Britain's Soviet Censorship Laws
How Communists Subverted Human Rights Law, and How Keir Starmer is Weaponising it to Censor his Critics
Unless Ed Miliband’s energy policies caused a blackout in your area this week, you will have read that police in England and Wales recorded a non-crime hate incident against a nine-year-old for calling a classmate a “retard”. Other absurd examples, procured via freedom of information access requests by the Times include: two secondary school girls who said another student smelled “like fish”; a vicar who stated Biblically-accurate views on same-sex relationships; and someone who called a Welsh person a “sheep shagger.”
This followed Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson getting a knock at the door from two officers on Armistice Day, informing her an anonymous accuser had reported a year-old tweet of Pearson’s which had offended them. The police disclosed neither which tweet had been reported, nor who had made the report — and corrected Pearson, saying “It’s not the accuser, they’re called the victim.” Essex Police have since opened an investigation under section 17 of the Public Order Act, as to whether or not Pearson posted something “likely or intended to cause racial hatred”. Under scrutiny, Essex Police released an extract from the recorded exchange with Pearson, where officers informed her that “It’s gone down as an incident or offence of potentially inciting racial hatred online. That would be the offence.”
The Guardian then revealed that Pearson had deleted the offending tweet over a year ago, and that the person who reported it is a former “public servant.” The post was initially reported to the Metropolitan Police as a potential breach of the Malicious Communications Act (1998) in November 2023. An NHS doctor, Nishant Joshi, has also boasted about trying to “place a hard limit on [Pearson’s] ability to write columns” in an interview, following her deleted tweet. Given the Home Office was just exposed for a report which called the grooming gang scandal a “grievance narrative” by “right-wing extremists”, we shouldn’t be shocked by such delusional progressivism from public sector employees.
Pearson’s case has since been dropped, after sustained public pressure from the likes of Elon Musk, who declared “This is insane. Make Orwell Fiction Again!!”; and, on another occasion, that “The UK has become a police state.”
I wrote last month, for The European Conservative, about how the police in Britain keep files on law-abiding members of the public, and note down any time someone complains that they have been offended by a remark or social media post.
Cliched though it might be to compare all censorship to Big Brother, Starmer’s increasingly unpopular government is taking on the most jackbooted characteristics of Orwellian IngSoc. But they have long had allies embedded in the Home Office, working to thwart the agendas of government ministers who had hoped to do some actual conservatism for once. To wrestle control of the wheel of our self-driving woke state would require a complete clearout of the civil service, College of Policing, and the judiciary. It would also necessitate a repeal of the guidance, laws, and legislation which have legitimised criminalising the private thoughts and conversations of the British public. As of yet, no aspiring insurgent political force has committed to such a task. Until it does, each of us awaits our turn in Room 101.
Non-crime hate incidents were introduced in 2014, by the College of Policing in their Hate Crimes Operational Guidance. They were adopted after the 1999 Macpherson Report called the Metropolitan Police “institutionally racist”, following the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Police were encouraged to record a “hate incident […] regardless of whether or not they are the victim, and irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element.” Not only do non-crime hate incidents require no evidence to be recorded: but officers are also warned against engaging in “secondary victimisation” by asking the complainant for evidence. The person who files the complaint is called a victim by virtue of the fact that they reported being offended.
Despite it being a non-crime, they show up on the accused’s permanent record — which could prevent them from getting a job if a role requires an enhanced background check. They may never know they have these black marks against their name, either, as police are under no obligation to notify you if you have a non-crime hate incident logged against you.
34 police forces across England and Wales recorded 119,934 non-crime hate incidents between 2014 and 2019. The Free Speech Union discovered this doubled to over 250,000 between 2019 - 2024. From June 2023 – 2024, over 13,200 non-crime hate incidents were recorded in England and Wales.
also republished these statistics, with commentary in a piece on his Substack this week:No wonder more than 200,000 burglaries in England and Wales went unsolved last year. And no wonder everything from shoplifting and mobile phone theft now appear de facto legal in modern Britain. Our police are too busy monitoring words at the expense of tackling actual crime.
Take Essex Police, for example, which is overseeing Allison Pearson’s case. In the last two years alone, Essex Police logged 1,500 non-crime hate incidents while simultaneously being criticised for failing to ‘promptly resolve non-emergency calls’.
The doubling followed the founder of Fair Cop and former police officer Harry Miller taking the College of Policing to court, after a Humberside police officer said a transgender lyric Miller had tweeted was step one of five towards genocide, and required “necessary intervention.” In the ruling, Justice Knowles said,
“The effect of the police turning up at [the claimant’s] place of work because of his political opinions must not be underestimated. To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom. In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”
Although the High Court ruled non-crime hate incidents had violated Miller’s right of freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, they said recording non-crimes was necessary to prevent real hate crimes. A later Court of Appeal ruling disagreed, ruling Chapter 6 of the Hate Crimes Operational Guidance was not “necessary in a democratic society.”
