It's a free country - part 2

Shawn Holes is an American who, like a lot of Americans , happens to be a practising Christian. In his case it is a particularly muscular brand of Christianity that he practises, involving street preaching and proselytising.
Unfortunately, nobody told Shawn that, in today's United Kingdom, such activities can get you into an awful lot of trouble.
Around two weeks ago, Shawn was in Glasgow with a group of fellow evangelists when he was arrested under one of the plethora of hate laws introduced since 1997. His crime? He was preaching to a crowd in a Glasgow street and quoted from St Luke's Gospel to answer a query about the biblical attitude to homosexuality. This is how he describes what happened:

"On March 18Th I was arrested while preaching the
Gospel in downtown Glasgow Scotland. I spent a horrible night in jail and
all I can say is that it was just miserable. Too many details from this
specific incident occurred for me to list here. I will say however that
what it came down to was that two people were supposedly offended when I said
that homosexuality is a sin against Jesus, therefore the arrest. I was given two options:
1- plead guilty to some really trumped up charges and
possibly pay a small fine of hopefully only 50 pounds or so and go home by
Monday as planned or
2- plead not guilty and have to spend up to 8 weeks
waiting for the trial NOT being allowed to leave the country with no guarentee (sic)
of winning the case.
I chose option number one. Big bummer though. The
fine was 1000 pounds. Thats (sic)1600 US dollars."

As far as the police were concerned, Shawn's mistake was in asserting that homosexuality is a sin. They were wrong. Shawn's real mistake was in assuming that, because freedom of expression had been central to our existence for at least the last couple of centuries, that this still held good today. Whatever the cause of this misapprehension, it cost both him and us dear. Shawn is financially and spiritually out of pocket. But, we have taken another significant step along the road to moral bankruptcy.

The bunch of fascistic pygmies who currently hold sway over us has made it its business to silence anyone who regards homosexuality as anything other than a completely natural state of being. Actually, what they have done and continue to do, thanks to Harriet Harman's upcoming equality bill, is create a whole raft of lifestyles and belief systems that are protected from comment or opinion, or at least any comment or opinion that does not conform to their narrow world view. They are unable - or unwilling - to understand that suppressing and criminalising opinions is more discriminatory and prejudicial than anything that Shawn and his ilk could ever do or say.

The professional atheist, Richard Dawkins, has a whole website dedicated to promulgating his beliefs. Every day he mocks anyone who believes in God, whatever form that God or belief might take. He does the same in print, on the radio and television and in public and invites his readers and listeners to share his dislike. In its own way, Dawkin's atheism has much in common with the religious fervour of the more extreme religious proselytisers.

As far as I know, he has yet to be arrested for preaching hatred. Which is as it should be. Every opinion is valid and every belief system has some merit, for the simple reason that there is always someone capable of testing or disputing their veracity. 20 years ago, had anyone proposed a law under which a completely innocent, law-abiding visitor to the UK could be threatened with gaol simply for expressing an opinion they would, rightly, have been laughed out of court by the liberal establishment.

Orchestrating the laughter would have been the likes of Jack Straw, Gordon Brown, Tony and Cherie Blair and Harriet Harman - the same bunch of chancers that has done so much to undermine our democracy and create a country completely alien to people raised on the ideal of a free society.

The great turkey vote

Conservatives are puzzled, and with good reason. For the last few years, polls have shown their share of the vote climbing to and staying steady at around 40% - enough to guarantee them victory and a decent majority in any General Election.
Given the litany of disasters that have assailed Labour for the last two years, they should be in a position where they would be pushed to get an offer of coalition from the Raving Loony Party, let alone the LibDems.
And yet, weirdly and almost inexplicably, Brown and his cohorts are not dead and buried. The most recent polls put the two main parties neck and neck. With Labour suffering from so many self-inflicted wounds why have the Tories consistently failed to finish them off?
Perhaps the answer lies in the latest employment statistics .
According to the Office for National Statistics, employment rose in the final quarter of 2009. Hosanna, Good News shout the pundits. Well, perhaps. The problem is that the 7000 new jobs created were all in the Public Sector. The picture was somewhat different in the Private Sector, where 61,000unfortunates were thrown out of work.
Consequently, as of the beginning of this year, although the total number of people in work was 28.86 million, almost a quarter of them, 6.1 million people, work for government in one form or another.

So, let's imagine a scenario in which someone whose salary is around 7% higher than the private sector equivalent, with a final salary pension inflation-proofed and guaranteed by the Government, is considering his options at the forthcoming General Election. On the one hand, he has Messrs Darling and Brown saying that to make wholesale cuts to public services would stall the recovery, feeble as it is, so their approach will be gently, gently. On the other, he has George Osborne promising to take an axe to public expenditure and, by definition, public jobs at the first available opportunity. All other things being equal, which of these is likely to represent the most attractive proposition to the ou Public Sector worker?
Now, from the gainfully employed, let's turn to the gainfully unemployed; in other words the multitude of those of working age who are, in official terminology, Inactive. There are 8.16 million of them, to be precise. Of that number, 2.31 million are students who are not in the labour market. 2.5 million are officially unemployed and drawing benefits of some kind. Many of these are desperately unhappy to be in that predicament and will do almost anything to get back to paid work of some kind or another.
But, unfortunately, a large number are not. There are whole areas of the UK where lack of a job is a fact of life, where several generations subsist entirely on benefits. In these areas, some of the shrewder ones realised long ago that it is more rewarding to be officially incapable of work through disability than to bother with unemployment and job seekers' allowance. There are nearly 3 millions claiming Disability benefit. Of that number, a surprising proportion, as many as 1/2 million apparently, are under the age of 25.
Given that this group will be a target for some serious pruning, it is difficult to see any incentive for them to vote Conservative at the next election.

