Despite the excellent news that Essex Police have dropped their Stasi-like investigation into Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson, orthodox Christians should still expect trouble from the woke police.
The police motion against Pearson centred on a year-old tweet that had described a bunch of demonstrators from a Pakistani political party at an anti-Israel demonstration as “Jew-haters”.
Pearson deleted the tweet as soon as she came upon that the officers photographed with the demonstrators weren’t from the Metropolitan Police, as she had tagged the post, but from Greater Manchester Police.
Two cops confronted Pearson at her Essex home on Remembrance Sunday just before she had planned to go to a church service. After Pearson publicised her ordeal in The Telegraph, the behaviour of Essex Police sparked a global outcry with X owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, weighing in behind her.
He posted on his X account where he has 205 million followers: “This must stop.”
The day before the news about Essex Police’s climb-down over Pearson got here through on November 21, the Times and Jewish Chronicle columnist Melanie Phillips wrote a chunk on her Substack headed ‘The policing of wrongspeak – Hate crime is the expression of a totalitarian mindset’.
Phillips observed that the treatment of Pearson “was much more grotesque since the offending tweet was actually protesting against racial hatred”.
She added acidly: “Ah, nevertheless it was hatred of Jews; and hatred of Jews appears to be a non-hate thing altogether.”
She described how for greater than a yr for the reason that October 7 atrocities in Israel, huge demonstrations have taken place within the streets of London and other cities aimed toward intimidating Jews, chanting for his or her mass murder and the destruction of the world’s one Jewish state and inciting murderous hatred by accusing Israelis of “genocide”.
“These demonstrations – and countless smaller but similar incidents – have left many British Jews too frightened to enter central London or use public transport,” she wrote.
Phillips brilliantly analysed the neo-Marxist ideology behind the behaviour of the woke police: “Most of the protests against hate crime and non-crime hate have focused on the threat to free speech. That, though, doesn’t get to the nub of this lurch into oppressiveness. It’s not that speech is being suppressed. It’s only some sorts of speech – those who don’t conform to a culture-wide power grab by certain protected groups.”
She argued that “this entirely subjective criterion of hate has opened the best way for utterly vexatious claims that may smash the status and lifetime of their unjustly denounced goal.
“People who’re in actual fact the objects of real hatred are either ignored or find themselves accused of promoting hatred after they protest or seek to defend themselves against the hatred being expressed against them. This is the sort of abuse of power related to a totalitarian police state.”
It is that neo-Marxist mindset which has captured particularly the upper echelons of the British police and created a culture during which Christian freedom of expression is becoming increasingly restricted. Orthodox Christian opinions on matters corresponding to sexual morality and gender identity are undoubtedly offensive to some people, especially amongst Millennials and Generation Z.
So, when Merseyside Police in 2021 displayed the message “Being offensive is an offence” on a billboard on the side of a van within the Wirral, that encapsulated the threat to Christian freedom of expression. The message sparked an outcry because under UK law it shouldn’t be against the law to offend someone, so Merseyside Police issued a political apology with a spokesman saying that the message had been “incorrect” but “well-intentioned”.
Phillips observed in her Substack piece: “Britain’s Labour government is uneasily shuffling its feet over the policing of hate incidents. But since so many Labour party members and ‘progressives’ usually are fanatical supporters of victim culture and fanatical haters of Israel, the probabilities of ministers doing anything to arrest this slide into cultural darkness are nil.”
She identified that “the Sovietisation of Britain can have began under Labour, nevertheless it was given rocket fuel on the Tories’ watch”.
She concluded: “It’s not enough for the Tories now to protest. If they actually need to show this round, they have to first own it – and show us all what they now understand they got so badly flawed for therefore long.”
The reality now for orthodox Christian freedom of expression is that neo-Marxist authoritarianism is so deeply entrenched in UK police forces that a pro-free-speech government, if one got elected, would should battle relentlessly for each inch of territory to push the evil back.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
