Freedom Vs Criminality

A man from Manchester (who I’m not going to name because he’s a dickhead!) has been jailed for four months for a public order offence. The crime committed was going out hours after the horrendous murders of police officers Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes while wearing a t-shirt with some offensive words written on it. These words were: ‘one less pig perfect justice’. As I’ve already stated, this man was a dickhead; in fact, that’s putting it far too politely, he was a horrible bastard of a poor excuse for a human being. BUT … that should not be a criminal offence. In my life I have known many imbeciles with disturbing opinions, but I’ve always tried to re-educate them about the immorality of their idiotic / objectionable viewpoints (largely unsuccessfully, but at least I tried!), I never thought that locking them up would be a good idea; if you lock them all up together they’ll probably entrench their opinions even further through socialisation with other dickheads! Freedom of speech is bandied around like a cliche nowadays, but it is a fundamental core of civilised society. Locking up this man from Manchester sends out the wrong signals that people may be criminalised for simply disagreeing with the majority.

 

Coalition MPs Are Occasionally Okay

A new campaign has been launched called ‘Feel Free To Insult Me’. Two of its main proponents are gay rights activist Peter Tatchell and Conservative MP David Davis. It simply promotes freedom of speech, even when insulting a person or group. Recently there have been a couple of disconcerting arrests: although common sense finally allowed them to be released without charge, a teenage boy was nonetheless arrested merely for holding a placard that read “Scientology is a dangerous cult”, and a student was arrested for a joke about a police officer’s horse being gay! If scientologists and homosexuals are offended by these statements, they need to grow up and chill out. So Tatchell and Davis have put their usual ideological differences aside in the hope that a law banning public insults will be repealed. Therefore, well done David Davis for resisting the traditional control freakery of the Tories. Also in the news this week, a report has been released by a ‘Conservative-supporting venture capitalist’ (now there are four words that should send chills down anybody’s spine!), encouraging reform of employment law so that ‘no-fault dismissal’ would become a great deal easier. In layman’s terms, this means employers will be able to sack an employee without having to provide a reason, thereby avoiding tribunal expenses. Thankfully, Business Secretary and Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable has stated his opinion that there is no place in British society for this type of removal of workers’ rights. This will hopefully prevent such a draconian policy from ever reaching fruition. So also a big well done to Vince for realising that the economy is not the be all and end all of politics. But of course, Davis and Cable are exceptions; don’t ever forget that the majority of the ConDem coalition government are still very uncool.