit real crime, you know the sort of crimes that, unlike online rants, really bother Britons such as violent crime, burglary, car theft etc, then it is plain to see that this was an unjustly harsh sentence. It is a sentence that may have been imposed not because of the severity of the crime, but to make a political point and to intimidate others into not speaking out about issues such as Islam-inspired terrorism.

It should not be forgotten that this case concerning Mr Duxbury came at a time when the government was desperate to persuade Britons that the threat of violence from the more loathsome parts of the extreme Right were equal to the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. Sadly for the government that is not the case. There are at present at least 43,000 people on the watch list of the UK Security Service, the vast majority it seems connected to international terrorism mostly of an Islamic nature and not to domestic ‘far right’ activity.

The large scale of the threat of Islamic terror when compared to that posed by the jackboot lickers of the ultra Right can be seen in a study of terror arrests and charges in the form of a Parliamentary briefing. This study found that 46% of terror arrests between September 2001 and 31^st August 2012 and 67% of those charged with terror offences during this same period were self identifying as Muslims. It is likely that this is an undercount of Muslims as it only counts those who declared their religion when arrested. For example: A person arrested for a terror offence who didn’t declare their faith or make any dietary requests for Halal food would be recorded as ‘religion not known’. This does not mean that there are thousands of Christians or Jews being arrested for terror offences it just means that the religion was not recorded.

Whilst both the government and the mainstream media love a good ‘non Muslim / far right’ terrorist story, because it makes it look as if violent extremism is more widely distributed than it really is, the plain fact is that no matter how loathsome some of the ultra right jackboot licking types are, they are nothing like the threat that is posed by Islamic terrorists.

It’s time to now turn to the subject of the Judge in Mr Duxbury’s case, Judge Sean Morris. Now Judge Morris is like some other Judges of my acquaintance and experience, one of those who are good for a sound bite or two. There’s nothing generally wrong in this, in fact an ‘interesting’ judge is of far more interest for a reporter and a news outlet than a more boring one. Some judges notice that their work gets more press coverage if they say stuff that the media likes than if they are bland. There have also been some judges, such as the late Michael Argyle QC, who were such oddball characters that they attracted nicknames, in Judge Argyle’s case, the ‘job hunters judge’ because of his penchant for finding jobs for unemployed defendants during his spare time.

But what characterises Judge Sean Morris’s sentencing comments are not just the vehemence aimed at a non-violent offender like Mr Duxbury, but also his ignorance of history. Let’s go back to Crimebodge for more details about the judge’s sentencing comments.

Crimebodge said:

On November 19th 2019 a jury at York Crown Court took half an hour to find Louis Duxbury guilty of inciting racial and religious hatred. Before sentencing him Judge Sean Morris, couldn’t resist the temptation of coming off like a press release:

“England has been a multi-racial and multi-faith island for thousands of years and will continue to be so. We have to live together in harmony because otherwise mayhem follows. I think you are a bit of a sad loner, but you have to go to prison.”

You don’t have to be a historian to see how ignorant that assessment of British history is, obviously spoken while under the intoxication of woke ideology,

Indeed. It’s Judge Morris’s historical ignorance that struck me when on a previous occasion I wrote about the Duxbury case. In an article entitled: ‘A gross miscarriage of justice from a politicised prosecution service and a politicised judge’ I said:

I’m, as many people know, a civic nationalist. I don’t care where you’ve come from or what your skin colour is just as long as you fit in and be loyal that’s fine. However I also know my history and Judge Morris is talking utter bullshit about Britain being a ‘multi racial and multi-faith’ country for thousands of years. May I suggest to Judge Morris that he hitches a ride with Dr Who in the Tardis and sees what it was like being a Jew in Hereford in 1290 at the time of the Great Expulsion or Black in London in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. It is only in recent centuries that Britain has become multiracial and as for religion, that also has only recently been a matter of personal choice. British religious tolerance is the anomaly in British history. The Romans drove out or morphed the pre-Roman religion into something else, Romano-British Paganism was driven out by the Christians and then there was the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation that split Christianity in Britain. It was only in the late 19^th century that the last of the legal disabilities that were put on Jews and Catholics were removed. No, Britain has never been a ‘multi-faith’ country until recent centuries nor has it been in a significant way multi racial up until a similar time period. This judge is either incredibly ignorant of history, or he is so heavily guided by the untruths of ideology that he actually believes this string of highly political words.

