No need to speculate that the UK government "might" one day become the bad guys: they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
That's textbook intimidation, which in certain cases is a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline, for example, by sending a letter to the victim containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
https://nypost.com/2025/12/04/us-news/british-man-says-he-wa...
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
EDIT 2: for avoidance of doubt, he did three days in a row of LinkedIn blog posts, where
1) his PFP at the time (shown in the top-right corner) was a picture of the business premises
2) the text of the post talked about the "delinquent client"
3) the post ended with a no-context-given picture of him posing with guns
Example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
EDIT: and your second example is also dangerously misleading. Jason Arday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday) and/or his university reported 2 professors and 1 journalist to the police, pretending their requests for comment on his plagiarism were harrassment. For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech). What spiked the story is that Jason Arday and/or his university got very expensive reputation lawyers Carter-Fuck to send a C&D to the journalist's newspaper, promising expensive litigation if they published the story. That is what spiked the story, not intimidation via false harassment claims. Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
You’re being misleading by saying he “posted them to a website” without explaining that what you mean by “website” is that he posted them on his personal social media.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
If the expensive lawyers are equal in the UK and US, then that’s not the important point of this story. It’s the part about him engaging the police and the police following through with it.
I also strongly disagree that it’s equivalent in the US. That expensive legal firm would be utilizing the maximum extent of the laws available to them in the UK, which includes the very harassment laws we’re talking about!
You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
> That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
Isn’t that literally what the quote, which was from the article, says? It didn’t contain the word “count”. You added that. The quote says he was arrested on suspicion.
This is the quote from the article:
> > A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm
You falsely added "[count]" to the quote and then argued about the count, which isn't in the quote.
> The article I linked clearly says he was arrested for one count of stalking and another account of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
It's not a UK speech policing policy issue, the topic of your post. The criminal law doesn't support Arday using false claims of harrassment to deter journalists.
You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue in terms of barratry / SLAPPs / cost of litigation / etc. No country, certainly not the US, has sufficient protection for whistleblowers against well-resourced litigants, and it is they (not the UK criminal law) who are successfully chilling speech.
It's the thing we're talking about.
The UK law was used to get police involved and the police told the journalist to desist.
> You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue
The fact that lawsuits exist everywhere does not make it equal everywhere.
We're talking about the UK's specific laws.
> There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
You don't mention the threat that civil lawsuits pose to speech at all. And yet it was the threat of a civil lawsuit that actually quelled speech here.
You have no evidence that action A ("he would report them to the police for harassment") led to outcome B ("to spike the stories").
Jason Arday did not spike any journalist's story by reporting them for harrassment. He, or his universty, did spike the story by engaging reputation lawyers. He could do that in almost any country, including the US, despite its stronger free speech laws. Unless a US state has an effective anti-SLAPP law, it is very likely all that is needed to shut people up is to threaten a lawsuit they can't afford.
The thing you want to be mad about -- the police unlawfully instructing a journalist not to contact someone -- is a bad thing, is not even legal (i.e. the UK state doesn't actually allow it, let alone condone it), and it had no effect on the journalist. They still wanted their story published. It was the private threat of a lawsuit that spiked it.
As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.
Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.
Especially rich to talk about habitual liars when it's a bunch of British press outlets and activists accusing others of being liars.
> 1 The Racism Of It All: It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct. It gets reported in a handful of stories, there’s a bit of media attention, but everyone quickly forgets about the problems.
> 2 Arday Was Definitely Guilty: The second point is somehow even more frustrating. Yes, Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys. Yes, the amount of scrutiny he received was obviously connected to the colour of his skin. But also, he definitely did plagiarize. And not just a little bit. His work is riddled with clear, obvious, and extensive theft from other published academic papers.
> You do not need to trust race realists or other unpleasant people. Just download the thesis and check for yourself. It is clear that a significant portion of the thesis was copied directly from other people’s work. This is not in doubt, it’s not in question, and the fact that so many people online are arguing that the plagiarism charges are false because a university said so is deeply depressing. It’s arguably the worst case of plagiarism I’ve ever seen.
> Whatever your thoughts on plagiarism, it’s clear that Arday’s work harmed very few people. As he himself said, “I didn't murder somebody”. If he hadn’t been a Black academic and a poster child for diversity at Cambridge university, we’d probably have never known his name.
