When a tweet rates worse than a rape – the strangulation of free speech
BRUCE NEWSOME
SINCE 2021, the Index on Censorship has ranked Britain as ‘partially open’ (the third tier). Britain ranks 20th for press freedom (worse than Trinidad and Tobago).
Just released: The US State Department concludes that in 2024, Britain’s human rights ‘worsened’ and the British government is partial in protecting rights and freedoms: ‘Significant human rights issues included credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism. The government sometimes took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, but prosecution and punishment for such abuses was inconsistent.’
There are three main categorical freedoms being routinely violated in Britain. In US Constitutional law, they are known as speech, assembly and press. British authorities need a reminder.
Let’s fully understand how this started, more than 25 years ago. In 1999, the Macpherson inquiry into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence recommended that police should record hateful incidents as a matter of intelligence, even if the incidents were not criminal. Quangos led by the College of Policing encouraged police forces to record non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). Police took it upon themselves to visit the supposed haters, to ‘correct your thinking’, to intimidate them with warnings of escalation, and even to strong-arm them into taking thought-correction classes with the police, at cost.
The 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act criminalises hatred of protected characteristics. It was once sold as a protection against violence, but was soon wielded to criminalise speech.
Police make more than 30 arrests a day (more than 10,000 per year) for online speech and record 66 non-crime hate incidents per day.
Despite several administrations claiming to review and restrict the definitions of hate speech and NCHIs, the definitions remain too vague to prevent police from repressing speech they don’t like. In 2024, the Free Speech Union submitted freedom of information (FoI) requests to all 43 police forces in England and Wales to see if recording went down since a new code of practice of June 2023. The number has actually increased. This year the current government sneakily signalled its appreciation of NCHIs in response to a petition to abolish them.
The latest statute aimed at free speech came into force on July 25: the Online Safety Act. The Bill was marketed as a necessary legislation to protect minors from harmful material such as pornography, self‑harm forums, and bullying towards suicide. Like the Hatred Act, the Online Safety Act is being used to suppress politically inconvenient content.
British public authorities (and social media) are suppressing speech and the press selectively with political, religious and ethnic prejudice.
Let’s start with the political prejudice. Last year the journalist Allison Pearson was interviewed by police for criticisms of the Prime Minister. Kent Police arrested a former police officer for a sarcastic tweet in response to an anti-Semitic group, rifled through his home without a warrant, and commented on his conservative books.
In 2024 a prosecutor brought to court a traumatised Army veteran for Facebook posts describing the summer’s protests and counter-protests as a ‘civil war’ that could end in ‘bullets’. The prosecutor asked Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke to take into account the accused’s attendance at a right-wing rally. She agreed and sentenced him to two years in prison. This was three months after she spared a child rapist, when the public defender asked her to take into account prison overcrowding.
Courts are choosing ridiculously punitive sentences for some political speech, including 30 months for Lucy Connolly’s anti-immigrant tweet, which she quickly deleted, was seen by few people, and did not incite any crime. Courts now routinely issue longer prison sentences for a tweet than a rape.
Overlapping the political prejudice are the religious and ethnic prejudices. For decades, local councillors and police were involved in the organised rape of white and Hindu children by Muslim men, mostly of Pakistani and Afghan heritage. The Home Office seems to have turned a blind eye, if not colluded. In June 2025, Baroness Casey reported that police concerns about ‘raising tensions’ permitted harm. This report was a long time coming, but police have not got the message.
In July 2024, local police, courts, councillors, the Home Office and even the Prime Minister’s office were certainly involved in hiding the identity of the man who stabbed to death three girls at a dance class in Southport. They actively disinformed the public with a claim that he is a ‘Welsh choirboy’ while accusing the public of disinformation, even though the disinformation – that he is a Muslim immigrant – is closer to the truth. (Rudakubana is a second-generation immigrant and Jihadi convert, who was three times investigated by the Prevent programme.) To add insult to injury, the government smeared the protesters as ‘far-right activists’.
A year later, the authorities apparently learning nothing, Warwickshire Police asked local councillors and courts to cover up the identities of two Afghan asylum-seekers who allegedly kidnapped, choked, and raped a 12-year-old. Only the bravery of the local council leader in defying a court order got the story out in the next week.
It’s not just police and courts. Quangos too are prejudiced in suppressing speech. For instance, the Charity Commission loves to terminate the non-taxable status of charities focused on traditional values, while it lets mosques get away with hate speech with no more than a warning.
It’s not just public authorities. Social media are censoring content inconvenient to the government, under the threat of government prosecution. Within hours of the Online Safety Act coming into force last month, posts referring to sexual crimes by asylum-seekers were flagged as pornographic. Social media posts showing police violence have been suppressed, including protests outside asylum hotels. A video of a speech in Parliament by Tory MP Katie Lam about Muslim rape gangs was flagged on X (Twitter) as ‘harmful content’.
Social media are self-policing. Failures to self-police can be costly: the statute threatens media companies with fines as high as 10 per cent of global revenue if they fail to protect minors.
Police are partial in where they police, and what they repress. They de-police privileged communities, negotiate with ‘community leaders’ for access, tolerate vigilantism by privileged minorities, and facilitate some protesters while repressing others.
London’s police protect anti-Semitic protesters, but arrest counter-protesters for being ‘openly Jewish’.
Essex police use riot shields to assault protesters against asylum-seeker crimes at a hotel in Epping, while escorting and bussing counter-protesters between the hotel and the railway station. Within a week, the counter-protesters out-numbered the protesters by five to one.
Days later, Essex Police conveniently issued a dispersal order covering public transportation and the town centre.
The police put up fencing against the protesters, and face the protesters, while letting the asylum-seekers and counter-protesters have the run of the other side of the street. Police will arrest people who cross the street.
The counter-protesters include such constitutionally violent groups as Antifa and Stand Up To Racism. By the way, Stand Up to Racism received more than £250,000 in government grants in the year ending March 2024. Hypocritically, the counter-protesters are more likely to resort to racism and violence. (Read the evidence from Epping and London, and watch the evidence from London here and here.)
Now Warwickshire Police are going door to door to tell protesters not to protest against the accused asylum seekers.
Britons don’t have freedoms of speech, press, or assembly any more; illegal migrants, Muslims and radical leftists have more freedoms than the rest of us.
This article (The no-nonsense way to stop the boats) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
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