

Thoughtcrime in Britain - Cbasedlifeform
http://azizonomics.com/2012/11/12/thoughtcrime-in-britain/

======
aes256
There have been a number of troubling free speech cases in the UK over the
last few months.

In July, a 17-year-old was arrested during the Olympics for tweeting abusive
messages at diver Tom Daley.

In August, a 22-year-old man was arrested for posting racist tweets aimed at
footballer Carlton Cole.

Also in August, a 44-year-old man was arrested for posting a message on
Facebook praising Anders Breivik.

In September, a 22-year-old man was arrested for setting up a fan page on
Facebook for Dale Cregan, shortly after Cregan was arrested by police,
suspected of murdering two female police officers.

In October a 19-year-old man was sentenced to three months in prison for
posting jokes about the missing five-year-old April Jones.

Also in October, a 20-year-old was given a community order for making an
online post stating "all soldiers should die and go to hell"

~~~
brackin
Decisions seem to be based on public pressure or context. The man posting the
picture of poppy's burning was arrested because it was Remembrance Day.
Because of common law these cases are each setting precedence. Although many
may believe it wouldn't go farther than this. There's nothing stopping judges
ruling that publicly disagreeing with a political party or common held belief
is a form of defamation.

If people rally around a case the police and courts are forced to react with
harsh sentencing. Morally these people are in the wrong but a moral
justification is different to a legal one.

Paul Chambers was found guilty for sending menacing electronic communication.
He tweeted that he would blow up Robin Hood Airport when it closed after heavy
snow. I've seen worse sarcastic tweets than this in my stream before, after
the listed cases these tweets could result in legal action.

~~~
aes256
> Decisions seem to be based on public pressure or context.

That in itself is quite alarming, that the justice system seems to be bowing
to the whim of the mob.

More worrying is that, in each of these cases, there were people who initially
brought the communications to the attention of the police. In each case there
was some busybody, with nothing better to do, who thought some hijinks on the
Internet was worthy of a police investigation.

I have no doubt that the number of these cases being reported in the national
news (at a rate of one every 1-2 weeks over the last six months) is re-
enforcing the view that reporting offensive content to the police is an
appropriate and proportionate action.

> Paul Chambers was found guilty for sending menacing electronic
> communication.

Chambers' conviction was quashed in July, in a rare display of common sense.

------
Nursie
Grossly offensive apparently.

I despair of this country, I really do. The whole system around speech laws is
a mockery of justice. People with no connection to the country sue each other
here because the material may have been available in the UK. People are
arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for little more than being insensitive
buttholes.

We desperately need a first amendment in our own law. Freedom of expression is
supposedly guaranteed under EU law but these cases never seem to make it that
far.

------
sambeau
This article misses two important points:

1) Britain has never had free speech.

2) This was not a thought crime. It was a deliberate insult: an act of
insensitivity and rudeness intended to give offence.

You cannot walk onto a cinema and shout fire and you cannot legally call
someone a cunt to their face in public (with the deliberate intention of
causing offence) without attracting the attention of the law.

While I'm sure there are many more pressing things that the UK's police force
could (and should) be dealing with, calling this a thought crime is both naïve
and stupid.

~~~
dannyobrien
"You cannot walk onto a cinema and shout fire". That's actually an interesting
analogy you make given the context.

The "theater/fire" metaphor was first used by US Supreme Court Justice Holmes,
to justify the imprisonment of anti-war protestors in World War I for
distributing leaflets. It's exactly because such a broad justficiation can be
so appealing and so easily misused that the US rejected that decision in
favour of a far more narrow description of prohibited speech.

I realise that the UK can make a different stance on free speech, but it seems
ironic to pluck as your standard the very language that was used in the United
States to quash opposition to the war and mass deaths that the poppy is
intended to commemorate.

~~~
sambeau
US Supreme Court Justice Holmes was using it as an analogy. I was not. I was
using it as an example.