You sound like one of the Arday Truthers:
> For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.
> The postmortem airbrushing of Arday’s story also ignores how that story twisted and turned while he was alive. When The Guardian confronted him with the implausibility of some of his tall tales, Arday responded by editing them in real time: Yes, he had once claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, an exceptional feat for an endurance athlete, but what he actually meant was that he took daylong rest breaks in between. Yes, he had claimed to have raised more than £5 million for charity, but actually this was with the help of “many fundraising collectives” whose participants he could not name because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
As they might say on Reddit, "Everybody Sucks Here". Arday the fabulist and plagiarist, the academic institutions who didn't vet him because they were razzle-dazzled by his bullshit lifestory (then drop him like a stone when their attempts to keep his plagiarism hidden don't work any more), the popular press who are happy to amp up a public shaming for clicks and views, the anti-woke and the racists who say this just confirms what they thought about DEI, and the anti-anti-woke and anti-racists who will deny the bleeding obvious if it makes them appear virtuous to their peers.
Step 1: put out the suggestion that the lies weren't lies
Step 2: don't read the responses
Job done!
EDIT: I'll give you one set of lies. Is it "exaggerated versions of statements" or you just didn't see them?
If I say I won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing a cure for cancer, and I have no evidence of either, but I insist I did both and make up a lame excuse as to why you can't see my prize (it's away being washed today) or why you can't find my cure (the journal pretended someone else wrote the article because they're all against me, but trust me mate it was really me who wrote it) am I just making "exaggerated versions of statements" in your view?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/au...
> In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.
> The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.
> The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.
> He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
> Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.
> In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
> When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
> When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.
> Arday had contacted the Met to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris after his plagiarism allegations and, because he was based in Plymouth, the case was handed over to Devon and Cornwall police. Correspondence seen by the Guardian confirmed that the force declined to pursue a case against Harris.
> Arday took no photographs of the bullet, the banana, the corrosive substance or the pig’s head. The only other people who saw any of the items were close family members, who told the Guardian Arday had shown them the bullet and the “poison”. Arday could produce no messages from the time in which he discussed any of the items with friends, family, colleagues or the police.
> There are many examples of prominent black figures being intimidated [...] But the abuse and harassment Arday has outlined would be some of the most extreme any academic has been subjected to in the UK. When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said. “Why would I lie?” He would be jeopardising his career.
A victim under a years long hate campaign by activists getting a bit jumpy or making a false alarm then becoming further fuel to the fire as those stories in turn get blown up is just proving the point. Someone with known mental health history raising a false alarm of a break in then becomes further perpetuation of the story. If security failed to respond to an alarm then that doesn't seem like the fault of the victim but even that is then snuck in as "evidence" in this list. Argument by volume basically summarises this whole thing.
> There are many examples of prominent black figures being intimidated [...] But the abuse and harassment Arday has outlined would be some of the most extreme any academic has been subjected to in the UK. When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said. “Why would I lie?” He would be jeopardising his career.
Again the implications of some sort of ranking comes from the perpetrators in the media. But nonetheless The guy was hounded to death over several years so it's at least up there a little wouldn't you think unless you think it somehow didn't exist?
I mean, it opens with "It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct." then lists several cases where white men committed academic misconduct and made headlines in mainstream media around the world. Then walks that back with "This sort of massive media storm almost never happens for white academics".
Ultimately it's true that racists amplified the story, and once the story was positioned as being about race/racists that contributed (in part) to its longevity, but I don't see anything in that post to justify the claim that "If Arday had not been a young, successful Black academic, the chances that anyone would’ve looked into his work are low." and especially that "no one would’ve cared."
There was plenty of drama to fuel the media too. The accuser was suspended from the university where he worked, lawsuits were filed to try to bury the story, the police publicly apologized for harassing a journalist, new laws were proposed limiting the freedom of the press, statements were made by high ranking politicians and by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the accused committed suicide, there was a whole lot going with that situation way beyond the internal academic investigation about plagiarism and race issues. Of course it'd generate more mainstream press than say, a spider biologist who faked research data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pruitt (although that was a pretty big story in certain circles)
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
In the second case, once again you repeat your nonsense. The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself, did not put the journalist off publishing.
You can read the journalist's own words right here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-...