I’m not a trained historian but I certainly know more about the history of my nation, the good bits, the bad bits, the praiseworthy and the shameful bits, than Judge Morris appears to know.

According to Crimebodge, Judge Morris seems to have a more than usual degree of a desire to court the press by his statements. Below are some of the comments made by Judge Morris in relation to other cases he’s presided over and other pre-sentence comments that he’s made.

Crimebodge said:

Judge Sean Morris has quite the form for politicizing his trials and cant resist despatching defendants to jail with a public service message.

When passing sentence upon a man who had dodged VAT on 85,000 cigarettes, he said:

“Let the word go out on the street – buy your cigarettes legitimately.” That was right after he accused the man of robbing the NHS, for avoiding duty tax, because “How do you think the NHS is paid for?” (Booze and fags obviously).

When jailing a man for 16 months for having £160 worth of cocaine in his possession he said:

“You might like to write to all your friends who take cocaine and say: ‘You go away for this.’

Jailing a rapist for five and half years he said:

“Can you remind everyone who is on trial for rape that they get credit for guilty pleas.”

If Judge Morris is so desperate to educate the hoi polloi can’t he get himself a Twitter account, not use convicted defendants as his own personal messaging service. At least that would give the public a proper insight into how anti-defendant he really is.

Take this comment he made when passing sentence upon a man accused of date rape:

“Any sympathy a court has for a defendant goes out of the window when they plead not guilty.”

Up against a political, pro-prosecution judge like Morris, it’s little wonder that Louis Duxbury was sentenced to 18 months. The only message Morris had for him was that due to the offence being a hate crime he should expect to serve two thirds of his sentence.

.There does seem to be an unusually prominent amount of grandstanding and playing to the press gallery with Judge Morris. Maybe this is something, along with Judge Morris’s alleged refusal to countenance a free speech defence in Mr Duxbury’s case, that should form part of a possible appeal?

The Aftermath of Mr Duxbury’s trial.

If the conduct of the police and the complainant, the questionable conduct of the trial and the outrageously harsh sentence imposed on Mr Duxbury was bad enough, what happened next is much worse.

 

Following his sentence Mr Duxbury was taken to Humber Prison. When he arrived the prison staff at gaol allegedly put Mr Duxbury in a considerable amount of danger. What they are said to have done is tell Muslim prisoners, of which there are a lot in British prisons, that Mr Duxbury was incarcerated for hating Muslims.

Crimebodge said:

The first thing they did was to inform the Muslim prisoners of who he was and what he had said about their religion. Duxbury would then find himself regularly confronted by prisoners banging on his cell door insisting that he justify himself, while the screws pretended to look the other way.

Prisons and the staff that run them have a duty of care to protect the prisoners that they have to look after. Telling the members of the main group that is likely to do Mr Duxbury harm, the Muslim prisoners, that he was imprisoned for insulting Islam, really doesn’t look to me like protecting a prisoner from harm. I bet nonces get better treatment in prisons than Mr Duxbury got from the prison officers.

I cannot for the life of me ascertain why the prison officers did this? Was it merely base cruelty on the part of the officers to do this? Was it in order so that the prison officers could ingratiate themselves with the Muslim prisoners and thereby make these particular prisoners easier to manage? Or was this behaviour approved and encouraged by those much higher up the pay grade scale than a front line prison officer? We can only speculate on the reasoning behind this but that doesn’t make it any less contemptible behaviour.