Then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman tried to keep police honest by passing new guidance into law with the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022). But the standard of what police deem “trivial, irrational and/or malicious,” and not worthy of recording as a non-crime hate incident, is skewed by the diversity, equity and inclusion training that departments across England and Wales undergo. How can they have a reasonable standard of what constitutes hate when they’ve been told to look for offence under every rock and floorboard.
Furthermore, Braverman’s guidance did the unthinkable: it abolished the dwelling defence. Under the Public Order Act (1986), an Englishman couldn’t be prosecuted for an offensive statement made in the privacy of his own home. (The fact that he could be for ones made in public is absurd, but that’s by the by these days…) But under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, police are instructed to record a non-crime hate incident against someone if they are reported for offensive comments made in their own home. Laughing stock of a Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime and Public Order Bill was criticised for doing exactly that: prosecuting people for things said in the privacy of their own homes. But now police in England and Wales are encouraging family members to turn into informants for jokes which might offend minorities, and are punishing people with blotches on their permanent record when they haven’t broken the law.
All of this was done, and made worse, under the conservative government. Now Labour have picked up the reigns, and intend on going further and faster. Although Chancellor Rachel Reeves told GB News “I don't think [non-crime hate incidents] is the best use of police time,” the Home Secretary does not agree. In August, The Telegraph reported that Yvette Cooper planned to repeal any guidance implemented under the previous Conservative government which advised police to exercise restraint when recording non-crime hate incidents. Neither does Keir Starmer: with the Prime Minister saying,
“It's important that the police can capture data relating to non-crime hate incidents where it is proportionate and necessary to do so to help prevent serious crimes which may later occur.”
But, as Harry Miller has explained, his case against the College of Policing revealed that no empirical evidence exists, nor have any studies been conducted, to prove that non-crime hate incidents reduce the likelihood of hate crime.
But let’s say they did: does that excuse them? As Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s attempt to thwart the Higher Education Freedom of Speech (Act) on behalf of censorship-prone Chinese students shows, this Labour government considers free speech to be an obstacle to their political goals, rather than an inviolable right. Although Phillipson will face legal challenges to her attempt to defy an act of Parliament, this will not stop Labour from trying to implement censorship with an iron fist.
Keir Starmer’s new Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, founded the Centre For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — which was exposed last month to be at the centre of a transatlantic conspiracy to “Kill Musk’s Twitter”. On the 16th of August, at the height of the civil unrest following the Southport murders, the CCDH met with officials from the Home Office, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Ofcom, and the counterterrorism internet referral unit at the Metropolitan Police to advocate for “emergency powers” to censor “misinformation” online. No matter how many of these nefarious efforts to censor lawful speech and independent journalism are publicised, the intent to control public debate and contain public outrage remains.
The second-order effect of non-crime hate incidents is the abolition of trust in the rule of law. Sir Robert Peel founded the police on the principle of consent: that, because “The police are the public and the public are the police,” there must be a bond of trust between them. But now, the best practice is to get out your phone and record every interaction with the authorities, and not agree to be interviewed without a lawyer or the likes of Fair Cop present. The default assumption is that the police are out to get the British public, on behalf of whichever racial, religious, or sexual minority is offended on any given day.
The fact that the Metropolitan Police were called racist twenty-five years ago is no excuse to punish law-abiding members of the public. To prevent a total breakdown in the rule of law, and to reinstate the entitlement of lawful free speech, as the traditional pillar of English political life, non-crime hate incidents must be abolished.
Any political movement seeking to restore the liberties which seem self-evident to every Englishman must commit to removing them from the law outright, and expunging every last one recorded since 2014 from innocent persons’ records. Otherwise, Britain will continue to descend into the Ingsoc police state depicted in Orwell’s infamous Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The apparatus with which Labour will continue to subject the native peoples of these Isles to socialist tyranny is human rights law.
I discussed the prospect with barrister Anna Loutfi on this week’s episode of Tomlinson Talks.
As Loutfi explains, a cohesive body politic — a people, in a place, with shared customs, values, and interests — precedes the codification of laws. A homogenous population produces a rule of law. For example, English Common Law was a way of arbitrating disputes with a shared cultural backdrop of what it meant to be English. That cultural understanding was never subjected to doubt, or revision by the mass accommodation of outsiders from foreign cultures.
However, human rights law arose to manage interactions between competing identity groups, brought about because Western nations became more ethnically fractured by post-War immigration. Simultaneously, the jurisdiction of law came to encompass the globe: through supra-national institutions like the European Court of Human Rights, and the United Nations. It had the initial noble goal of making Frane and Germany play nice, to avert future World Wars — but these institutions have long outlived their purpose.