> Despite the thoroughness of my investigation, THE did not run the story. While I was personally disappointed, I understood; by this point, Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation. Even if we were right – and I stand by my reporting – it would have been ruinously expensive.
You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit. It was LAWYERS LAWYERS LAWYERS suppressing the story.
You're the only person in this thread using the phrase "chilling speech" and you keep admitting that they did.
Let me quote you on this topic:
> The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself,
> In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
These are all three your own quotes from this thread. The last quote isn't even accurate because the police DID take action in the form of contacting the journalist and telling him to desist.
You're trying to argue that Jason Arday held journalists at bay by reporting them for harrassment, therefore the UK speech laws are bad because they let wrongdoers avoid scrutiny by making harrassment claims against their scrutinisers. That is incorrect. There was only one journalist, and Arday held him off by engaging private lawyers. The harrassment reporting did not stop the journalist.
Arday falsely reported two people for harrassment to the Metropolitan Police, one professor in 2023 and one journalist in 2025. The (Devon and Cornwall) police declined to pursue the 2023 case. The (Metropolitan) police investigated the 2025 case for four months, then decided to take no action (no charge, arrest or caution). The investigating officer phoned the journalist to tell him the case was closed (they can do that). The fact that there had even been an investigation caused a chilling effect:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-...
> But were my enquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
I'd say that even in the professor's case, it could've had a chilling effect. If the police had interviewed anyone related to the professor, there could've been leaks and/or career-stunting rumours.
The officer requested the journalist not contact Arday. That's overreach, and shouldn't have happened.
The head of the Metropolitan police admitted the investigation should not have even been started. That's not the law at fault, that's shoddy policing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
But ultimately, it did not "spike the story". That was 100% on the lawsuit. Both things are bad
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
Now imagine you owe this guy money, he's admitted in public that he put a picture of your business premises at the top of every blog post he makes on LinkedIn in order to get your attention, and his latest blog posts on the LinkedIn website therefore shows YOUR WORKPLACE and HIM SHOOTING GUNS.
Juxtaposition that he admits he wants you to see.
You can read all three blogposts. Note he has switched out the picture of the workplace (top-right PFP):
1. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Top of my agenda Today is getting a follow-up email to the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client
"delinquent client" and no mention of why there's a picture of him with guns or where it was taken
2. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> I am disappointed that absolutely nothing has come back from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (OR his Department) regarding my delinquent Client.. this is concerning as despite continuing to owe me
"delinquent client" who "owes" him and once again, picture of him shooting guns apropos of nothing, nothing explaining where he is, whose guns they are, just him shooting guns. Guess he just likes to shoot guns while talking about his "delinquent client" who "owes" him and he's put a picture of the delinquent client's premises as his PFP.
3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
And again no-context gun photo to add to the blog post about his delinquent client
Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
The photos are obviously target shooting. This is a common sport in many countries.
Your argument is that because he wrote long daily updates about what he was doing and included two unrelated things, that he's implying that the guns are for those offhand remarks?
We get getting farther and farther from the real problem, which is that the UK police have been weaponized to respond to people's social media posts about how they make others feel. That's a ridiculously low bar.
From https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/consultant-arrested-posi...
> However, he said that a police officer later visited his home to warn him that concerns had been raised about the post.
> "I was told to be careful what I say online and I need to understand how it makes people feel," he said.
No, I don't understand why he would.
Nothing there was intimidation. Pretending it is intimidation is stretching crudility. The fact that he got arrested over this is straight up nonsense, IMO.
All the posts read like blog-style posts, and there wasn't any aggressive language used there at all. He also mentioned he was meeting with people to resolve the issue through legal means in the posts.
I suspect the owner who owed him money was acting maliciously.
If you're buying that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Both the police and whoever claimed to be intimidated would/should have known better.
The problem whenever discussion of any of these subjects is that there will be people that are determined to pretend there isn't a problem in the UK with these laws when it is quite clear there is.
This is one of three days worth of posts where he talks about his "delinquent client" and ends with a picture of him and guns (with no explanation of why, where or how him and the guns are related to the body text). He put an image of the business owner's premises as his PFP in the top-right corner, which is now a picture of some people sitting in chairs. The business premises, "delinquent client" body text and gun photos appear on the same page.
Further details: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/12/01/uk-police-arrest-gun-...
