Posted on 12/12/2005 3:56:35 PM PST by Pokey78
All over the United Kingdom, right now, real crimes are being committed: mobiles are being nicked, front doors are being kicked in, bollards are being lobbed through bus shelters - just to name some of the lighter activities that add so much to the gaiety of the nation. None of these is a "priority crime", as you'll know if you've ever endured the bureaucratic time-waster of reporting a burglary.
So what is a "priority crime"? Well, the other day, the author Lynette Burrows went on a BBC Five Live show to talk about the government's new "civil partnerships" and expressed her opinion - politely, no intemperate words - that the adoption of children by homosexuals was "a risk". The following day, Fulham police contacted her to discuss the "homophobic incident".
A Scotland Yard spokesperson told the Telegraph's Sally Pook that it's "standard policy" for "community safety units" to investigate "homophobic, racist and domestic incidents" because these are all "priority crimes" - even though, in the case of Mrs Burrows, there is (to be boringly legalistic about these things) no crime, as even the zealots of the Yard concede. "It is all about reassuring the community," said the very p.c. Plod to the Telegraph. "All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed."
So no crime was committed. Yet Mrs Burrows was "investigated" and a report about the "incident" and her involvement in it is now on a government computer somewhere. Oh, to be sure, the vicious homophobe wasn't dragged off to re-education camp - or more likely, given budgetary constraints, an overcrowded women's prison to be tossed in a cell with a predatory bull-dyke who could teach her the error of her homophobic ways.
But, on balance, that has the merit of at least being more obviously outrageous than the weaselly "community reassurance" approach of the Met. As it is, Lynette Burrows has been investigated by police merely for expressing an opinion. Which is the sort of thing we used to associate with police states. Indeed, it's the defining act of a police state: the arbitrary criminalisation of dissent from state orthodoxy.
Mrs Burrows writes on "children's rights and the family", so I don't know whether she's a member of PEN or the other authors' groups. But it seems unlikely the Hampstead big guns who lined up to defend Salman Rushdie a decade and a half ago will be eager to stage any rallies this time round. But, if the principle is freedom of expression, what's the difference between his apostasy (as the Ayatollah saw it) and Mrs Burrows's apostasy (as Scotland Yard sees it)?
I don't suppose the Tories will be eager to take to the ramparts for Mrs B, either. Every time I hear a Conservative heavyweight these days, they're droning on about how "the public sees us as too white, male, middle-class and heterosexual". Actually, they don't seem terribly heterosexual to me. But, at any rate, defending Lynette Burrows's right to free speech seems unlikely to play well with the party's marketing gurus.
As for the Government, in the Observer on Sunday, Tony Blair wrote a piece almost every bland sentence of which had me spraying my cornflakes all over my civil partner, right from the sub-headline: "The most important freedom is harm from others."
Well, up to a point. If you live in one of those parts of, say, Aston in Birmingham where the writ of the British state no longer runs in any meaningful way, that sounds grand. But the police don't seem to have much stomach for enforcing your right to be free from harm in such neighbourhoods. The Prime Minister was writing principally about the great Asbo - that's not the powerful God-like being from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, though, from Mr Blair's faith in Asbo as an instrument of righteousness and justice, it might as well be. Technically, Asbo is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, one of those "so-called summary powers", as the Prime Minister puts it. The trouble is the British police are a lazy lot and, if it's a choice between acting against intimidating thugs who've made the shopping centre a no-go area or investigating the non-crime of a BBC radio interview, they'll take the latter. I leave it to Scotland Yard to decide whether the Asbo's reach already extends to "homophobia" and "Islamophobia", but whether it does or not, sticking Mrs Burrows's "homophobic incident" in a police file is certainly an Anti-Social Behaviour Notice, de facto if not de jure.
