I did not think I could be shocked any more but this Mail on Sunday story shocked me: “Knock knock, it’s the Thought Police: As thousands of criminals go uninvestigated, detectives call on a grandmother. Her crime? She went on Facebook to criticise Labour councillors at the centre of the ‘Hope you Die’ WhatsApp scandal exposed by the MoS”
In a chilling clampdown on free speech, two police officers pay a visit to a grandmother – simply for criticising Labour politicians on Facebook.
Detectives were last night accused of acting like East Germany’s feared Stasi secret police for quizzing Helen Jones over her calls for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday.
Police conceded that the 54-year-old had committed no crime – yet Mrs Jones says she has effectively been silenced by the officers, as she was intimidated by them calling at her door and is too terrified to post on social media again.
You can watch a video of the visit of the two detectives to her house here: “Helen Jones, 54, had a visit from 2 detectives from the Manchester Police”. The person who can be heard speaking from inside the house via an intercom is Mrs Jones’ husband, Lee. The video ends with the detective who was doing the talking saying (at 1:12), “OK. OK. We’ll give you a call on your phone. I am not going to stand out here if you are not going to speak to me.” So far as I can tell Helen Jones was indeed “spoken to” by phone, not at her door. That does not negate the intimidatory effect of having the cops turn up at your door because of something you said on Facebook about an elected official.
The Mail on Sunday continues,
In one post on 4Heatons Hub, Mrs Jones said of Cllr Sedgwick: ‘Let’s hope he does the decent thing and resigns. I somehow think his ego won’t allow it.’ In another, after posting screenshots from the Trigger Me Timbers group, Mrs Jones wrote: ‘Not looking good for Cllr Sedgwick!!!’ to which another member added: ‘Cllr Sedgwick, will you be resigning?’
At around 1.30pm last Tuesday, while Mrs Jones was looking after her baby grandson at a nearby house, a detective sergeant and another officer knocked at her door and spoke to her husband Lee, 54, via an intercom.
A shocked Mrs Jones rushed home fearing something tragic had happened to a loved one. At 2.15pm she received a phone call from an officer thought to be the same sergeant who knocked on her door and was told the police had received a complaint about her recent social media posts.
Speaking exclusively to the MoS, she said: ‘[The officer] said, ‘We’ve had a complaint,’ and I immediately asked, ‘From who?’, and he said, ‘Well, I can’t tell you that’.’
She asked if Cllr Sedgwick or his partner had made the complaint. ‘[The officer’s] exact words were ‘Your thought process is correct in that’,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I asked the police officer, have I committed any sort of crime. Why did you call at my door? They said, ‘Someone has spoken to us about your social media posts.’
So what were her exact words? We know that she called for the resignation of Councillor David Sedgwick, but was there something beyond that that has not been reported? I have not been able to find out. But it is acknowledged by Greater Manchester Police that no crime was committed.
Later in the report, a spokesman for Greater Manchester Police is quoted as saying, “We are under a duty to inform her that she is the subject of a complaint.” As Caroline Farrow – who speaks from bitter experience – has pointed out, there is no such duty, and if there were a letter would have sufficed. The cops knew what they were doing when they called at Helen Jones’s door, and Councillor David Sedgwick knew what he was doing when he sent them there: “Had Helen Jones continued to post criticism of Councillor David Sedgwick after being informed of his complaint, the police could claim she could reasonably predict that her posts would cause alarm and distress.”
This is why they took your guns.
“Get out! The calls are coming from inside the house!”
The British police are following laws and procedures set by others – and if they refused they would be dismissed, and they would not get another job (try getting a job if you a branded “racist” and so on).
As police officer friends have told me – when and if they come for me it will not be personal, and I understand that. I bare them no ill will.
For a very long time (long before Critical Marxism became fashionable) the ruling philosophy of the British state has been utilitarianism – associated with Jeremy Bentham, but with David Hume and Thomas Hobbes long before him. According to this philosophy the individual is not the vital consideration (the soul is considered not to exist) – and there are no individual rights AGAINST the state – the state calculates what it believes will be for the greatest happiness of the greatest number and proceeds accordingly.
So if that means Hate Speech laws, and so on, that is what the state does.
To be fair to the British state – nearly all other states appear to agree with this position, that there are no rights against the state. For example, ALL members of the European Union must have “Hate Speech” laws.
The lists of “rights” in various Constitutions (except the United States Constitution) tend to vanish when one closely examines their wording (which contain terms such as “subject to law” – which means, you do not really have any rights against the state), or end up as just lists of goods and services from the state, or stuff the state forces private employers to give people (thus pushing up unemployment – sorry I mean “economic inactivity” as unemployed people are normally kept out of the unemployment statistics these days).
