Thursday 5 June 2008

The Suppression Of Free Speech In Britain

In 1984 a British headmaster, Ray Honeyford, wrote an article for “The Salisbury Review” where he questioned the values of multiculturalism, which he deemed to be segregationist rather than “inclusive”.

Mr Honeyford, a brave, decent and completely apolitical man was driven to write the article by his belief that young ethnic children were being badly let down educationally, and that their future life chances were being sacrificed for Leftist political gain.

Mr Honeyford was chased from his job amid accusations of racism in a carefully orchestrated political alliance of the hard left coupled with various ethnic-minority spokesmen.

Whether this contributed solely to future anti-racist legislation is unclear, but it certainly played its part.

In 1986 new legislation was passed to counter the rhetoric of such men as Ray Honeyford in the form of the Public Order Act 1986, Section 17 of which clarified racial hatred as being:

“..hatred against a group of persons in Great Britain defined by reference to colour, race, nationality or ethnic or national origins.”

Section 18 clarified racist behaviour as:

“The use of words or behaviour or display of written material intended or likely to stir up racial hatred.”

The maximum penalty for any individual found guilty of contravening this act was two years imprisonment.

In 1993 a young black male called Stephen Lawrence was allegedly (legally speaking) stabbed to death by a gang of five white youths in Eltham, south London.

The case was seriously mishandled by the police which led to media hysteria and an investigation by Sir William Macpherson who subsequently published a seminal study in 1999 known as the Macpherson Report which, in addition to labelling the police as “institutionally racist” gave birth to eighteen words which have been used by the British authorities to clamp down on any speech critical of any minority group. The exact wording is as follows:

“A racial incident is one that is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”

In 1998 the Crime And Disorder Act 1998 extended the maximum jail sentence over and above normal sentence times if racial aggravation was used in crimes up to and including murder.

In 2006 the Racial And Religious Hatred Act 2006 was passed which classified religious hatred along the same lines as racial hatred and extended the jail sentence for transgression to seven years.

2006 also saw the introduction of the Equality Act 2006 which swept away the Commission For Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission and replaced then with a single entity called the Commission For Equality And Human Rights or CEHR.

In 2007 the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill was passed, with an amendment that bought homophobic hate crime in line with the definition of racial or religious hatred, including a maximum jail sentence of seven years.

In addition to the above legislation, Britain has also seen the introduction of the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, both of which have been used to suppress freedom of speech in the UK.

Ray Honeyford was fortunate that none of the above legislation was in place when he transgressed the racial thought police in 1984. Other people have not been so lucky.

Robin Page, a television presenter, was arrested in 2002 for inciting racial hatred when he stated that people living in the countryside, and who supported fox hunting, should be granted the same rights as blacks, gays and lesbians. The police claimed they had received reports from distressed persons unknown, although it seems likely they acted on their own volition.

Fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Codie Stott was arrested over a “racial incident” in 2006, after she asked to be moved to a different discussion group where her fellow pupils actually spoke English. She was released without charge but only after spending several hours in the cells where her DNA was taken.

Much to the chagrin of the Muslim Council of Britain, Robert Kilroy-Silk was not prosecuted for inciting racial hatred after he described Muslims as suicide bombers and limb amputators in a 2004 Independent newspaper article. The police wanted to prosecute but were advised by the Crown Prosecution Service there was insufficient evidence. Despite this, Kilroy-Silk still lost his job as a television show host.

In 2006, Nick Griffin, Chairman of The British National Party was acquitted (at the second time of asking) over inciting racial hatred, after he publicly accused Islam of being a wicked and vicious faith. His acquittal, after Muslims were deemed a religion rather than a race, was the prime motivation for the religious aspect to be introduced into The Racial And Religious Hatred Act 2006.

The blogger Lionheart has now been arrested and bailed on charges of inciting racial/religious hatred. If found guilty, he faces seven years in prison. We await news of this with hope rather than certainty as to the possible prosecution. His crime? He detailed the activities of Muslim criminals in the Luton area. I have read his blog and nowhere does he call for deportation of, or violence toward, British Muslims.

A retired couple, Joe and Helen Roberts were warned by Lancashire police in 2005 that their request to display Christian literature alongside homosexual rights pamphlets at their local council offices was discriminatory and homophobic, that they were walking on eggshells and that they were almost guilty of a hate crime. Much as Lancashire police wanted them to be guilty, they would have to wait a couple of years for the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2007 to be enacted in order to criminalise them.

Author Lynette Burrows was cautioned by the Metropolitan Police in 2006, for suggesting that male homosexuals did not make ideal adoptive parents. This was in the build up to the introduction of the rights of homosexual males to adopt children, built into The Equality Act 2006 which was passed without the necessity of asking whether homosexual males were more likely to commit child abuse than heterosexual couples, which according to Family Research Council they overwhelmingly are. (Note: this report has been censored).

In 2005 Maya Ann Evans was arrested for reading out the names of British soldiers killed in the Iraq war whilst standing next to the Cenotaph, a memorial to the war dead close to the House of Commons. In so doing, she contravened section 132 of The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 which had purportedly been enacted to prevent terrorist attacks at the seat of British government.

The use of anti-terrorism legislation has now spread to local councils who use it to spy on essentially law abiding people who may have lied about their post code in order to obtain a place at school for their children, but was used most famously when Walter Wolfgang was detained by police under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. His crime had been to attempt to rejoin the Labour Party Conference of 2005, having been physically ejected for daring to heckle a speaker over the war in Iraq.

The latest attempt to muzzle free speech occurred in Birmingham in May 2008, when two Christian preachers, Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, were warned by a Muslim police community support officer that handing out Christian literature in a Muslim area was a “hate crime” and could lead to their being beaten up if they dared to return. West Midlands Police refuse to apologise for this incident.

What should be apparent by now is the proclivity of the of the newly politicised British police to crack down on any dissent from indigenous Britons if they voice their concerns over any matter relating to race, religion of a non-Christian bent, gender or sexuality, all of which run counter to traditional Western civilisation.

This is the culture war in all its glory. The myriad laws passed in recent years are simply there in order to stifle discussion, let alone dissent, in the Liberal/Lefts ongoing war against that which they hate – indigenous European, Christian, heterosexual families.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Nowhere is this maxim more apparent than the approach by the police to areas where Islam is at fault and the indigenous European innocent.

No imams exposed in Channel 4’s Undercover Mosques programme have been prosecuted under any of the legislation outlined above. In fact, the West-Midlands police force attempted to prosecute Channel 4 themselves for inciting racial/religious hatred by dint of their sheer temerity in broadcasting footage of Muslims calling for the overthrow of the West and the murder of homosexuals and the infidel kuffir.

Although this article is about the UK and not Europe, it seems inevitable that we will be subsumed by Brussels when the Lisbon Treaty is ratified early in 2009, so will leave you with a quote from Terry Davis, Secretary general of the Council of Europe, in the aftermath of the brutal crack down against SIOE and Vlaams Belang in Brussels last September as to the future of free speech in Britain, or such as is left anyway:

“It is very important to remember that the freedom of assembly and expression can be restricted to protect the rights and freedoms of others, including the freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This applies to everyone in Europe including the millions of Europeans of Islamic faith, who were the main target of today’s shameful display of bigotry and intolerance.”

One cannot caveat freedom of speech. It exists or it does not. In Britain we must come to accept that it does not, and we must make every effort to ensure that in the future, it does.