The Duxbury case could just as easily have ended in a similar tragedy to that of Kevin Crehan the Bristol man who was found dead in his cell towards the end of a sentence of gaol for putting a slice of bacon on a mosque door. In the Crehan case the prisoner had, as well as a substantial criminal record, a long history of severe mental illness. Mr Crehan’s mental conditions were not minor, there was a history of drug abuse coupled with suicide threats and attempts. Yet the prison authorities consistently failed to properly assess his health or treat or monitor his mental illness. The prison staff also neglected to keep him safe the prescription drugs and other chemical contraband that were circulating freely but illegally in the prison where Mr Crehan was held.

Although it is more than little likely that Mr Crehan died of an overdose, a post mortem found lethal amounts of opiates in his body and was not at the time of his death being physically attacked for being anti Islam, I do wonder whether similar shit stirring activities on the part of prison staff was done to Mr Duxbury was also a factor in the prison experience of Mr Crehan? We know from the press reports of the Crehan inquest that the prison failed to protect Mr Crehan in a medical and psychiatric way and it should make us wonder whether Mr Crehan was poorly treated in other ways as well, for example by leaving him open to intimidation perhaps?

Thankfully the end that Mr Crehan faced did not apply to Mr Duxbury. According to his own report on what happened and which was relayed to Crimebodge, he managed to convince these angry Muslim prisoners that he was not a far right nutter by engaging with their concerns head on. In an incredibly bold and brave move Mr Duxbury explained to the prisoners what he had actually said and why he said what he had. Eventually he managed to persuade these prisoners that he wasn’t the ‘far right’ nutter that they were told he was by the prison staff and many of the prisoners even agreed that Mr Duxbury didn’t deserve to be incarcerated. I dread to think what might have happened to Mr Duxbury had he not had the presence of mind and the intellect to challenge the prisoners about the false information about him that they had been fed by prison staff.

Although Mr Duxbury managed to fend off the other prisoners who had been riled up against him by prison staff, the British state didn’t leave him alone whilst in prison. During the time he was incarcerated, he had a visit from a Counter Terrorism Officer and someone one from Prevent, the government’s laughable and failing extremism prevention group. Why do I say that this entity is laughable and failing, well that’s because they are. They have done little to prevent or reduce the levels of religious or rather Islamic extremism, which let’s be honest here, is the primary extremism and terrorism problem that Britain faces.

Let’s go back to Crimebodge for what happened next.

One afternoon, a prevent officer from the Polices’ Counter Terrorism unit ordered that Duxbury be taken out of his cell. He was then frogmarched along a corridor and forced into a room. Inside the room waiting for him was a Muslim Imam. The prevent officer began acting up for the Imam, castigating Duxbury for his crime, and insisting that he justify the comments he’d been imprisoned for. The officer’s hatred for Duxbury was undisguised and he was determined to conduct his own mini show trial in a locked room with the Imam as jury. Once again, Duxbury quelled this hostility by engaging the Imam in civil conversation. This seemed to annoy the PREVENT officer, who shouted Duxbury down and insisted that he listen to the Imam rather than talk to him.

Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights provides a freedom of religion. That right also includes a freedom not to be subjected to religion or not to be forced to participate in somebody else’s religious beliefs. PREVENT and Humber Prison, by compelling Duxbury to be subjected to Islamic ideology, as a means to reprogram his wrongthink, have abused his article 9 rights. This also highlights the worrying thought that PREVENT is indirectly assisting the radicalisation of prisoners, rather than preventing it.

Again, as with how Mr Duxbury quelled the hostile and misinformation filled prisoners, we see some of Mr Duxbury’s good qualities. He refused to be goaded by a Prevent officer who in my view appears to have behaved in a grossly unprofessional manner and instead engaged the Imam in a civil conversation. I fail to see how the prevent officer’s behaviour contributed in any way shape or form to any radicalisation prevention.

I tend to agree with Crimebodge that this incident looks very much like an Article 9 breach and it is something that I would counsel Mr Duxbury to take up with his legal team. Sadly this alleged behaviour by the Prevent officer is yet more evidence of a state bias towards Islam, as if the mealy mouthed pronouncements by politicians after Islamic terror attacks, the police misconduct over the grooming gangs and the state’s failure to allow an open debate about the wilder shores of Islamic theology, were not enough already.

