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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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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.”
‘Let’s be clear, we don’t have blasphemy laws in the UK.’ So said Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s business secretary and premier solicitor impersonator, to the BBC earlier this week. Reynolds was pushing back against US vice-president JD Vance, who gave European leaders a very public dressing down at the Munich Security Conference last week for censoring their voters, and Britain for criminalising its Christians. Of course, Reynolds’s denial was about as trustworthy as his CV.
You needn’t alight, as Vance did, on the vexed issue of ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics, which have led to Christians being arrested for staging silent protests / prayers, to see that blasphemy laws have made a horrifying comeback in Britain. Easily a more vivid example is that, a day before Vance addressed the global great and good in Munich, a man was arrested for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in central London. Another man, who slashed at the Koran-burner with a knife, was also arrested. Welcome to 21st-century Britain, where we ‘don’t have blasphemy laws’ but you can be arrested – and stabbed – for desecrating a holy book. Maybe Reynolds could finally put that legal training to good use and explain the difference to us.
– Tom Slater
“Violent offenders face ban on owning knives” reports the Telegraph.
Violent offenders face being banned from owning knives under plans to be considered by the Home Secretary.
Something tells me that the violent offenders will face this prospect with the equanimity that comes from already having faced a ban on being violent criminals.
Offenders with a propensity for knife possession or violence would be designated a “prohibited” person under the proposed crackdown drawn up by police.
They would be banned by law from buying certain types of knives or applying to be a registered knife seller.
Chris Rose has been inspired to do his bit to help the Home Secretary fight crime:
Hi
@YvetteCooperMP
I’ve just opened my kitchen drawer and sternly warned the knives not to wonder off and stab people whilst I’m away otherwise you’ll ban them.
Later today, I’ll also be talking to my car to not drive into any crowds.
Preston Byrne makes the comparison in a speech at the Free Speech Union.
“Yes, Mr. Musk and his young team are seeing confidential government data. But he’s also the second most closely observed person on the planet, the exact opposite of the thousands who already have access to government data and stay invisible until they turn out to be Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Charles Edward Littlejohn or Jack Teixeira. Mr. Musk is said to be causing chaos but government programs are born in chaos—with congressional horse trading and payoffs to appease interest groups.”
– Holman Jenkins, Jr. Wall Street Journal
UK government tech policy must become libertarian, writes Preston Byrne.
The government wants to boss tech companies around, but it might not get its way any more, because the market is small, tech companies are mobile, and:
…the permanent bureaucracy in the United States which might otherwise have helped the UK apply informal pressure on Americans who dared to disobey its decryption and censorship edicts – none of which, it bears mentioning, are enforceable against an American who refuses them and is happy to avoid setting foot in British territory – is gone.
We should adapt.
If the UK chooses to be the worst place for an AI company, or a social media company, or a digital asset company to incorporate and do business, it will find that it has very few such companies. Regardless of your opinions on how British society should be structured, the NHS, immigration, or the appropriate quantum of social welfare, if you don’t have high tech employers generating revenues and paying taxes, social programs become very difficult to pay for.
Will we get a government capable of making this realisation? Or will we continue to self-destruct?
“Blasphemy laws are incompatible with free speech”, writes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
The Government is known to disapprove of the term “two-tier”, especially when applied to policing, in which case, says a recent Home Office report, it can be a telltale sign that you’re of the “far-Right”. Isn’t everything?
I shouldn’t have laughed at that, but I did.
Yet in the last few days we’ve had a perfect example of how our laws are written to be, and correctly interpreted by judges as, two-tier, meaning that they are laws intended to offer different levels of protection and punishment to different groups of UK residents, depending on their faith or ethnic origin.
Martin Frost of Manchester chose (ill-advisedly, I might add) to burn a copy of the Koran in public, live streaming the event, in response to his daughter’s death at the hands of Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023.
It is notable how many media outlets skated over the fact that Hamas murdered Martin Frost’s daughter. You might think the Telegraph’s phrasing (“her death at the hands of Hamas terrorists”) was mealy-mouthed enough, but just compare it to this ITV report that said,
The “trigger” for his actions was the death of his daughter in the Israeli conflict which had affected his mental health, the court heard.
Note the scare quotes around the word “trigger”, the words “the death of” as if she died a natural or accidental death, and the reference to it occurring in “the Israeli conflict”. Not the Hamas conflict, not the Gaza conflict, not even the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the Israeli conflict.
Tom Harris’s article continues,
He [Martin Frost] claimed also to have been protesting at the murder of Iraqi asylum seeker Salwan Momika who was murdered in his apartment in Stockholm after he performed his own act of Koran burning for his internet audience.
Forst [sic] pleaded guilty to charge of “racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment or alarm by displaying some writing, sign or other visible representation which was threatening, abusive or insulting thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.” That charge is contained in the text of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, introduced by Tony Blair’s government.
The old blasphemy laws may have been consigned to history decades ago, but they were replaced in 1998 by new ones: it is widely accepted that Muslims take very seriously the physical abuse of their religion’s holy book and are known to feel personally offended by any disrespect shown towards it. Similarly, most Muslims also take personal offence at any physical representation of the prophet Mohammed, hence the outcry against the teacher at Batley Grammar in 2021 who did exactly that by showing his pupils a cartoon depicting Islam’s founder.