US Supreme Court Justice Holmes was wrong. His analogy was bad one that was
thankfully rejected.

I may be wrong in this case about whether the freedom to insult people for no
reason should be protected, I am still mulling it over, however I was not
wrong and a free society is not wrong to sanction shouting "fire" in a crowded
cinema.

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jeremysmyth
Although this isn't the act under which the guy was arrested, it is another
example of ...vague and thoughtcrimey law in the UK.

<http://reformsection5.org.uk/>

Also, and probably importantly, there's a large public (and legal - see the
various judicial outcomes) reaction against the stupidity of laws like this.

------
chernevik
Americans aren't in much position to complain about free speech in Britain.
The US government just imprisoned a man for his connection with a video deemed
"offensive" by that government -- if there was any criticism by anyone but a
few right-wing cranks I missed it.

The man's nominal offense was a parole violation. Whether the government's
pursuit of the violation, or the sentence given, were typical for such
violations is beyond my expertise.

However the government went out of its way to see to it that his arrest
(pardon, "brought in for questioning") was known to and photographed by the
press. This was an obvious effort to communicate to elements abroad the
distate of the government for the video. Maybe he had to prosecuted on the
parole violation -- if so, that could and should have been done much more
quietly.

No one seems to regard this particularly important, which I find very strange.
One, anyone in the US who might want to say something "offensive" now has
cause to wonder what opportunities they present to discretionary prosecution.

Two, and more important, the US government has just validated censorious
behaviors of a great many governments. How exactly are we going to complain to
the Chinese or Egyptian government for jailing dissenters when we have made a
point of doing just that? Worse, we've just told all those dissenters that
they cannot be sure that we will be supporting them if they get into trouble.

I don't really much care that his offense was nominally related to an
international incident, or that he said means things about someone else's
religion. The whole point of ignoring such problems is to deny the government
_any_ excuse for censorship. Because once a government gets in the habit, it
becomes quite easy to find excuses for the censorships it finds in its
interests.

This was a shameful episode for Americans. Joined to a cultural squishiness on
speech "offensive" to one religion in particular, it is disturbing. Join it
with a few more episodes of government action and the lot will begin to become
dangerous.

~~~
jdminhbg
> Americans aren't in much position to complain about free speech in Britain.

The author appears to be British. So what does this have to do with anything?

~~~
chernevik
It has to do with any Americans who might be reading or commenting on this
topic, on this board. I expect there are enough such to merit noting events in
their own country.

That is so obvious I have to wonder why you are looking for arguments against
even mentioning the matter.

------
R_Edward
Well, that's certainly disturbing. Arrested for burning a paper poppy. I
always thought Great Britain was rather more progressive than us colonials.

~~~
NickPollard
Unfortunately we don't have an equivalent of the First Amendment in the UK, so
people aren't quite as used to Free Speech being thought of as an unalienable
right.

Whilst generally speech is fairly free, and we have a pretty diverse media,
there have been numerous laws impeaching upon Free Speech, particularly
recently, generally in terms of avoiding obscenity and protecting children.
It's a worrying trend, and one I wish we could revert.

I've been wondering a lot recently what the best way is that I can help
campaign against this - it's my biggest bugbear with UK politics currently,
far more than the economy or other social issues. Any suggestions?

~~~
maratd
The UK and most of the colonies have legal systems that are based on common
law. Which means precedent is everything.

If you _really_ want to do something about this problem, break the law, get
arrested, and defeat the law in court. Or make friends with somebody who did
that and assist that in their legal fight, assuming they decide to fight.

Of course, your probability of success is slim, but that's a quick way of
getting rid of something profoundly stupid by a sole individual.

------
jiggy2011
I don't think you can really blame the state/police for this.

The overwhelming majority of the British public see these kinds of things as
grossly offensive and in cases have created petitions _wanting_ stuff like
this to be illegal.