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
Wait, this is the threat?
I'm bewildered this could be grounds for an arrest. That's pretty scary.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
It's the combination of the paragraph about the 'delinquent client' and the picture of him pointing a gun which could be construed as an implied threat. I don't know if that would hold up legally, but in any case, no charges were brought in the end.
As to why the police did anything at all, the most likely explanation is that once the 'delinquent client' reported the LinkedIn posts, the Police saw a photo of someone using a shotgun who didn't have a shotgun license. Unaware that the photo was taken outside the UK, they probably decided that the combination of an unlicensed firearm and a possible implied threat was worth investigating.
Exactly.
Every time I hear a story of "horrible abuses in UK where people get arrested for talking on the internet" it turns our they intimidated or scammed or bullied someone.
I wonder why people keep lying about it.
What seems to happen on these stories that anything that might be construed as a threat will be, to pretend there isn't a problem with the speech and online laws in the UK.
It very tiring to have people like those on this thread pretend there isn't a huge problem.
No point even arguing with them, it's a lost cause.
Given you got the nationality wrong 2/3 times in this comment section and they weren't bot accounts either, you might want to adjust that number.
You got the political lean wrong at least once as well. This might be the time to adjust your worldview. Empirically it doesn't seem to mesh with reality.
Until this exchange, I hadn't realised I would be doing anyone a favour. I'll have a think about it.
Someone got arrested and intimidated by police because they criticized someone with even only a modicom of authority: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre...
Imagine getting six police officers sent to your house and spending 11 hours at a police station for causing "disharmony" by disagreeing with how your daughter's school operates in a WhatsApp group. In a sensible country that might've been a phone call or a single officer stopping to chat and defusing the situation if police decided to get involved at all.
* The Police admitted their obvious error and paid £20k in damages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o
* This bizarre case has nothing to do with "speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy" (root comment).
If you look for examples of the police arresting people for stupid and unjustifiable reasons, you can find them in lots of countries, including the US. For example, here is someone being arrested in Kansas for clapping too loudly during a meeting: https://www.kbtx.com/2026/07/27/teacher-arrested-repeatedly-... It's absolutely right that this sort of thing is reported and it's right for people to be outraged about it. However, I'd be cautious about drawing overly sweeping conclusions about the UK from such cases.
So yes, we might not be so dreadful compared to Hicksville, US or some craphole country like India,but that's a very low bar for the police of a G5 nation.
Absolutely go ahead and make sweeping generalisations about the state of the police in the UK. It's all true (except if anyone claims they are systemically racist, or some other clickbaity nonsense).
In the UK, they can't force you to speak, but not answering questions can be interpreted as evasion / "adverse interference".
They do not need a warrant to search your phone. Not providing them with a PIN can be a separate charge, with up to 2 years imprisonment.
They can hold you up to 36 hrs if the police decide so. Up to 14 days without charge under modern broad "anti terrorism" laws.
Also note the absence of large scale destructive anti-police riots in the UK over the past decade.
As for police killings, you are comparing an event that’s extremely unlikely to happen with an event that’s multiple orders of magnitude more likely. Speech offense prosecutions in UK are more common today than political prosecutions were in post Kruschev Soviet Union. The only reason UK has fewer political prisoners than Soviet Union had is that the sentences are shorter and typically non-custodial.
The UK have about 13,000 arrests per year over social media etc. Without litigating all 13,000 of them for validity, that's about 185 microliberties.
Birth control is about 1-5 micromorts.
So you're 30x more likely to be arrested for a social media post than death by getting out of bed, and 55x more than being killed by police. And it's in the same range as taking birth control.
Realistically, these are population estimates. Your actual risk of dying by police is highly correlated with the number of violent interactions you have with them. If you're a getaway driver or a bank robber vs SW developer, you probably have significantly different risk profiles.
On the other hand, edgy social media posts are potentially much more diffuse across populations.
That's the figure (slightly inflated) for arrests under both the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Communications Act 2003. That's not reasonably described as arrests for 'social media etc.' It's quite likely the the majority of those arrests have nothing to do with content that people post on social media.
Wasn't there a story about a woman getting put in jail for having spaghetti on a spoon that they thought was drugs? Lost her job?
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2014/09/florida_woman_jailed_s...
Yeah, imagine that. Getting put in jail for a month.