"Freedom from harm" is all very well, "freedom from being offended" is extremely dangerous - a way of extending the already harmful media phenomenon of "libel chill" to every noisy lobby group. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie and co get their way on "religious hatred", every BBC Five Live discussion on Islam will be followed by a call from an aggrieved listener and a visit from the Fulham police. And, for every Lynette Burrows, insisting she'll continue to exercise her right to free speech, there'll be a hundred more who keep their heads down and opt for a quiet life.
Hollywood stars are forever complaining about the "crushing of dissent" in Bush's America, by which they mean Tim Robbins having a photo-op at the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled because he's become an anti-war bore. But, thanks to the First Amendment, he can say anything he likes without the forces of the state coming round to grill him. It's in Britain and Europe where dissent is being crushed. Following the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, film directors and museum curators and all the other "brave" "transgressive" artists usually so eager to "challenge" society are voting for self-censorship: "I don't want a knife in my chest," explained Albert Ter Heerdt, announcing his decision to "postpone" a sequel to his hit multicultural comedy Shouf Shouf Habibi!
But who needs to knife him when across Europe the authorities are so eager to criminalise him? No society with an eye to long-term survival should make opinion a subversive activity. Here's a thought: we should be able to discuss homosexuality, Islam and pretty much everything else in the same carefree way Guardian columnists damn Bush's America as "neo-fascist".
bump
Will you add me to your Steyn ping list? Thanks very much.
This is the sort of policing that has led to the boilover in Sydney. Multiculturalism uber-alles, with no time to deal with real crimes by real hooligans.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=sydneyriots
Badda-bing!
Bump!
Speaking of crimes...
BTTT
Thanks, Pokey!
But who needs to knife him when across Europe the authorities are so eager to criminalise him? No society with an eye to long-term survival should make opinion a subversive activity. Here's a thought: we should be able to discuss homosexuality, Islam and pretty much everything else in the same carefree way Guardian columnists damn Bush's America as "neo-fascist".
We should, but the intolerance of political correctness makes the whole argument a bit unrealistic.
<< Lynette Burrows has been investigated by police merely for expressing an opinion. Which is the sort of thing we used to associate with police states. Indeed, it's the defining act of a police state: the arbitrary criminalisation of dissent from state orthodoxy. >>
And so goes the the sad spiralling into decline and final fall of the once-great British empire.
The barbarians' Trojan Horse long emptied, made redundant and discarded, their abjectly-hostile colonies, comprised of rapidly-breeding unassimilable third world savages, well established and rapidly metasticizing, the final battle in of and for once-great Britain is over. And the barbarians have won.
All that remains is that the hapless hopeless natives sit about in morbid denial, degenerating into increasingly epidemic alcoholism, their thoughts policed, their impotent frustrations occasionally stirring them to quixotic episodes of bovver-booted thuggery and soccer-stadium heroics, until it finally registers with them that they are, as Enoch Powell prophesized and Snatcher Thatcher confirmed, swamped. And that their very identity has been sacrificed to delusional elitist fantasies, sick socialism and to the duel tyrannies of multiculturalism and political correctness.
Vale, Britain.
Might be because a large number of those who refused to tolerate it, crossed an ocean, and endured the humiliating processing at Ellis Island.
Just so.
The trouble is the British police are a lazy lot and, if it's a choice between acting against intimidating thugs who've made the shopping centre a no-go area or investigating the non-crime of a BBC radio interview, they'll take the latter.
Anarcho-Tyranny
Following the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, film directors and museum curators and all the other "brave" "transgressive" artists usually so eager to "challenge" society are voting for self-censorship: "I don't want a knife in my chest,"
We also engage in PC self-censorship, afraid of the figurative knife in the chest.
ASBO???
gad
ASBO sounds like an executive order from the Prime Minister's regime.
The money quote that will be resoundingly ignored by the champions of the First Amendment at Yale and Harvard, the New York Times and CNN - to name a couple.
Steyn bump for the morning crowd.
Well, they aren't too eager to say it like it is in the first place.
Un-effing-believable!
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