Is it a Crime to Tell the Truth? If You Live in Britain, and That Truth Will Damage “Community Relations”, the Answer Seems to be Yes

LAURIE WASTELL

Another week, and another person has been convicted for posting something online during the disorder this summer. This time it’s Derek Heggie, a boxer turned actor and podcast host from Carlisle. In two YouTube videos posted between August 2nd and 8th, Heggie was alleged to have made “grossly offensive” online comments, including saying that “young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs that worship the Prophet Muhammad”. He admitted to posting these comments “with intent to cause distress and anxiety” at Carlisle Crown Court. He had initially pleaded not guilty, but being held on remand for four months – since August 8th – seems to have changed his mind. He will be sentenced this week.

Whatever else it may have been, it must be noted that this comment of Heggie’s is undeniably true. In the decades-long horror of the grooming gangs scandal, thousands of white, working-class girls have been groomed, abused and raped, largely across the post-industrial north of England, by Pakistani-Muslim men. There was indeed a racial angle. Charlie Peters, who has reported on this tirelessly, notes: “Through the countless testimonies that I’ve heard, I’m convinced that the national grooming gangs story was a race hate scandal, perpetrated mostly by Pakistani men who saw white children as legitimate and ‘easy’ targets for abuse.” And worst of all, says Maggie Oliver, a police whistleblower who has done much to expose this story, the abuse is likely still ongoing. “We’ve been approached by 60 victims in the last three days who are currently being failed by the police,” she said last year. “It is not a historical problem.”

Yet the veracity of what Heggie said has not spared him jail. Of course, it’s not hard to see why the British state views speaking about the grooming gangs scandal as inflammatory. It is an outrage and a disgrace. It shames our nation. It makes it difficult to maintain the official orthodoxy, as Labour MP Lisa Nandy expressed it recently on BBC Question Time, that Britain has been “enriched” by immigration. Tell that to the grooming gang victim first targeted in her primary school playground from the age of 11, raped at 13 and abused by over 150 men by the age of 16. “You stole my childhood, now I’m taking your freedom,” she defiantly told her five abusers when they were finally sentenced last month, 22 years after the horrific abuse started. “I am your karma.” An important moment of justice in a scandal that should never have been allowed to happen.

Heggie’s case is not the first time that speech about the grooming gangs has been found to be a criminal offence.

Readers may recall the case of Sam Melia, the organiser for far-right group Patriotic Alternative who was convicted and sentenced earlier this year to two years, principally for “the intent to stir up racial hatred”, an offence under the Public Order Act 1986.

Melia had run an online library of downloadable stickers including messages like the following: “Labour loves Muslim rape gangs”, “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066” and “Mass immigration is white genocide”. Others were anti-Semitic: “Why are Jews censoring free speech?”; “Small hats, big problems” (next to a kippah). Using Melia’s library, an anonymous group he led called the Hundred Handers had been responsible for a series of stickering incidents between 2019 and 2021, printing them and displaying them in public places. Following the incidents, which ranged from Cornwall to Northern Ireland, Melia was found guilty in January of inciting racial hatred and also of encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage.

The judge’s sentencing remarks again reveal that the truth of a statement in no way mitigates whether the state will deem it to be incitement. In deciding how severely to sentence Melia, Judge Tom Bayliss had to evaluate whether or not there were aggravating factors to the offence. He concluded that there was one: the “particularly sensitive” social climate at the time the offence took place. Bayliss explains:

A body of the messages preys upon public fears about grooming gangs and asylum seekers. By deliberately using those as illustration of the threat posed by certain minority groups, the messages themselves demonstrate the sensitive climate in which these came to be published and disseminated.

That is, because the messages speak to real public fears, the court should deal with them more severely. He continues:

You told the probation officer that the catalyst for your activities was the emergence of and subsequent investigations into the sexual exploitation of young girls in Rotherham. You cannot but have failed to recognise the sensitivity of the situation.