Also I'm not from Florida or the US for that matter.
But you're just peddling false narratives which are easily disproved, which are rampant especially on right wing news sites. So you might not be right leaning, but people who write and share them generally are.
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
Just very heavily implying it, thinking they're being clever
This is part of what started the death of BBM and proliferation of news via social media. You’d go on Twitter and see all the reports or riots and burning buildings then go to the BBC and… nothing.
All of this is to say that successive British governments, over a span of decades, have been actively destroying freedom of speech and a right to privacy for its citizens.
With AI and the rise of populism combined with the absolute decimation of the average person’s attention span it is going to get a lot worse.
What we have is a lot of people changing the narrative since to discredit the BBC and divide everyone further.
The point at which the BBC started reporting was the same as all other major news outlets: after the point that they just looked daft for not reporting it.
I know this as my videos of the riots took my little blog from 50 - 100 views a day to thousands per minute…
I think this is the link where the chap asks for legal advice: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1vxkcic/poli...
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Police have arrested and questioned 3 of my mates from our private WhatsApp group chat. They're asking to speak to me too, but I'm working abroad.
They've all been arrested and had interviews under s127 of the Communications Act.
There's 4 of us in a group chat on WhatsApp where we chat and also make some edgy jokes and stuff. We're two white, an Indian and a black guy who studied at uni together.
All three of them have been arrested and interviewed today. I don't know anyrhing more than this. This info comes from their gf and fiance.
I'm working abroad but I have received a WhatsApp message and attempted call from a UK officer who identified himself wanting to speak to me about an ongoing enquiry into a reported issue.
My mate's fiance says it was reported by another guy's ex who he dumped 4 weeks ago. I'm inclined to believe that as the officer's message said he was acting on a report.
The thing is, we shared a lot of edgy jokes beteen us - but it was literally just the 4 of us in a private fucking chat. Some of the jokes we made were racisr, but they were all banter directed at each other. Others were just taking the piss out of the major news events like saying "Who needs people flying planes when our own shitty buildings just burn themselves down?" about Grenfell.
It's crass, but it's literally just us talking shit in private. These messages arent public or anything.
I can't get through to any of the guys. Is this something the police are actually going to try and prosecute?!
At this point should I just not come home? I'm dual Austrian-British and Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
How so? Since Austria doesn't (typically) allow dual citizenship.
> Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
With what guarantee? In 2013 Austria forced the landing of the plane of the Bolivian president on orders from the US because they had intelligence Snowden might be on board.
So if you think Austria will hesitate to ship your ass to the UK if you piss off the wrong elites, just because there's no official bi-lateral extradition agreement, you're kidding yourself. If needed, they'll just make up a spin story that you're some major child molester or something, to justify their actions in the media and reassure the public on why the violation of your rights was justified and they'll never ever do it again to anyone else as long as they behave, pinky promise wink-wink. In short, the people with guns can break the rules at will with little to no accountability.
However, if you want hard evidence what that post was claiming, I can give you a real citation from 2018:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46106224
> A house linked to an "offensive" video showing a model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire has been searched by police. Six men [...] were arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and have been released under investigation. A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46112026
> Can I be offensive in my own home?
> Basically, yes. [...] if you make offensive comments in your home and they are recorded and posted online, it might be possible that you could be prosecuted.
However, the CPS appealed against his acquittal, and it was quashed in 2021: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-58054431
He was retried in 2022, where this time he pled guilty and was given ultimately a minor slap on the wrist: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61160971
Ultimately, everyone is happy:
- people who saw the video and were offended by it are happy "something was done"
- the CPS is happy because they gott'im
- the courts are happy because they got paid double
- the guy accused of offending people is happy this multi-year ordeal where the CPS won't stop hounding him until he confesses his guilt is finally over
- MPs are happy they didn't need to change any laws no matter how unreasonable they were
All good, right?
Are we also going to spend years prosecuting someone who mockingly reenacts the sinking of the Titanic? Or is that somehow water under the bridge?
It's political correctness gone mad.