After Release.

Mr Duxbury served his sentence and was eventually released. Sadly the treatment that Mr Duxbury received post release also leaves a lot of questions that need to be answered and also gives us another glimpse into how left wingery and Islamopandering has now become the default position for many state agencies.

Like many others who are released from prison Mr Duxbury was put into the hands of the probation service. He had to report weekly to a probation officer, a white woman, who by the account of Crimebodge was a wokeist of the worst sort. The probation officer made it clear that there was no redemption for Mr Duxbury because of his crime and allegedly made the racist claim that Mr Duxbury’s skin colour was part of the problem and lectured him about ‘white privilege’. This sort of thing is critical race theory in action and it is extremely worrying that although the UK Government’s Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has denounced CRT, this disgraceful and discredited ideology is still being pushed in places like the probation service. Mr Duxbury made a complaint about his treatment at the hands of York Probation Service but his complaint was ignored and as Crimebodge pointed out, CRT is still the dominant ideology in the probation service.

More piss poor behaviour by the police.

Just as Mr Duxbury’s time on licence following release from prison was over, the police decided to have another crack at him. As part of his release licence Mr Duxbury was required to attend a police station with all his electronic devices which the police inspected to determine if any ‘wrong speak’ had been going on. On the very last day of Mr Duxbury’s licence period an officer from North Yorkshire Police claimed that they’d found ‘something of concern’ on one of Mr Duxbury’s devices which would need to be investigated. This leaves the freedom of a man who has been subjected to an already harsh and difficult to justify punishment in jeopardy. The police are it seems deliberately over estimating how much time this will take to investigate, a tactic of ‘the process being the punishment’ that we’ve seen on all too many similar ‘speech crime’ cases.

Crimebodge said:

In my opinion this is a deliberate attempt by North Yorkshire Police, to extrajudicially punish Louis Duxbury, for a crime he has already paid heavily for. The officer deliberately over estimates the time period Duxbury will have to wait for them to make a decision as they play Russian roulette with his liberty.

I am certain, just as Duxbury is, that the police, the probation service, PREVENT, and the Crown Prosecution Service would like nothing less than for Duxbury to go back to prison, and it seems they will do anything to make this happen. In their eyes, he is the most heinous of all criminals. He has dared to offend the state’s most beloved and protected community, and they will show no restraint or proportion to make him suffer for that. He is a political prisoner, persecuted by the authorities in an attempt to balance the books and make it appear that right wing extremists are as prolific as Islamic terrorists. And where they can’t find any, they are willing to manufacture them.

It’s difficult to come to any other conclusion that the police’s intent in this case along with other government agencies is to try as hard as they can to get Mr Duxbury back into prison and get him back unjustly. It is because of this that is vital that Mr Duxbury’s case is raised as far and as widely as possible. I reiterate my previous advice to readers of this piece that they should contact their Member of Parliament to politely complain about how Mr Duxbury has been treated and ask the awkward questions about this case that desperately need to be asked. I would also counsel writing to the Home Secretary Pritti Patel and to the Equalities Minister Ms Badenoch about this case because there seems to have been abuse of process here and abuse for ideological reasons, which is a matter for the Home Office and it’s plain to see that Mr Duxbury has not been treated with anything like equality. Using the political process to get justice for Mr Duxbury might work but if it does not then at least we will know which politicians are willing to stand up for freedom and which have sold their souls to various ideological idols. Those that stand up for freedom need to be in turn supported at elections, whilst those who do not, need to be voted against.

Could things have turned out differently.

It’s tempting to say that things would not have been any different had alternative actions had been carried out. After all we can see from the account of Mr Duxbury’s handling by the prison and probation services as well as the police that they are all desperate to contribute to the fiction that far right extremism is an equal threat as Islamic terrorism. However it’s possible that things might have turned out differently had different choices been made.

Firstly there was the choice of platform for Mr Duxbury’s statement. Facebook is NOT a free speech platform. It is one that readily and enthusiastically not only censors views that the Left do not like but also has no qualms about giving users details to the police in places where the rights to free speech have been eviscerated, places like the United Kingdom for example. The same also applies to Twitter,You Tube and other Big Tech platforms.

