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Tory councillor arrested for ‘hate crime’ after sharing video criticising police
A Conservative councillor was arrested for an alleged hate crime after re-tweeting a video criticising how the police treated a Christian street preacher.
Cllr Anthony Stevens, 50, from Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, told The Telegraph he was arrested at his home this month and escorted to a police station for questioning about tweets from his personal account, which has 76 followers.
One tweet involved a video showing how police had treated the arrest of Christian preacher Oluwole Ilisanmi in Southgate, London, in 2019.
A police officer snatched Mr Ilisanmi’s Bible after the preacher was accused of being Islamophobic. Mr Ilisanmi was later awarded £2,500 for wrongful arrest. The video, shared by Cllr Stevens in May, also showed footage of a police officer apparently stating that a Muslim preacher was allowed to preach on a high street.
So, let’s get this straight. Councillor Stevens was arrested for criticising the police for arresting Oluwole Ilisanmi, an arrest the police themselves have admitted was wrongful.
There’s more.
Police also questioned why the Tory councillor had tweeted his support for Cllr King Lawal, a fellow Northamptonshire councillor, who has been “cancelled” for expressing his Christian beliefs in relation to LGBT issues, according to Cllr Stevens.
Cllr Lawal, 31, who is the only black councillor in Northamptonshire, was suspended by his local Conservative group in July, after he responded to images of Pride parades organised by LGBT groups, writing: “When did pride become a thing to celebrate. Because of pride, Satan fell as an archangel. Pride is not a virtue but a sin. Those who have pride should repent of their sins and return to Jesus Christ. He can save you.”
In July, Cllr Stevens retweeted a petition calling for Cllr Lawal’s Conservative positions to be reinstated, writing: “If you value free speech please sign and share.”
He said that police officers showed him his tweets regarding Cllr Lawal and asked him why he supported the petition. Cllr Stevens said he stated that he is a “free speech absolutist” and that even if he does not agree with someone, he believes in their right to express their beliefs.
When the actions of the police prompt a former Director of Public Prosecutions to say, “It is essential that police officers are properly trained in the importance of free speech rights and the particularly strong protection that the law gives to political speech”, it is a safe bet that a second apology for wrongful arrest will eventually be issued by Northamptonshire police. They will make the apology late and with bad grace, making sure to put in a bit about how, “When a complaint is made, the police must investigate”. They will speak in injured tones of being “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t”.
Perhaps Plod has a point there. After the unprovoked racial murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, laws were rushed through that said that if anyone connected with an incident thought it was a “hate incident”, then a hate incident it was. I distinctly remember the Guardian‘s Hugo Young saying at the time that this definition was “intellectually absurd”, though I cannot find the quote online. Still, the police display definite preferences in which way they choose to be damned. The sort of damnation that comes your way months or years after you arrested a local elected official for hate crime is so mild that it might more accurately be described as paying for your pleasures.
And the truly damnable thing was this:
Cllr Stevens said he understood that he had been reported to the police by a local Labour Party member.
Nadine Dorries is right in regard to Rishi Sunak: he is an unelected nonentity who is leading his government to annihilation at the next election.
She is wrong about almost everything else. She is behind the disastrous Online Harms Bill, and she seems to have a strange crush on Boris Johnson, the liar and failed prime minister. I confess I have not followed her career closely enough to know she was a net zero fanatic, but if Boris was in favour of it, it is no surprise she was.
In sum, if brains were dynamite, she couldn’t blow out a candle. And she’s probably not the thickest MP out there.
– Commenter JohnK
The Register’s Rupert Goodwins is right to describe the Bill as “stupid” but, I regret to say, probably mistaken in describing it as “dead”. It has long since passed the Commons. Its progress through the Lords is almost complete. But a few more sharp thrusts like this one might yet kill the beast:
The British state is a world class incompetent at protecting its own data. In the past couple of weeks alone, we have seen the hacking of the Electoral Commission, the state body in charge of elections, the mass exposure of birth, marriage and death data, and the bulk release of confidential personnel information of a number of police forces, most notably the Police Service Northern Ireland. This was immediately picked up by terrorists who like killing police. It doesn’t get worse than that.
This same state is, of course, the one demanding that to “protect children,” it should get access to whatever encrypted citizen communication it likes via the Online Safety Bill, which is now rumored to be going through British Parliament in October. This is akin to giving an alcoholic uncle the keys to every booze shop in town to “protect children”: you will find Uncle in a drunken coma with the doors wide open and the stock disappearing by the vanload.
