Why Britain Needs a First Amendment
Ed West is on fire at the moment. He keeps writing one great piece after the next – and I’m almost ready to forgive him for being completely unsound on lockdowns. His latest Substack post is about the need for a First Amendment in the UK and, as usual, it’s a tour de force.
Today, Britain in effect has two sets of blasphemy laws. There is a de facto law protecting Islam, illustrated by the recent removal of a film depicting Mohammed. And there are the more official hate speech laws protecting people’s identities, which are treated with almost comically-absurd harshness by the courts, like with the ancient crime of asebeia.
Just this week an ex-police officer was jailed for 20 weeks over racist messages sent to a WhatsApp group. James Watts had sent 10 offensive memes during May and June 2020, “including one featuring a white dog wearing Ku Klux Klan clothing and another showing a kneeling mat with [George] Floyd’s face printed on it”.
The magistrate told him that “The hostility that you demonstrated on the basis of race makes this offending so serious that I cannot deal with it by a community penalty or a fine. A message must go out and that message can only go out through an immediate sentence of imprisonment.“
Well, that message has certainly been sent out.
To illustrate how jarring this sentence is with the usual standards of British justice, just a fortnight ago two men in Lancashire were spared prison after putting a complete stranger in intensive care for no reason.
The Watts ruling is not an isolated incident. A teenager who sent a racist tweet to Marcus Rashford was given six weeks in jail, a quite extraordinarily harsh sentence in a country where violent offenders regularly avoid prison. In contrast a young man the same age who set fire to the flag on the Cenotaph avoided jail. What does society consider sacred — racial identity, or the sacrifice of young men dying for their country? The judiciary have clearly given their answer.
Like all Ed’s pieces, this one is worth reading in full.
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Off topic, but Fauci has tested positive for Covid.
He must be the last public health official or politician in Washington to test positive. His nominal “boss,” the director of the Department of Health and Human Services, has tested positive TWICE in the last 30 days.
https://www.al.com/news/2022/06/dr-anthony-fauci-tests-positive-for-covid.html
… Regarding the First Amendment, America needs a 28th Amendment to our Constitution. This one needs to simply say: “Quit violating the first one!”
The crook Fauci still not in prison then?
Looks like he will skate … just like the Saudi prince who almost certainly ordered the gruesome murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist. Dark times we are living through.
Fortunately, as El Gato Malo pointed out, he has still tested negative for ethics 🙂
Could we change the headline:
Britain needs a Second Amendment.
In a situation of war it is perfectly legitimate & lawful to take up arms to defend oneself.
We are at war. With dark forces hiding behind the veneer of respectability & governments.
I have been reliably informed of that by a few different military veterans, one of whom is a lawyer.
We are at war BB of that there is no doubt. I think an armed populace is likely, maybe even inevitable.
I was about to write that. The streets of Britain would be much more peaceful if the police were to tackle violent (drug-related) crime instead of seizing pocket knives. At some point in time, the hysterics will probably outlaw glass bottles as it’s possible to stab people to death with them, which they prefer over ensuring that their offspring doesn’t get itself in trouble by hanging out with and owing money to the wrong people.
Cheers.
“Revolutionaries who storm Bastilles famously build Bastilles of their own. In the case of Tsarist Russia’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where so many Bolsheviks enjoyed a spell under the old regime, conditions were famously far worse under the new order. ‘Whereas before there had been one man to a cell,’ Orlando Figes wrote, ‘there were now two or three; and women were imprisoned there for the first time… Four men shared each tiny cell… Compared to this the old prison regime in the fortress had been like a holiday camp.’ “
Yes. Women in the gulags could also get it slightly easier in return for “favours” – instead of being worked so hard that their uteruses fell out. Dirty Commy bastards. (So bowdlerise me…).