Britain has become a cursed nation. It is cursed by some pretty malevolent and or stupid politicians using absurd laws to prop up their own often morally busted narratives and ideologies. A damned good example of this is the case of the prosecution of Mr Jamie Michael for comments he made following the public disorder that sprung up as a reaction to the Southport Atrocity.
The nature of Mr Michael’s comments have been outlined at length in excellent pieces by Luke Gittos at Spiked and The Stark Naked Brief on the X platform. Suffice to say that none of what Mr Michael said in his internet video could in anyway be said to be constructed in such a way as to credibly incite violence to either people or property. Mr Michael’s merely discussed the Harehills Roma riot, an Islamist demonstration outside Rochdale police station and engaged in some commentary about the handling of and information management by the state of the aftermath of the Southport Atrocity. He did criticise Britain’s open borders and did criticise Jihadism but so what, these issues represent major security problems that pose great danger to both the British people and the British state, therefore such matters should be a legitimate subject for discussion.
For his comments Mr Michael was arrested at his place of work, charged with stirring up racial hatred using a recording under Section 2 (1) of the Public Order Act 1986. He spent three weeks on remand in gaol before being bailed pending trial. When he did come to trial earlier this week he was acquitted by a jury. The jury took under twenty minutes of deliberation to come to their decision which in my view shows just how weak the Crown’s case against Mr Michael was. If the Crown’s case could be dismissed in less than twenty minutes then it shows that the preponderance of evidence was on Mr Michael’s side and not that of the Crown.
This case also showed us the public the absurdity of Britain’s ‘hate speech’ laws. It showed us how capricious and easily bent to suit political circumstances and political needs such ‘hate speech’ laws can be. I’m a free speech fundamentalist but try as I might I could find nothing in the words of Mr Michael that could be classified as incitement as judged in jurisdictions that have considerably more free speech than the United Kingdom has. The Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court jury, that living, breathing embodiment of the ordinary and reasonable ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ obviously didn’t think so either. Even the ‘call for action’ that Mr Michael was said to have made constituted calls for people to use the political process for getting change and he made a strong point that now was not the time for violence.
Another thing that Mr Michael’s case has illustrated to us is the willingness of some politicians to use these ‘hate speech’ laws as a weapon against their political opponents or those who challenge their narratives. It also shows us how equally willing the police and Crown Prosecution Service are to acquiesce to such uses and abuses of the law. As Mr Gittos points out in his Spiked piece the initial impetus to prosecute Mr Michael came from a female Labour Party member of the Welsh Assembly or Senned as it is known in Welsh. It could be argued that without the input of this elected politician there would have been no prosecution of Mr Michael because the things he was being accused of didn’t even meet the threshold of being an offence even under Britain’s absurd and dangerous ‘hate speech’ laws.
This appears on the face of it, if the allegation about the Senned members involvement in this case is correct, to be a naked political intervention in an arrest of a loyal and law abiding British subject. We now have a situation where a politician uses the law to attempt to silence a person whose opinions they did not like. What’s worse is that the policing, prosecutorial and judicial systems all blindly went along with what was a political complaint about a normal Briton from a politician.
If it can be proven that the intervention of a Labour politician set the legal wheels in motion and pointed them at Mr Michael then it is a damning indictment of the situation regarding impartiality in our police, prosecutors and legal system. This case should never ever have made it to court. It should have been very obvious from the get go that there was no case for Mr Michael to answer.
We should worry about this. We should worry that police and other agencies such as the Crown Prosecution Service are so addled with identity politics and so deeply politicised that they were impeded their assessment of the law, even bad laws such as Britain’s ‘hate speech’ laws.
We should be grateful that Mr Michael has been acquitted but we should also be grateful that his cases has allowed seriously worrying allegations of direct political influence over an arrest and a prosecution to come into public view. We should use that information to ask ourselves some hard questions about how we are governed. Two questions in particular that should be asked are these: How many other cases like Mr Michael’s have there been where a prosecution was sought not because there was any real crime, but because a left wing politician or Islamist or Islamist adjacent activist wanted to silence a critic? Also how many of the social media comment arrests and prosecutions that occurred after the Southport Atrocity were instigated or influenced by direct political influence over police and prosecutors?
It used to be said that in the mid to late 20th century Britain was not a place where the politicians directly pulled the strings of the police and did so for political reasons, that sort of behaviour we once thought was the province of backward and corrupt third world countries, but now we have this conduct here and it’s not good. We are now in woeful and unwished for situation where like some poverty stricken, despot ruled and corrupt third world country we have citizens who at any time can be targeted for prosecution merely because a politician has vicariously taken offence to something a private citizen has published. That is a situation that Britain should no longer tolerate or see as ‘normal’. We need our own very British version of the US First Amendment that will prevent Establishment politicians and others who wish to suppress open debate from using ‘hate speech’ law for their own political advantage.