…“some stories stand out. The one that confuses me is the call for Britain to trial some form of ‘universal basic income.’ What exactly do people think we’ve been doing for the past two years?”
– Sam Ashworth Hayes, in the Daily Telegraph (£).
“Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.” To the Guardian’s Steven Morris, responding to a government consultation is another of those famous irregular verbs that changes its form according to who does it.
UK gun lobby accused of helping to ‘skew’ consultation on tightening laws
The powerful UK gun lobby…
“Powerful UK gun lobby” my breech. It has lost every legislative battle in my lifetime.
…has been accused of mobilising tens of thousands of shooting enthusiasts to “skew” a government consultation on tightening firearms laws launched after the Plymouth mass killings in 2021.
The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) and the Countryside Alliance have made it easy for members and supporters to access the consultation from its websites – and advised them on how to reply to each of the 20 yes/no questions posed.
Making it easy for members of the public to respond to a Green Paper or other public consultation exercise is usually just the sort of thing the Guardian supports. The whole point of such things is that anyone with an interest in the subject is encouraged to give their view, and all advocacy groups consider it a core part of their function to tell their members that such consultations are taking place and to advise them what to say. Would anyone really prefer that a democratic country went ahead with a proposed new law without seeking input from all viewpoints?
The answer to that is yes, some would prefer exactly that. Among them is Peter Squires, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton. He says,
“Virtually every independent-minded expert agrees on what needs to be done and then the Home Office conducts one of these farcical consultations and allows the self-interested single-issue shooting lobby to school its members through the process of rejecting the proposals.”
The consultation could turn out to be farcical in one of several ways. But if you want to give it a go, here is the link again. The deadline is tomorrow, 23rd August 2023.
“What strikes you when reading about any number of NHS scandals since then isn’t so much the systemic failures, it’s the instances of individual cruelty to patients. Bereaved parents repeatedly told the Ockenden report about a lack of compassion from staff and some even said they were told they were responsible for their own child’s death. All of this amounts to a sense that the health services continually privileges the institution over the needs of patients at the most vulnerable times of their lives. When you consider how utterly inhumane that is, it becomes easier to understand how the NHS could contain a monster like Letby.” (See here for details on the Ockenden saga.)
– Alys Denby, Editor, CapX, in a weekly letter to subscribers of that platform. Denby writes about Lucy Letby, a nurse convicted last week of murdering a number of babies in a NHS hospital.
Monsters can flourish in certain institutions, and it strikes me that those that are treated as near-sacred institutions provide cover for them. The NHS needs to be nuked from high orbit for various reasons, and these scandals surely add to the list.
The crux of the objection was that I considered the actions of West Yorkshire Police to be akin to an organised crime gang engaged in a kidnap. It’s a strong allegation, which demands some justification, so here goes. Kidnap is a common law offence, made up of four distinct elements. The taking of one person by another… with force….without their consent… and without lawful excuse. The screams of the girl attest to the fulfilment of the first three elements, but what of the fourth? Did the police have a lawful excuse to behave as they did?
Here’s the technical bit: Section 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 cannot be committed where the suspect (in this case, the girl), and the victim (the officer) are both in the same private dwelling. The clue is in the name. It is the Public Order Act, designed to address alarm, harassment and distress carried out in a public place. For the arrest to have been lawful, the police would need to demonstrate a mistake as to fact. In other words, that they genuinely mistook the hallway and cupboard beneath the stairs in which the girl was hiding for, say, the town hall steps or other public place. Ignorance as to law is not a valid defence. Ever. What the police did was the equivalent of pulling over a car on the verge of breaking the speed limit and arresting the driver for burglary.
– Harry Miller
West Yorkshire Police must now justify the officers’ actions in terms of lawful arrest and proportional force. Failure to do so would significantly undermine public trust, especially among people with autism and other disabilities.
– Robert Jessel
Unless there is far more to this story than meets the eye, if they cannot justify their actions, at the very least some Plod need to lose their jobs and ideally face prosecution.
The good folk at The Cobden Centre have put together a very good documentary to explain how the fiat money system works, and has some suggestions as to what to do about it. At the instigation of the Sage of Kettering, (full disclosure, his cousin made it), here it is.
I have watched it and it is very good. Ex Nihilo: The Truth about Money. My only quibble is that it repeatedly refers to banks creating money out of thin air, but there is some substance to ‘thin air’, which, after all, can sustain respiration and hold up aircraft.