> "By 2017, Grenfell Tower housed a remarkably diverse community. Up to 600 people lived in the building’s 120 flats, representing a rich tapestry of nationalities, ethnicities, and generations. Residents hailed from countries including the UK, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, among others." - https://grenfell.soton.ac.uk/week-1-who-lived-in-the-tower/
> "The Grenfell Tower fire inquiry "must not ignore" the impact of race and poverty on the disaster, a lawyer representing survivors has said. .. The inquiry returned this week after a four-month break due to coronavirus. "The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum," said Mr Thomas in his opening statement. "A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people of colour."""" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53320082
The people in the video didn't upload it to a social media platform like Youtube, they wanted to keep it private to their friends. It would also have been taken down by the likes of Youtube. The only reason this case got to where it did is because the video ultimately reached a wide audience virally by people forwarding it on, and that enough of that audience didn't like it and wanted someone "done" for it, and the state obliged. But nasty, mean, dark, sick, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynist and all other -ist jokes are told day-in, day-out, between people who like that sort of humour, no matter how much other morally righteous "right side of history" people want that not to happen. You can't stop them. You can only go after scapegoats if such things breach their usual boundaries.
Over 1,500 people died at sea when the Titanic sank, including black, Chinese, Jewish, Turkish, etc. passengers. It was an dreadful fate for each person, and it caused much grief for the victims' families and friends. I'm still going to joke about it, though. "How do you think the unthinkable? With an itheberg."
The state has a century long history of answering that in the positive; under the Criminal Law Act 1977 a person agreeing with another person to do a crime is guilty of conspiracy to commit that crime[1]; section 5 talks about "the offence of conspiracy at common law" which it replaces, including when it does/doesn't apply to "conduct which tends to corrupt public morals or outrages public decency".Further back, the Offenses Against The Person act of 1861 says that encouraging, soliciting, or proposing to any person to murder another person is a misdemanour punishable by imprisonment for life[2].
AFAIK the UK doesn't ban the classic film The Towering Inferno which is about people dying in a burning tower block. The Titanic has no remaining survivors to be offended where the video here was <2 years after the Grenfell Tower fire, and your joke about the Titanic isn't mocking the dying, it's mocking the builder's hubris. So it's more about the "outraging public decency" part.
Even the most free-speechy places have arguments about what free speech is acceptable (classic example: yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre) and have ideas about free speech, with consequences.
I would rather the UK government had put that effort into earlier holding the tower management company to fixing the problems reported by the fire brigade and the Grenfell Action Group in the years before the fire, and knocking the Council for trying it silence that group for repeatedly reporting fire problems, and of course for the excellent business decisions to save money by using flammable cladding.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/section/1
[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/section/...
I would rather it didn't. It dangles like the sword of Damocles over a number of acts, and it's very selectively enforced, and really depends on the tastes/mood of the public and or prosecutors. My example with the Titanic was to determine where the outrage is meant to lie; is it in the act of mocking a tragedy or not? Does it matter if the families of the victims are alive or dead, if neither are the intended audience?
It also interferes with what ought to be private, let's say an entirely willing, paying theatreful of Jerry Sadowitz fans enjoying his attempts to offend them in exciting and new ways. A recent development is that Scotland introduced its Hate Crime act, which insisted that even things said inside your own home to your own family could be a hate crime. Legal theorists warned about introducing this, but as per usual the ScotGov didn't listen. On the day it came into force, J.K. Rowling basically said "here's a list of convicted rapist men who think they're women, they aren't women, I fucking dare you to prosecute me for saying that", and the police did nothing. They also did nothing when right-wingers mass reported Humsa Yousaf's "white people" speech for racism. So it's an empty-threat law, on the books to be threatened or used quietly against someone stepping out of line, rather than setting a clear line in the sand as to what's sayable and what's unsayable.
From a legal aspect, another thing that bugs me is this was a private gathering of (presumably) like-minded individuals. That it was filmed and shared among each other should be fine. They could equally have been indoors and swinging or orgying, or something else that harms nobody if it's consenting adults, but would disgust the public at large if spread to them.
If you're then going to nab people for "outraging public decency", and there's no principal tortfeasor, the onus should be on those who spread that video outwith the participants who wanted it kept private, but the liability on each person would be very dilute, and the public who were "outraged" were likely participants in their own victimisation by passing it on themselves. It's not the same as someone intentionally going on social media and uploading it in a prominent place.