As I explained in a previous essay for Courage Media:
a third reason has emerged to revisit the events and aftermath of the Second World War. Carlson and Cooper lament how London, no longer majority English, has lost its parochial identity. I have lived here for a quarter-century, and can attest to how unpleasant my city has become. This is due to unprecedented demographic change: with 1.2 million migrants moving to a country the size of New York state every year. When a criminal foreign national is due to be deported, human rights lawyers frustrate the process with appeals to Article 8 of the ECHR. This same statute was cited in an ECHR ruling which compels all signatories to take costly climate action because hot weather violates the rights of pensioners who want to take “longer holidays”. The rights enshrined in different political and technological conditions have been strained beyond credulity, and that’s without mentioning the Soviet meddling with the UN’s Declaration. As David Starkey states, they exist now not to protect individuals, but to enable aggrieved ‘minorities’ to attack ‘majorities’. There exists a painful contradiction between the story Brits tell themselves: victors of the Second World War, but penalized by costly immigration and cultural degradation. Any complaint is met with accusations of being “Far Right”, a racist, and a Nazi.
Churchill is not the monocausal culprit of this state of affairs. But his legacy is complicated by his involvement in establishing institutions and treaties that have outlived their purpose. Some are captured entities: like the UN’s Human Rights Council, counting China, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar among its members. Others are antiquated, with the definition of “refugee” stretched to encompass billions living below Western economic standards, and Muslims who, since October 7th, have broadcast genocidal intent toward the very Jews these laws were written to protect.
One such institution is the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
At its inception, it was subverted by the Soviet Union, which introduced a carve-out for the state to protect itself and its citizens against “fascism” — described by the UN delegate as “the bloody dictatorship of the most reactionary section of capitalism and monopolies” — in Article 19, protecting the right to freedom of expression.
As such, human rights became about the state protecting minority groups from host majorities; or, rather, the weaponising of law and state power by aggrieved minorities, against host majorities.
Ever since, human rights law has been a means for socialist revolutionaries to nip at the heels of liberal democracies, by dividing and conquering “marginalised communities” as client groups. Liberals’ fundamentally faulty egalitarian view of human nature immobilises them to these claims of oppression because they infer discrimination from a disparity. Therefore they do the bidding of communists, like the Critical Race Theorists, by passing anti-discrimination laws which discriminate against heterosexuals, Whites, and men, in favour of non-Whites, women, and the ever-expanding LGBTQ+ acronym.
So, in the name of antiracism, the UK’s government, civil service, police forces, and judiciary have come to resemble the Soviet politburo and NKVD. They will censor, suppress, and discriminate against the law-abiding, tax-paying native population, all in the name of “human rights”.
Loutfi and I discussed the Soviet origins of human rights law, and who and why they are being weaponised against homogenous law—making populations in the US and Europe, in the following clip:
You can watch our full discussion on LotusEaters.com. It was graduate-seminar-level stuff, and really worth your time.
I explored the fertile comparisons between Keir Starmer and Joseph Stalin’s premiership of the Soviet Union further, in my latest essay for Courage Media.
Dissent is intolerable to Marxists with a roadmap to utopia, or an even stronger contempt for counter-revolutionary enemies. “Anti-Rightist” action was how Chairman Mao transformed China into the one-party state it remains today. In 1957, Mao commanded Deng Xiaoping wage an “anti-rightist campaign” against half-a-million political opponents, to set the stage for the Great Leap Forward. Eventually, Mao urged Xiaoping to exercise restraint, explaining that “if we kill too many, we will forfeit public sympathy and a shortage of labor power will arise.” But during the subsequent Cultural Revolution, thousands more were accused of being “rightists”, and publicly shamed, berated, beaten, and killed. 17 million students were banished from cities to be re-educated in Manchuria and Xinjiang, in labor camps. 2 million were murdered during land expropriation. A total of 45 million died during the ensuing Great Famine. We should begin to be concerned when Keir Starmer so easily denounces whole swathes of concerned citizens as “Far Right” — a term synonymous with fascist, Nazi, and irredeemably evil. […]
The new Labour government rules in a way which goes against the free spirit of Englishmen. This is why Starmer has plunged 49 points in popularity since the July 4th general election. Their dishonesty and disregard for the equal application of the law violates Britain’s common law tradition and Christian inheritance. […]
From this, England derived the presumption of innocence. William Blackstone based his famous formulation on the dialogue between God and Abraham in Exodus, where Sodom and Gomorrah would be spared if ten innocent men could be found. This same insistence on the worth of a life, despite social standing, is why Magna Carta was drafted to constrain the attempt by King John I to become an absolute monarch, like those on the European continent. This is the difference between English common law, and for example, French imperial law. As Sir John Fortescue commented in On the Laws and Governance of England, there is continuity between Biblical, Mosaic law and the laws which constrained the powers of English Kings. Just as Caesar’s Earthly power was challenged by the incarnation of Christ, no king may claim to serve God while depriving his people of habeas corpus.
