by Julian Mann, The Daily Sceptic
There are many within Britain’s woke police forces surely getting giddy at the prospect of being handed the draconian powers that Labour’s Conversion Practices Bill will give them, says Julian Mann.
There are many within Britain’s woke police forces surely getting giddy at the prospect of being handed the draconian powers that Labour’s Conversion Practices Bill will give them.
For the past several years I have covered many stories about Christian street preachers arrested for causing “harassment, alarm or distress” under the Public Order Act.
The police officers responsible for these arrests have been very keen to follow up complaints about Christian preachers. The brutal arrest in 2021 by Metropolitan police officers of John Sherwood, then aged 71, in Uxbridge town centre for making “homophobic comments” when he quoted the Bible’s teaching on marriage was a particularly egregious example.
The police eventually lost in court, as they usually do in these cases. Sherwood was cleared a year later by Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court, which upheld his human right to freedom of expression. But the police officers who arrested him suffered no professional consequences, as ever.
The officers in Sherwood’s case could have told complainants that he had the right to free speech as one Metropolitan Police officer told a group of angry Muslim men complaining about a Christian street preacher in Whitechapel last February.
PC Moule earned praise from the Met’s Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist for her actions. He was speaking at the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee after a viral social media video showed her calmly telling the crowd objecting to Christian preaching in a “Muslim area”: “In this country, we have freedom of speech.”