His Way Or No Way, Totalitarian
He's got no time for your looking or breathing how he don't want you to
At the weekend, more than 500 people were arrested at a protest in support of Palestine Action. The government has proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, and arrested them under section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
These people are not terrorists. Palestine Action is a direct action organisation opposing British Arms sales to Israel. Protest should not be equated to terrorism, and the fact that the government took the steps to proscribe this organisation after members of the organisation ‘spray-painted two military aircraft’ demonstrates this as a nefarious misuse of power and legislation.
I wrote most of this article last year (21st August) after the Southport Riots, in which I made the point that criminalising protest, or giving the government the power to choose which protests and protestors are criminalised, will lead us down a dark path.
First published on Medium.
Thoughts from the left on the prison sentences for the Southport rioters
If you are to believe everything you read on X, the UK has, in the past few weeks, turned into a totalitarian police state.
But why are people saying that, and is it true?
A few weeks ago, there was a wave of riots across the UK, sparked by a heinous crime committed by a 17 year old born in Britain, who murdered three young girls in Southport.
Various strands of misinformation combined into the falsehood that the killer was a muslim immigrant (one who may have come here illegally). This then resulted in attacks on mosques, and muslim owned businesses, and hotels housing asylum seekers.
Keir Starmer denounced this violence, and put together a task force to deal with it, saying that Islamophobic violence was not to be countenanced in this country, and that people inciting the violence online would also be subject to countermeasures.
Secretly I Think They Want You All to Kick Off
Hundreds of people were arrested, and they have now started being sentenced, with some being sent to jail for in excess of 6 years.
Lots of headlines have been doing the rounds, along the lines of this one ‘Sutton man who chanted ‘Who the Fuck is Allah?’ jailed’.
This implies that the man was jailed for chanting ‘Who the Fuck is Allah?’, which implies that he was arrested for expressing his thoughts rather than for any crime committed, which many on X have taken as a violation of free speech.
Free speech is an often misunderstood issue — it is the freedom to say what you want. It is not freedom from the consequences of saying what you want.
So being banned from Twitter (in the old days) was not a freedom of speech violation. Twitter was entitled, as a business, to do as it pleased with its users (so long as it was not being prejudiced itself) so was free to ban you if it decided that your actions were costing it money, or indeed because it thought you were annoying.
But when the govenment is getting involved and arresting you for saying these things then that’s a different matter, isn’t it?
Except when you actually read the article, you see that this man wasn’t arrested for what he said.
David Spring, of Longfellow Road in Sutton, was part of a group who confronted police officers during a gathering of around 700 people near Downing Street on July 31.
Spring pleaded guilty to violent disorder after footage showed him at the forefront of the crowd while threatening and chanting at officers.
There are a few more examples exactly like this, but not all of the arrests follow this pattern.
For example, Lucie Connolly, wife of a Tory councillor, was arrested for alleged posts on X. She hasn’t been sentenced yet, but she wasn’t present at the riots herself.
Instead, she was arrested for an alleged post which read:
Mass deportations now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b****** for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. if that makes me racist, so be it.
This is clearly a level up from Springers comments, and directly incites violence against asylum seekers.
Its the kind of thing which is incredibly uncomfortable to read, and to defend her right to say it feels uncomfortable. Because it is clearly abhorrent and violent language, and it should not be ignored with no repurcussions, but is it a violation of free speech to arrest her?
Or is the issue the length of the sentences people have been receiving for offences like hers?
It appears to be inciting violence, but how many followers did she have? How many people actually saw the post, and does it matter?
Maybe she had a lot of followers, in which case the charge of incitement is probably fair, but there is a difference between Donald Trump tweeting support for the January 6th insurrection, and a random English woman ranting to 100 people.
If you said the same thing to your friends in the pub, or on Whatsapp, would you be arrested for it?
There’s Nowt You Can Say
Free speech proponents often mention the idea that it is a slippery slope which leads to the government jailing people for comments like this — that it is a one way ticket to a full totalitarian state where protest is suppressed.
And indeed, climate protestors were recently arrested for organising a protest, which is very alarming and a blatant overreach of government power.
This article claims that justice was served in the case of those protestors, whose crimes can be summarised below.
But does causing someone to miss a flight constitute jail time? Or a student being delayed for a mock exam? Sad though it may be, people will miss funerals every day for a variety of reasons — should we be rounding up those responsible and putting them in jail too?
Many people will support the general goals and aims of Just Stop Oil, even if they don’t really understand the point of protests like the one they were jailed for, which can seem to alienate the public and put them off supporting the cause.