If people want to make a statement that the left have successfully been able to criminalise or is controversial then they need to do that on an explicitly free speech orientated platform of which there are a growing number. Some are particularly notable in this regard and one alt platform CEO has a policy of telling the UK thought police to go and take ‘the sex and travel’ option when they request user details from them in order to prosecute the user for speech that is not illegal in the jurisdiction where the platform is hosted, in this case the United States.

The second thing that could have made a difference was Mr Duxbury’s interaction with the police. He broke the golden rule of dealing with the police which is that he spoke to them. He may have naively thought that by explaining himself he would have got a fairer hearing from them but the police are not and never have been interested in explanations. All they want is for the arrested person to talk in order to incriminate themselves. The best and only thing that should be said in a police interview is the phrase ‘no comment’. Make the police work for their repression and oppression of you, don’t hand yourself over to them on a plate.

When arrested for anything, especially when a speech crime is the basis of the arrest, the first thing that you should do is get a lawyer. You might get lucky with the duty solicitor as some have, but it may be better to follow what I understand is the advice given by the women’s campaigner Kelly Jay Keen, which is to not bother with cheap lawyers. If you can get an expensive lawyer, the best you can afford, someone who knows their stuff and get them on the case as early as possible. Someone at the top of their legal game might be better able to advise the arrested person or face down the police than someone of lesser experience, lesser ability and less cost. Lawyers I’m afraid are a bit like shoes. If you get cheap shoes or a cheap lawyer you will come unstuck but if you buy quality shoes or get a quality lawyer then your outcomes might be better. To put it bluntly when arrested say nothing to the police. Remember they are not your friends nor are they on your side. Also make sure that you are properly legally represented.

Thirdly and this again applies to legal representation get decent ones. If your case does come to court then make sure that you have a lawyer who is on board with support for freedom of speech who is willing to put up a robust defence and who is willing to challenge the prosecution and sometimes a judge who might not wish to allow such a defence to be heard. I do wonder if Mr Duxbury’s case might have turned out differently had a more robust free speech defence had been made and Mr Duxbury’s words had been contextualised. It is quite reasonable to ask whether things might have been better for Mr Duxbury had a Section 29J defence (see above) had been made?

Conclusion

The Duxbury case is a microcosm of all that has gone wrong in the UK. We see how Mr Duxbury was robbed of what many of us believe is an ‘unalienable right’ to speak freely a right that should not be countermanded by capricious and unevenly enforced ‘hate speech’ laws. We can also see how a desire by the state to treat members of some groups and some religions as politically and legally untouchable ends up in the outrageous and disgraceful oppression of ordinary British subjects.

In the long term we must vote for and support those reasonable political parties and candidates that can see, as many of us can see, the damage that has been done to our society and culture by legal instruments, such as various ‘hate speech’ laws. These laws need to go and Britain needs its own equivalent of the US First Amendment. Such a guarantee of free speech is needed not merely to protect those who speak ill of Islam, but also those who wish to criticise any other ideology whether religious or secular, including such a law must everyone including protecting those with whom I may vehemently disagree.

In the short to medium term the injustice of Mr Duxbury’s case and other cases like his need to be as widely publicised as possible. There may also be an eventual need for some form of entity, charity or community interest company that supplies quality legal representation at a profit for those who can afford to pay or substantially subsidised by donors, to those facing speech crime charges or who have been arrested for speech crimes. It is morally intolerable in my opinion that those arrested for speech crimes face such a lottery when it comes to legal representation and I have little doubt that many have been persecuted in a similar manner to how Mr Duxbury has been persecuted who may not have been had they had decent legal representation.

I would like to end by asking all those who can to speak up for those like Mr Duxbury and others who have been and are being persecuted by the British state. These individuals are not being targeted because they are violent extremists, but because they speak words that some, either in authority or from the Orwellian sounding ‘protected groups’, take offence at.