In other words, it is precisely because Melia was aware of the horrendous crimes committed by these grooming gangs – something he no doubt felt very strongly about himself – that he ought to have known not to say anything about them lest he exacerbate the social tensions they gave rise to. The logic is positively Kafkaesque: it was “sensitive” because it was outrageous. Far from the usual concern with “disinformation”, the problem for Melia is that what he was saying was true.

Don’t imagine that, true or otherwise, the judge found these comments criminally liable because they had led to any disorder. “I accept that there is no evidence of anyone being corrupted by the material nor of there having been any particular consequences arising from your actions,” Judge Bayliss said. But, he added: “The risk they pose to public order by promulgating the view that such minorities are enemies of and inimical to the welfare of the population as a whole is obvious and would have been obvious to you.” (This very desire not to upset community relations is a significant reason this scandal has been ignored, downplayed and allowed to continue for so long.)

It’s also worth noting the arbitrariness of the aggravating factor of a “sensitive social climate”. Getting into his stride at the end of his sentencing remarks, Judge Bayliss said:

Whilst your activity ceased in 2021, recent events in the United Kingdom demonstrate that there is for the first time since the 1930s a real risk of gross potentially violent anti-Semitism becoming normalised on our streets.

That is, the weekly pro-Gaza “hate marches” then taking place and the precipitous rise in anti-Semitism since October 7th that accompanied them.

He continues:

The publication of this kind of material is corrosive to our society and highly damaging. Anti-Semitism in particular is a destructive force. It has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy. It must not be allowed to do so again.

Anti-Semitism is indeed a scourge – but the “recent events” troubling Bayliss’s liberal conscience here have nothing at all to do with Melia or his stickers. The outpouring of anti-Semitism onto British streets was largely Islamist and to some extent, far Left. Yet for Bayliss, it nevertheless served as a reason to treat Melia’s conspiratorial, far-Right anti-Semitism – vile as it was – with extra severity, despite it having occurred years before. Is this fair? Melia, who would call himself an anti-immigration activist, here found himself scapegoated for a social problem significantly caused by immigration.

What’s more, it’s pretty galling to contrast Melia’s treatment with how the British state treated the anti-Semitism actually on display in those months. Few can have forgotten the soft-touch approach taken by the police to many of the marches, for one thing. Meanwhile, after Allison Pearson’s recent tussle with Essex Police for pointing out exactly that, a Jewish reader informed her that when she complained to the force about a tweet that referred to “genocidal Jewish supremacists” she was told they would not pursue its author since “feelings were running high” at the time it was posted. In the same vein, when Judge Tan Ikram notoriously spared the “paraglider girls” jail, despite having convicted them of appearing to show support for a terrorist group, he did so on the grounds that “emotions ran very high on this issue”. Again, the logic is head-spinning. The emotionally charged – i.e., rabidly anti-Semitic – social climate post-October 7th became a reason for the state to treat that very same anti-Semitism more leniently. Ultimately, such two-tier reasoning is downstream of speech laws which empower the authorities to try and regulate public sentiment – an endeavour which practically necessitates such arbitrary and capricious decisions.

It says a lot about the precariousness of social order in multicultural Britain that Heggie and Melia’s factual comments about grooming gangs are deemed so subversive that they both deserve to be imprisoned. Nor is the grooming gangs scandal the only politically incorrect truth the state is at pains to obfuscate. Why, as Reform’s Rupert Lowe is finding, is the Home Office so reticent to publish data on crime rates and benefit receipts by nationality, for instance? Why, after the Southport massacre, were the authorities so concerned about the public unrest that might result from the full knowledge of the attacker’s background that they refused to be upfront with the public – and still are? Why do police forces insist that it’s “routine” for the police to patrol Christmas events with assault rifles, when everyone knows it’s a grim indictment of how much less safe our society has become? “In a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” The oppressive British state certainly seems to see it that way.

---