A FEW months ago I wrote here about how William Hague had become a Davos poster boy. I explained how influence and groupthink could turn a libertarian Thatcherite into a globalist, authoritarian technocrat. Shortly afterwards, Hague completed one of the most astonishing U-turns in politics. In a dangerous step towards a Chinese-style social credit system, he joined Tony Blair to help him force ID cards on the public.
How people change. In 2004 he voted against Blair’s Identity Card Bill. He voted against it again in 2005. In fact when he was in opposition in 1998, this is what he thought he believed:
‘For when we listen to Britain, we are listening to the defenders of liberty and freedom. In the face of this Government’s attitudes we must make sure we are seen as the party of personal liberty. For the British Way is to keep Government in its proper place – as the servant, not the master … make sure Government minds its own business so that people can get on with minding their own.’
However, by 2013, Hague was rejecting claims that the government were spying on the public. The fatal words were ‘law-abiding’ citizens have ‘nothing to fear’. The perennial defence of the dictator. When politicians ask why no one trusts them any more, you can reply in two words: William Hague. At least Blair has been consistent.
– Simon Marcus
Read the whole thing. Strongly recommended.
Anyone who gloated about the “de-banking” of Nigel Farage over his account will now realise, or they should have anyway, that the sword is double-edged:
Monzo initially refused to tell Ms Miller why her “True and Fair” party account would be closed in September. After the BBC contacted the bank about the case, it said it did not allow political party accounts and had made a mistake in allowing it to be opened. Monzo said it recognised the experience would have been “frustrating for the customer and we’re sorry for that”.
It is too easy to roll the eyes, and say “karma is a bitch”. What appears to be the case is that, as discussed in my post here, and in the comments, we just don’t have a fully free market banking system in the UK and much of the world today. The next time you read some idiot going on about “unbridled capitalism” or “neoliberalism”, point this out to them.
An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, a hardline capitalist (so he says) made a comment that no-one has a “right” to a bank account, as they don’t have “rights” (those inverted commas are doing a lot of work here) to healthcare, education, paid-for holidays, etc. He was, of course, writing about the Nigel Farage/Coutts saga that has seen the CEO of NatWest, Coutts’ parent firm (39% owned by the taxpayer) issue a sort-of apology to the former UKIP leader.
I wrote in reply to this issue about “rights” to banking, because I think it is too easy to just throw down the ideologist purist card on the table and assume that ends the matter. No so fast, Batman:
In a world of laissez faire capitalism, absent the distortions of bailouts, the central bank drug of easy credit, endless compliance regulations and so on, barriers to entry to create banks are far lower and there would be hundreds more banks. They’d be relatively small in some cases, and be fiercely competitive. With some operating not with full statutory limited liability protection (but only under the Common Law), people running these banks would be a lot less careless and more focused on building value. There’d also be fewer hiding places for a culture war phenomena to flourish in. Instead, banks would be about capitalism, period.
It is notable, however, that many of these desirable features don’t exist in the Western banking system today, although a few “challenger” banks and digital offerings are quite good, and may win business as a result of a backlash against some of the things going on. But in general, banking in the UK, and US, is intertwined with the State. Many firms have been rescued with billions of pounds, dollars and euros of taxpayers’ money. To open an account, you have to go through an increasingly severe KYC [know your client] and anti-money laundering regime, and banks that fail to comply can be fined and in extremis, lose their licences. Fines worth tens of billions have been imposed on banks over the past 20 years, for example.
Ideally, any commercial entity ought to be able to refuse to do business with people, however rational or irrational that decision should be, and we should let the brute force of free enterprise weed out bigots. Bigotry and stupidity are costs. That’s actually what tends to happen over time. A problem is that in a mixed economy, some of those competitive forces are attenuated.
When a person is “debanked” today, they can have a problem opening an account anywhere else if the bank asks them why they left a bank in the past. As a result, we have almost a sort of “cartel” system operating.
In time, hopefully, competition will swing back, and some of the nonsense going on will disappear. In the meantime, while I agree with you that the idea of having a “right” to a bank account is as bogus as many of the other “rights” that people talk about today, the fact that banking is such an embedded form of life in a modern economy means this issue hits hard in a way that, say, isn’t the case if you are banned from a pizza restaurant or candy store for holding the “wrong” views. Of course, it may be that the Farage case might encourage a firm to go out of its way to court business from those who have been targeted. Let’s hope so. For example, a bank could, without incurring wrath from the “woke” or regulators, say something like “Banking is all we do. No politics. No agendas. Just finance.”
And as I have said before, the outrageous Nigel Farage case, and that of others, surely demonstrates that a central bank digital currency idea must be resisted. This would be the end of any financial autonomy at all.
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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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