That teacher is still in hiding.
In modern Britain, Islam and the Koran are protected by the law, by the courts and by the police. Christianity is not. That is not an argument that Christianity should receive equal protection; it is an argument that Islam should receive the same level of legal respect and protection as Christianity – ie, none. Two-tier protection is unacceptable because it equates to two-tier freedom of expression, freedom to criticise one religion but not a different one.
Yes. To forestall criticism that just saying “Yes” adds little of value, I shall try to give better value by amending it to “YES, YES, YES!!!”
We can imagine the horror that police officers, court officials and politicians must have felt when legal proceedings didn’t go their way in the case of Jamie Michael, an ex-Royal Marine who had served his country in Iraq but whose anger at the Southport murders of three young girls last summer led him to upload an ill-advised rant against illegal immigrants that a member of staff working for a Labour MS (Member of the Senedd) felt so offended that they just had to report it to the police.
I would not have guessed that someone working for a Labour member of the Welsh Government actually did have something worse to do with their time than their day job.
A jury took less than an hour of deliberation to acquit him.
The terms Mr Michael used were obnoxious and unpleasant. But as the jury agreed, that should not impinge on his right to free speech.
Juries often do things like that, even now. That’s why “Progressives” keep whittling away at the jury system: “Former Justice Secretary calls for scrapping of defendants’ right to choose jury trial.”
Religious toleration only came about when religion ceased to be a threat to the state.
In the Telegraph’s business section, Matthew Lynn writes about why Santander is thinking of leaving the UK:
Santander’s departure would certainly come as a crushing blow to Rachel Reeves’s ambition to turn the UK into the fastest growing economy in the G7. It emerged during the week that the Spanish bank, a familiar presence in the UK since it acquired Abbey National back in 2004, was considering getting out of the country.
It is not hard to understand why. The returns are pitiful, the regulations are a hassle, costs are rising all the time, and even if profitability does improve, there’s a risk the Government will accuse it of “profiteering” and confiscate whatever money it does manage to make with an extra windfall tax.
For a global bank such as Santander, there are better opportunities elsewhere. It has 76m customers already in South America, for example, and that would seem a better place to deploy its capital, not to mention management time, than the UK.
True, Botin [Santander’s executive chairman] moved quickly to dismiss the reports, telling a panel in Davos how much she loved the UK, and how the bank was committed to the British market for the long term. But then again, she would say that. Nothing will be confirmed until the day a final decision is made.
And yet the simple truth is this. It is a shocking indicator of how poor the prospects are in the UK market that a major corporation such as Santander is even thinking about leaving.
Sometimes the Guardian shows flashes of its old persona as a guardian of liberty. Publishing this article by Apostolis Fotiadis was one example:
The EU wants to scan every message sent in Europe. Will that really make us safer?
In my 20 years of being a reporter, I have rarely come across anything that feels so important – and yet so widely unnoticed. I’ve been following the attempt to create a Europe-wide apparatus that could lead to mass surveillance. The idea is for every digital platform – from Facebook to Signal, Snapchat and WhatsApp, to cloud and online gaming websites – to scan users’ communications.
This involves the use of technology that will essentially render the idea of encryption meaningless. The stated reason is to detect and report the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on digital platforms and in their users’ private chats. But the implications for our privacy and security are staggering.
Since 2022, EU policymakers have attempted to push the legislation, called the regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse (better known as the CSAM regulation proposal), through. Similar attempts to introduce the tech in Britain via the online safety bill were abandoned at the 11th hour, with the UK government admitting it is not possible to scan users’ messages in this way without compromising their privacy.
Cybersecurity experts have already made their opinions clear. Rolling out the technology will introduce flaws that could undermine digital security. Researchers based at Imperial College London have shown systems that scan images en masse could be quietly tweaked to perform facial recognition on user devices without the user’s knowledge. They have warned there are probably more vulnerabilities in such technologies that have yet to be identified.
The title of this post referred to this story: “Britain’s biggest choir ditches Every Breath You Take over ‘abusive’ lyrics”
The song, which was written by Sting and released in 1983, is considered by some to be a stalkers’ anthem.
Sting has admitted that the words – “Every breath you take/ And every move you make/ Every bond you break/ Every step you take/ I’ll be watching you” – have “sinister” overtones.
“Now of course it’s true that the nature of home-schooling will vary family by family. That is precisely the point of it.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph, warning about the move by the UK government to try and severely curtail home-schooling, which he correctly identifies as a way to enforce ideological conformity on the education of the young – something that the Left (and sometimes also on the Right too) has long sought. Frost writers about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
So, to summarize: it turns out that the “deceivers” were never the energy companies to begin with. Rather, New York City attempted to deceive the legal system by taking information out of context in order to name and shame American energy companies. While unfortunate, this activity isn’t surprising considering the City’s law firm, Sher Edling, is currently under Congressional investigation for its dark money financing and questionable ties to activist-academics.
– Mandi Risko
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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