But the British state does seem rather more enthusiastic about enforcing controls on speech and so on than other states – famously (or infamously) there are more arrests for this sort of thing in Britain than there are in Mr Putin’s Russia. But this is NOT because the Russian state respects rights against the state (it does NOT) – what appears to be the case is that officials and the police are lazy and corrupt in Russia, whereas in Britain they are honest and hard working – working hard to find people who have the wrong opinions, and to bring them to punishment.
In Britain (at least among a large part of the population – although I do NOT know if it is the majority) it is also considered to be morally good to be an informer – to denounce someone else as a “racist”, “Islamophobe”, “Transphobe” or whatever. To do this, to denounce other people for non “Woke” opinions, is considered the sign of being a good person.
In some other societies being an informer is considered shameful.
The lady was critical of a Progressive politician – that would seem to indicate that she herself is not Progressive. If the lady is not Progressive it is reasonable to suppose that she might possibly be “right wing” and, therefore, evil.
And a compliant was made against the lady – by a member of the public (who shall remain nameless).
All perfectly in order – ask Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer who is a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and a leading member of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers.
As the Prime Minister made clear last year (2024) right wingers should “go to prison” – this was before the people he was referring to had been convicted of any offense. And the judges acted accordingly – as they are from the same political culture as him and have similar training.
Paul Marks
February 24, 2025 at 8:24 pm
“As police officer friends have told me – when and if they come for me it will not be personal, and I understand that. I bare them no ill will.”
You are a far nicer guy than I am.
If they come for me for an actual crime, sure. That’s my problem. That’s their job.
But if they come for me over Thoughtcrime, then they are “just following orders”, and they lose all respect and legitimacy, and their faces and addresses, and pictures of their pets, will be all over the internet.
If we give people a pass for “just following orders”, then they will all mindlessly “just follow orders” without hesitation. I want people to have to carefully consider what power they serve, and take responsibility for their choices.
Might be timely to have a listen to this commencement speech by Lt. Clay Higgins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s6AM47IDxk
Set aside his references to God, if that’s not your cup of tea, but the appeal to higher goods for newly minted LEOs is compelling.
I’m hoping Kash Patel brings him into the FBI; he’d make a good Inspector General!
A couple of thoughts:
1. There seems to be a list of people to watch, even though they haven’t committed a crime? Is it called “The Orwell List”?
2. I notice on the video that the ID badge of the policeman was pixelated out. How come? He is a public official, why should his name be hidden? I mean, like they like to remind us “if you aren’t doing anything wrong….”
3. I think you Brits could solve this in a jiffy. Simply have everyone make a complaint about absolutely everything that offends them. Me? I get offended at least fifty times a day with stuff I see on the Internet. I’m not suggesting at all that you try to deliberately overload the system. Just that if it is legitimate to complain about someone for some minor offence and to have the right to do it anonymously, then you should certainly take full advantage of that. Heck, just listen to what pretty much any politician says and you should find half a dozen things to complain about. Do you think the police will be making a call to Number 10 to fulfill their duty to let Keir know that an anonymous complaint has been filed against him?
OMG, Britain used to be a truly great nation, and the mother of civil rights. When I left thirty years ago, people still believed in free speech and to keep their nose out of other people’s business. What the hell happened? It sounds like an Orwellian hellscape now.
Next question — why do you people still live there?
There should be punishment: of the individual officers and the relevant police service.
The officers who called on Mrs. Jones should be reduced in rank. The senior officer who sent them, Inspector or Superintendent or whatever, shoud be reduced in rank. The Chief Constable should be called in by the Police and Crime Commissioner for a very short interview, without coffee and without being invited to sit, where he/she is informed that this kind of policing will stop immediately or he/she will be dismissed immediately.
Or maybe just dismiss the Chief Constable immediately anyway.
I predict that none of this will happen.
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The state is not your friend. Your government does not like you.
The state is not your friend.
Your government does not like you.
Your government does not even think about you – it has minions for that.
Place not your trust in Princes, or government, or the Blob.
bobby b – under the laws of the United Kingdom I would be guilty of an “actual crime”.
The philosophy of the British establishment (long BEFORE Marxism became fashionable in the education system) is totally against the idea of Natural Law – the law is what the state says it is by statute, and the ruling philosophy (again long BEFORE Marxism became fashionable) holds that there is no such thing as the soul (in either the religious or Aristotelian sense) and that the individual (who is NOT a person – as that term was traditionally understood) has no rights AGAINST the state. That “rights” are goods and services from the state – or things the state forces private employers to give people (as in “workers rights”), that a “right” is NOT a limitation on state power – but, rather, a reason for the extension of state power.
As for spreading faces and names and so on – it would be my face and name that would be spread about (indeed it already has been – I was on the front page of the totalitarian “Guardian” newspaper in 2019 – and they did not mean well) – and much of the public would applaud the arrest and punishment of a “right winger” like me.