This first blew up when the group "Islam4UK" demonstrated in Luton against the
royal anglian regiment's homecoming parade. This spawned the EDL group to
counter-protest.

They later threatened to demonstrate in Wootton Basset (where dead soldiers
are repatriated) and the uproar against this was huge with major newspapers
all calling for the march to be banned.

It is now illegal to be a member of the Islam4UK group, so they have had to
change their name a bunch of times.

~~~
fingerprinter
> I don't think you can really blame the state/police for this.

This could come down to your view on the role of government, but I personally
don't see that the majority opinion should be how a society is defined. There
are dangers both ways, though I feel the government should always be pushing a
more progressive social agenda. Gay marriage is a great current example. Obama
is doing it right by pushing for it. Gillard in Australia is doing it wrong by
saying "the people don't want it" and axing any proposals. Obama is fighting
upstream for what is right and Gillard is basically saying "look, my hands are
tied b/c the people don't want it". It's a cop-out for making an unpopular but
right decision.

In the case of free speech, there is little wiggle room, IMO. People need to
be free to say what they want. It may not be popular, but that isn't the
point.

Long winded way of saying, the mass opinion shouldn't be the way we define
civil societies. We need to do what is right. "Right" might be gray at times,
but it is usually pretty clear when you get the smart people together and have
them hash it out.

------
hughlomas
Why hasn't Britain adopted some sort of free speech law in the spirit of the
US's first amendment? They've had over two hundred years to do so. Can anyone
provide insight into why?

~~~
Nursie
There seem to be a large number of people (lets call them dumbasses) who are
quite happy with the status quo, and rather like the idea that people can be
put away for saying the wrong thing.

This is (of course) because in their minds they are part of the in-crowd and
people caught by these unjust laws are part of the out-crowd and are therefore
'other'. Many humans do not care about what happens to anyone that can be
defined as 'other'. It never seems to occur to them that it could be used
against themselves or their relatives. They also seem to trust government
implicitly.

Perhaps it's a generational thing. I hope this changes.

------
jackcviers3
All speech, including that inciting violence or dissent should be protected.
If a populace allows imprisonment over utterances, rebellion against tyranny
becomes impossible. Imagine Thomas Paine was imprisoned for "Common Sense" or
the First Continental Congress was imprisoned for discussing independence, or
that Martin Luther King was imprisoned for expressing the extremely unpopular
and offensive notion of equality for all races, or Pope was imprisoned for his
satire of slavery or Joyce for his depictions of people going to the restroom.
Socrates was willing to go to death because of his ideals. The least of us
should be willing to decry the suppression of opinion of any form at the risk
of being offended or verbally injured or even incited to violence against the
forces that support the suppression of Speech, lest we find ourselves the
member of an oppressed, unpopular, and thus imprisonable or executable
minority. To fail to protect the Speech of those with whom we disagree is to
fail to live as free people. This was the salient theme in Orwell's 1984.
Newspeak was an attempt not to remove offensive Speech, but to make impossible
the act of expressing any thought through speech that may move the populace to
action to throw off the shackles of tyranny that chained them to a life of
slavery.

Britons have a right to be angry, and a right to express their anger at these
arrests. They are an assault on the human rights of all citizens of the UK and
the willingness of some on this topic to accept these assaults is both
unsettling and unexpected.

------
Zenst
He may of had a right to free speech, but there again so did those who's
memories he was offending. It is also worth noting that free speech realy
offers not extra right to utilise match's with regards to burning things to
cause offence. Be him burning religious fiction or paper flowers, it is the
way that free speech is expressed that is the crux of the issue and as a rule
free speech does not advocate match's or fire. I feel that last point is
important on many levels.

------
roco
1984 was not a guidebook.

------
maeon3
I'm not voicing my true opinion here because i'm worried i might get in
trouble. I can't afford some lawsuits at this point in my life. maybe when i
level up from my social class when my raise comes through... maybe.

~~~
Nursie
If you level up enough they won't touch you anyway...