But that doesn’t mean they should be jailed for causing disruption in the name of protest, especially when non-disruptive protest is often less effective because of it’s oxymoronic nature.
If a protestor yells in the woods and no one is around to hear it, was there really a protest?
So are these things — climate change protests and Islamophobic Facebook posts — the same? Or the same kind of thing?
Is there a direct line from arrests for tweeting ‘set fire to all the hotels full of the bastards’ to arrests for tweeting ‘the government is bad’?
There is a clear distinction between posts which incite violence and ones which don’t. And that post lies clearly on one side of that line.
But there are clearly examples of jail sentences which have been handed out for lesser offenses as part of the crackdown on these riots, as detailed in this article by Ed West.
“Far more troubling is the case of Sellafield worker Lee Joseph Dunn, who shared three Facebook posts, all of which were hostile to immigrants but not calling for violence or rioting. Dunn had removed the posts, had no previous convictions, but was still sent to jail for eight weeks.”
The posts in question are not nice, and could definitely be considered racist, or at the very least rather offensive, but they do not call for violence.
He Makes Examples of You
The article discusses the wider strategy of arrests as an attempt to deter future unrest, which is why those charged have been receiving harsher sentences than they otherwise might have — had the posts been made in isolation a few months earlier for example.
So it’s easy to say that there is no link between the recent arrests and arrests for climate change protests, but government overreach has already been an issue in this country in terms of suppressing certain kinds of protest.
Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC)
SHAC formed in November 1999 following a covert investigation by Channel 4 at Huntingdon Life Sciences. Footage aired on national TV showing law-breaking and extreme violence by staff at the facility. It was the third undercover investigation at Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) out of a total of six carried out by organisations such as PETA, Animal Defenders International and the BUAV.
Horrified by scenes of beagle puppies being punched in the face, and live monkeys being cut open without anaesthesia, the existing Huntingdon Death Sciences protest campaign took on a renewed vigour and evolved into SHAC
Between 2009 and 2014, 16 animal rights advocates were sentenced to a combined 80 years in prison for their roles in SHAC, on flimsy charges such as:
“Forwarding two anonymously received emails to a US direct action website.”
“Attending lawful protests in the UK.”
“Attending a BBQ with friends, which the prosecution claimed was a conspiracy meeting.”
The SHAC Justice Project are seven former animal rights prisoners wrongfully convicted in a politically motivated miscarriage of justice
They say on their website that they have made their appeal public in light of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill
“Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) have already been added to extremist watch lists. Their nonviolent protests have been branded ‘hooliganism and thuggery’ and an ‘attack on democracy’. How long before the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is used to round up and imprison key organisers and shut down campaigns?”
The Public Order Bill, a 2023 add-on to the PCSC Bill of 2022, establishes an incredibly low threshold to define disruptive protesting.
Protests can be shut down if they are considered “too noisy” or a nuisance, and the police have been granted new powers to prevent protests, including banning people from attending protests of any kind.
This Town’s A Different Town Today
Another issue being raised by these arrests is that other criminals are being released to make way for them — including ‘violent’ criminals.
But this is a bigger issue than the riots. It has been brought forward by the arrests of the rioters, but the prisons were going to be full at some point soon anyway — the consequence of 30 years of being ‘tough on crime’ without the requisite investment in police and prison infrastructure.
Too many people have been being jailed for too long for trivial offences for a long time before these riots (meaning that there is no space for violent criminals who are a danger to the public) — all they are doing is highlighting the problem.
And as the Ed West article points out, many of those who were arrested for their part in these riots have many previous convictions and, some would argue, should still have been in jail for those offences.
Maybe they’ll be released early when the next wave of riots results in those whose places they are taking being re-arrested.
One of em’s alright, the other one’s the scary one
So, what’s the conclusion — are liberals at risk of being jailed for drunk tweeting some Tory hate ?— one rioter was cited for posts which were anti-establishment in nature, which is chilling.
I don’t think so, but peaceful protest must be permitted. And using the precedent set by these rulings, tough sentences could easily be brought down on those protesting other issues, such as climate change or animal rights.
In some ways writing this feels like a twisted version of Martin Niemollers ‘First they came for the communists’ quote.
First they came for the people posting about burning down hotels full of asylum seekers, and I said nothing because I was not a person posting about burning down hotels full of asylum seekers.
And it would be easy to sit here and type that things are fine, because these rioters are a kind of ‘bad protestor’, and those demonstrating for a ceasefire in Palestine, or for more action to be taken on climate change are ‘good protestors’.
But as demonstrated by the harsh sentences on the JSO organisers and the SHAC activists, under the The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, the government can decide for itself who is a good and bad protestor.
The haze has ascended, it don’t make no sense any more…