I too would rather the UK government spent more time writing regulations about how people safely construct buildings rather than what private individuals do with their time. There's a terrible web of fingerpointing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c049yvrd5qxo - but my main takeaway was that the privatised certification body, BBA, was hopelessly incompetent, and the French company selling cladding (that they wanted to offload onto the UK because it was illegal to sell it in their own country and they had a large stock of it) took full advantage of that fact. There is plenty more blame to go round, even London Fire Brigade fucked up, but that's the crux of it.
There is speech and there are consequences for speech.
If I incite or state that I am going to commit violence, stalking, rape or murder, should I face consequences? Yes. That's what is happening.
There are outlying cases which will be used to discredit this perspective but reality is there are a hell of a lot of very not nice people out there making active threats and inciting hatred and violence.
And everyone gets their day in court.
Pretty sure she called for the murder, by arson, of asylum seekers although the article missed that bit out.
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
> Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Connolly...
> “Kill those motherfuckers. Let the streets soak in their red, capitalist blood, dude.” - Hasan Piker on landlords
I don't think that statement would go down too well here, but even then context is very important for incitement to violence. Considering people were and did set fire to hotels I think it was worthwhile investigating.
A guy Hasan didn't like got shot in the neck during a public debate. A pair of Jewish embassy workers were gunned down while walking to a museum. A health insurance company CEO was shot outside of a hotel. I could go on.
In the UK there was an attempted murder when someone attacked a protestor burning a Koran, but luckily the UK authorities convicted the victim of the attack with "asking for it"[1] so justice was served.
[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/london-muslim-man-spared-jail-tu...
The victims fine was overturned and the attacker was convincted, justice system working as intended: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9v7wlj3pr2o
Hasan is still not British.
When the context is altered it suddenly becomes worthy of prosecution? I don’t think that’s fair, by holding or stating an opinion you do not induce its outcome.
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal. 2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal. 3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
The last time it worked like that was in the 1970s. You can travel and move anywhere you want but you can't legally work, rent a state owned apartment, get social benefits or send you kids to public school unless you get a stamp from the local authorities. It's the same as migrant workers anywhere else.
Of course it's corrupt and unfair and they should stop doing it but "can't leave your area" is a big exaggeration.
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/R-v-Lucy...
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
319 years, 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days to be exact.
Generally this applies to all governments anyway. The British state is just the most blatant at it currently, as they are losing control.
Also, shit like, "Authorities arrested a grandmother for silently holding a sign outside an abortion clinic that said “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, if you want.”" - Yeah, take your fucking signs away from people trying to get an abortion. It's harassment.
And, to top if off, you're American. I'm not sure how you can call our government the "bad guys".
You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?
Imagine if we jailed every gay person the moment they had a gay thought. How legal do you think being gay would be now?
My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.
And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?
Why do you talk like that?
Are you one of the redditors that has been invading this heterodox environment.
>There's a spectrum of aggressive speech, ranging from
Is sufficient and much less cringe.
It’s why the US has such a problem with gun control and laws.
I could argue everyone should have guns, and it’s just bad people, right?
Let me give it a go; Switzerland has higher gun homicides than the UK.
They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.
For example, the USA maintains a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and penalities for providing support to those organisations are rather more severe than the in the UK.
Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter - their most serious action to date has been simply damaging military aircraft. Personally, I'd tend to say that proscription is too harsh a response for property damage with no violence against a person.
I guess in the US that anyone doing something similar would simply have been killed, rather than their organisation being banned. That's not exactly great either!
No, that's actually the heart of the matter.
Palestine Action is not a terrorist organization. Full stop. This isn't even arguable.
Labeling them a terrorist organization and then arresting anyone who expresses support for them is a massive abuse of terrorism laws and an attack on the very heart of freedom of speech.
They called PA a terrorist organization, which is an insult to everyone's intelligence.
Then they carried out mass arrests of people protesting that decision.
Democracies don't do that.
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
Everyone here subconsciously understands that most laws are only intended to apply to people who regularly cause problems, and that creates an unjust system, especially when “causing problems” starts to include political activity.
The line gets s lot blurrier when you call fo arson and someone acts on it and burns down a building. Should you be liable for the actions of the third party that burnt down the building? Imho there's some responsibility to be held, yes, despite you only calling for it.
But I wouldn't want anybody to wield the power to legally shut down other people. The amount of abuse that can generate in the wrong hands is Tremendous (see what I did there?)