Mao’s Sparrows

How British Police Have Escalated Their War on Free Speech

Kellie-Jay Keen at a Let Women Speak event in Brighton on 19 September 2022. Photo credit: Tones of Monochrome

In any list of unintended consequences, Mao’s war on the sparrows must surely rank near the top. As part of the Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao placed this humble bird on a hit list of undesirables alongside rats, flies and mosquitos, and called upon the populace to join in an avian genocide. The rationale was based on the sparrow’s alleged role in consuming seeds which would otherwise sustain the human population. In the battle of Man v Bird, it was the locust that came out on top. Free from the scourge of its natural predator, entire crops were devoured in the ensuing pestilence, leaving twenty million Chinese starved to death. 

Iatrogenics is the term used to describe the consequence of intervention where the unintended deficit is greater than the anticipated gain. Nicola Sturgeon provides a recent example. When the First Minister placed her full weight behind Scotland’s Gender Reform Bill by insisting that convicted rapist, Andrew Graham, was indeed a woman, she unleashed a plague of locusts upon her reputation, career, legacy and the prospects of success for the entirely unrelated issue of Scottish independence with Biblical efficiency. In terms of political iatrogenics, wee Nicola was Mao in a kilt.

We should resist the temptation to gloat. As the Old Testament party pooper, Amos, famously warned: Woe to those who are at ease in Zion! Iatrogenics works against the righteous and the unrighteous. Celebrated as a landmark victory for common sense, the Miller rulings handed down by at The High Court (February 2020) and Court of Appeal (December 2021) meant to end police meddling in rights protected by Article 10 ECHR. Rather than a socialist Great Leap Forward, it was meant to be conservative Short Step Back to an era where police busied themselves preserving life, protecting property and detecting crime. The hope was that the police would suck up their humiliation and go into that good night, content with collaring burglars. 

What followed has shown the hope to be a pipe dream. Since the MacPherson Report, the police have developed a profitable supply chain in the hate industry so that the expression of orthodox belief or the wrong type of satire is rebranded as hate for which, of course, they themselves are uniquely positioned to provide a cure. The market is not even close to saturation, thereby affording entrepreneurial officers the opportunity to discover entirely new catalysts for hate crime. In Northumberland, Viking statues have been added to the growing catalogue of evils linked to far-right hatred. The war against Noggin The Nog is a lucrative business. The Chief Constable should be up for some kind of award.

State-funded monopolies like this are not given up on the mere say-so of a judicial bench; rather than backing down, the police have doubled down. Non-crime hate incidents have been given a facelift and rebranded as actual crimes, thereby incentivising the police to interfere with greater force than before. 

No matter that there may be little prospect of conviction, the process is the punishment. Where the likelihood of a charge is slim to non-existent, the stigma of being summoned to a police station, where the very fabric of the building signals relative impotence to the attendee, is sufficient deterrent for most people to leave their heresies unspoken, their limericks unpublished, their dissenting commentary away from the earshot of all but the closest of friends. Make no mistake: It is stressful to be escorted by uniformed officers through corridors of power where every door passed through is closed and locked. It is stressful to be cautioned, interviewed, fingerprinted, and released on bail. And it is a particular violation to have a swab poked into the soft membrane of your cheek in order to provide a sample of that most private and personal commodity: your DNA. Objective facts of reasonable suspicion and law run a poor second to these humiliating rituals. 

An additional benefit to the police subjecting a suspect to this preliminary process without any realistic prospect of a charge is that they will be required to give only a limited, internal account of their actions and never have to measure them against the exactitudes of law. This is especially beneficial where the law being enforced exists only in the Stonewall-sponsored imagination of the investigating officer. In Birmingham last year, the journalist, Connor Tomlinson, was overheard by a Police Inspector using the word “insidious” during a private discussion about the LGBTQI community. The Inspector, presumably relying on a non-existent statute forbidding any criticism of queer theory, informed the journalist that the word “insidious” in this context was verboten:

Journalist: “I don’t understand.” 

Inspector: “If you use defamatory, derogatory, or discriminatory terms, that will border into a criminal offence.” 

Journalist: “I don’t think I did.” 

Inspector: I’m not negotiating. I’m telling you what the parameters are.

Subtitled footage of the incident is available here.

Like Kafka’s prisoner, the nature of the suspected crime is often left unspoken, with the vague generalities of Hate Speech and Hate Crime serving as a coverall for the flagrant lack of specificity. Sometimes, the police reference laws that do not exist, stirring memories of the sketch show, Not The None O’Clock News, where the constable, played by Mel Smith, arrested a man for the offence of wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area. This is not quite as far-fetched as it sounds. In January, The Met informed a suspect that he was required to attend a voluntary interview in relation to an offence contrary to The Malicious Communications Act. Aside from the obvious oxymoron, there is no Act by that name in English law.

Following last September’s Standing For Women rally in Sussex, Posie Parker was also “invited” to attend a police station interview under caution. In this instance, the police mumbled something about the Public Order Act and a cited an imaginary obligation to balance the competing interests of women with those pretending to be women in a rainbow-infested place like Brighton. This too is a useful fallacy. It is the role of government and the judiciary to balance competing interests. It is the job of the police to ensure freedom and to keep the King’s peace.

Last week, Fair Cop were given details of a man investigated for flying the flag of Saint George. Political enforcers from the community standards unit in Hampshire gave the suspect, whom they clearly judged to be a flag shagging white supremacist, the option of criminal investigation or voluntary attendance at a Hate Crime Awareness Course. The £80 fee for the voluntary course provided not only redemption from the humiliation of an interview under caution but also enlightenment into the evils of the slave trade and a supply of crayons to complete the task of colouring in rainbows beneath the watchful gaze of a spotty youth with an asymmetric haircut. The modus operandi is Infantilising suspects into compliance.

In December, during the heady days of the World Cup, North Yorkshire Police investigated a man for sending a letter to the Football Association in which he criticised Black Lives Matter, wondered when football players would take the knee for the white victims of grooming gangs, questioned the team selection, and referred to the manager as “That soy boy, Gareth Wokegate.” The man was not fortunate enough to be offered a crayoning course as an indulgence for his sin. Instead, he was prosecuted under S127 of The Communications Act, denied a trial by jury, and found guilty by a single magistrate who denounced him as a despicable racist and sentenced him to 100 hours of community service. 

Those of us who cheered when the hate crime guidance was ripped from the hands of the police did not imagined that the police would escalate their way back into the Hate Game any more than Mao imagined his war on the sparrows would leave twenty million dead from starvation. We were naive. Fair Cop and The Free Speech Union should have anticipated the response and prepared the public for it. In victory, we sowed the wind. Now, we are reaping the whirlwind. 

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