The UK allows any EU citizen who is permanently resident here to vote in ALL elections. By contrast, a UK citizen resident in Ireland is allowed to vote in local and European elections there but not at a General election or in any national referenda. The same is true of most other EU countries.
That means that Poles and other newly-minted EU citizens from eastern Europe who have settled here in the last three to four years are all entitled to vote in the coming General Election. This new constituency of potential Labour voters was one of the planned benefits of Labour's drive for multiculturalism when it came to office. As we are all now well aware, the assumption was that these newcomers would not only be grateful to their Labour hosts but register their gratitude in the most practical way possible, by endorsing the Party at the General Election. Suitably galvanised, this group could easily swell the Labour vote by several hundred thousand come the day
Do not be surprised to see a concerted government campaign to persuade these newcomers to exercise their newly-acquired right to vote over the coming six to eight weeks; purely in the interests of Democracy, of course.

Take all of these groups together and what you get is a significant proportion of the population for whom the current administration is the principal source of income. Asking them to elect the Tories is akin to expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.

It's a free country

As a child growing up in London I was as argumentative as I am now. The only way that I would concede an argument was if you battered me senseless.
So, one of my favourite, regular Sunday morning outings was to Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park where I could watch Nazi's argue with communists, Methodists with Quakers and atheists with anyone of faith, to my heart's content. I remember, particularly, one black African dressed in traditional robes who harangued the crowd unmercifully on any topic, ranging from colonialism and slavery to the horrible English weather with equal fervour and passion. There was no subject that was taboo or off limits. You would see the occasional bobby on the fringes of the crowd, keeping an eye on proceedings. There was a lot of heckling and name-calling, much of it very personal and specific; but it was all part of the motley.
On Sunday afternoon, on the cobbles adjacent to the Tower of London, you could watch an escape artist struggle free from a tarpaulin wrapped in chains and pierced by various swords and other pointed objects: providing, that is, his pitch hadn't already been high jacked by Lord Soper, standing on a soap box and preaching his own brand of muscular Methodist Socialism to groups of bemused American tourists, argumentative off-duty dockers and occasional snotty little schoolboys like me.
One major boon of being English, planted in my unformed mind by these early experiences was that speech was free: That we all had an unalienable right to say precisely what we wanted on any subject under the sun. "It's a free country. I'll say what I like" was the ultimate clincher used in arguments by everyone from schoolboy to grizzled pensioner . I know, I used it throughout my school years and well into my late forties.
It's not an expression you will hear too much these days. It's not one that I employ at all any more. And for very good reason. England is no longer the home of free speech. People have been silenced, or at the very least reduced to whispers, on a whole range of topics by the insidious creep of political correctness and what is, spuriously, labelled equality legislation.
OK, things weren't perfect in my youth. Freedom of expression probably didn't seem too great a principle if you were black or Irish and subjected to racial insults; or a homosexual on the end of some queer-bashing vitriol. It was easier for a landlord to post a notice saying " No, blacks, Irish or Jews" than it was to get hold of a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover back then. But, the boundaries of "correctness" were a mixture of what was customary and generally accepted by the majority. This didn't mean that minority views or opinions weren't tolerated, they were, because the tradition of freedom of expression was breathed in along with the rain and the smog.
If people got hurt and offended, I am genuinely sorry. But, freedom of expression is not something that can be doled out in carefully weighed portions. Governments do not have any greater sense of what is right or correct than the rest of us. In fact, because they are vested interests with very specific congregations to succour, they tend to be much narrower than the public at large in their range of beliefs.
Witness the current administration, which has gradually eroded the rights of the majority in order to protect those of some very small, specific but highly vocal minorities.
This political correctness has manifested itself in all aspects of our lives; not least in people's reticence when it comes to speaking their mind. "You can't say that" is an expression heard in offices, pubs and homes whenever someone voices an opinion that strays from the conventionally acceptable on a raft of subjects ranging from immigration to homosexuality. The stick of multiculturalism has been used to beat people into submission and stifle grown-up, informed debate on whether or not it is sensible for a country with the highest population density in Europe - England - to encourage ever greater numbers of immigrants to come here.
There have been recent instances of sincere Christians, picketing a homosexual conference with posters containing biblical quotes, being arrested and convicted of hate crimes. Earlier this year, a couple who run a hotel was charged with a similar crime for debating Islam with a female convert to that particular religion. She, objected to them questioning her belief and called in the police. To their eternal shame, they reacted by arresting the couple under hate crime legislation.
Now, Harriet Harman is clouding the issue still further with the Equality Bill due to come into law in the autumn. Among other things, this will make it possible to charge a health club worker with discrimination if he - or she - offers a woman a lighter set of weights that they might offer a man. Protected religions will include any faith system including atheism and Jediism - if there is such a thing. Presumably, telling someone that Luke Skywalker is a comic character and doesn't actually exist will constitute an assault on the beliefs of a Jedi and result in some sort of criminal charge.
It sounds comical when considered in that light. But it's not. It is sinister and evil: Yet another brick in the wall imprisoning freedom of speech and expression.
If we continue along the same path and fail to counter the forces of political correctness no one in this country will ever win another argument by saying , " I can say what I like. It's a free country".

NB. Since writing this article, I have read a piece with a similar theme, written by PhilipJohnston in the Daily Telegraph, which is an extract from his latest book, title "Bad Law". Click on the link to read the article:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/philipjohnston/7494131/How-do-we-win-back-our-freedom.html