by Freddie Attenborough, spiked
The British state’s war on so-called hate speech is totally demented.
The rallying cry for those who are alarmed by the police arresting thousands of Britons for social-media posts has long been, ‘Police our streets, not our tweets’. But the way officers have been policing our streets recently is proving equally as authoritarian.
We had an example of this at Swindon Crown Court last Monday, when Christian street preacher Shaun O’Sullivan was acquitted of religiously aggravated intentional harassment. His crime? Allegedly saying, ‘We love the Jews’, ‘Jew haters’ and ‘Palestine lovers’ to a Muslim family in Swindon town centre in September last year.
The family said they felt ‘targeted’ because they were wearing hijabs. During their 999 call, the complainant told the operator: ‘We just felt very unsafe… calling us Jew haters, Palestine lovers.’ On the recording you then hear the officer on the other end of the line, apparently speaking to someone else in the room, say: ‘No, I’ll put a hate claim on.’ In policing jargon, that means flagging the report as a ‘hate’ incident there and then. And once that label is attached, the whole case is channelled through the state’s hate-crime machinery, ultimately transforming a few seconds of preaching into a charge. In O’Sullivan’s case, the charge – religiously aggravated harassment – carried a maximum penalty of six months in prison.
Before a judge and an impartial jury, the weaknesses in the prosecution case quickly became clear. There was no audio or video recording of the alleged remarks. CCTV showed the family passing O’Sullivan in seconds with no confrontation – in other words, there was no objective evidence of harassment. As for the family’s testimony, the complainant admitted under cross-examination that she hadn’t heard the full message and that her recollection had been shaped by her strong views on Gaza. What had really bothered her, she conceded, was simply that O’Sullivan ‘spoke directly to us’.