No wonder that Starmer, the first atheist Prime Minister, holds no candle for such traditions. Nor did those who led the Soviet states that he idolized in his youth. Paul Kengor compiles horrific accounts of how the Securitate tortured priests and Christians in Ceaușescu’s Romania. In Pitești, Christians were mock-baptized with buckets of excrement, beaten to the point of fainting for not renouncing their faith, and defecated on during mock crucifixions. Their hatred of Christianity had its roots in Marx and Engels’ texts: with Christianity derided as “the opium of the people”, blocking man’s ability to live by bread alone. In fact, one’s possession of wealth, and perpetuation of the false consciousness of Christianity and capitalism, was enough to warrant “the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples”. Whereas Christianity places a premium on the worth of human life, the socialism for which Starmer remains a sycophant has no problem with the persecution of those it decrees to be revolutionary adversaries. Whereas Solzhenitsyn knew the line between good and evil is a moral law inscribed on every human heart — and that “even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained [and] even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil” — Starmer is unwilling to extend the same consideration to anyone he sees as “Far Right”.
Allison Pearson is also not the only critic who has been mistreated by the politicised police and justice system.
Since coming to power, Starmer’s Labour government have released thousands of violent offenders to make space for people who posted offensive things on social media.
“Keyboard warrior” Wayne O’Rourke was imprisoned for three years for “publishing written material online to stir up racial hatred” after alleging the Southport murders were a terrorist attack carried out by a Muslim. Will O’Rourke have his sentence revised in light of new evidence? Grandfather Peter Lynch was jailed for two years and eight months for shouting at police during one of the protests; and was found hanged to death in his cell on October 19th, aged 61. Tragically, nothing can be done to bring Lynch back to his family. But will anyone in government at least have the humility to admit fault and apologize? […]
On October 22nd, 1,100 prisoners were released after completing only 40% of their sentence to “ease overcrowding”. These include those convicted of kidnapping, grievous bodily harm, and torturing a child on Snapchat. This followed September 10, when 1,700 inmates were also released — including 37 freed by mistake, who have since been returned behind bars. Despite Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood promising this was a one-time mistake, a GB News correspondent caught a prison escapee later that same day.
16,000 prisoners have been released early since October 2023 — with over half of those let out in the first quarter of 2024 already back in prison. Recalled prisoners are now 1 in 7 of all inmates. If Labour wanted to make space, they could deport the >11,000 foreign nationals in Britain’s prisons to their countries of origin. In fact, they could stop importing foreign criminals altogether: with immigrants arrested 34% more often than the native population, and convicted 2.5 times more for crimes in other European countries. But for some reason, this has been ruled out as an option — all the while Britain boasts the highest number of foreign offenders in Western Europe.
That’s if they make it to prison at all. Neil O’Brien MP has published that, since 2007, people have been spared jail despite having over 50 previous convictions on 50,000 occasions — including 4,000 people who had over 100 previous convictions. Magistrates have been instructed to spare violent offenders from prison sentences in order to make space for participants in summer’s civil unrest. It’s as if Starmer took this challenge to his newfound power personally, and marshalled all his experience as a seasoned prosecutor against his political opponents. Those given suspended sentences include a child rapist who broke the terms of his release agreement; a former Metropolitan Police officer convicted of six offences of possessing category-A child sexual exploitation images; and thirty other pedophiles in possession of thousands more images, as profiled by The Sun. Hit-and-run driver Mohammad Rashid, who struck and killed pedestrian James Risk in “very good lighting conditions” in 2022, was sentenced to only 300 hours of unpaid work and a 27-month driving ban. In fact, the judge, Jeremy Richardson, who sentenced Peter Lynch to his lethal stay in prison had previously handed a suspended sentence to a woman who killed a cyclist while driving, and to a repeat-offending pedophile, citing “concerns about his mental health in prison”.
Others have been spared deportation to their countries of origin, despite committing heinous offences. A convicted Indian pedophile won his ECHR appeal to remain in the UK, after an independent social worker concluded his deportation “would be too harsh on the man’s children”. A Portuguese drug-dealer, despite prior offences, also appealed to Article 8 of the ECHR and won the right to remain, arguing “if he was forcibly removed from Britain it would harm his mother’s mental health”. A deported Albanian burglar who snuck back into Britain was spared deportation, appealing to the ECHR on the grounds that he had married and impregnated his Lithuanian girlfriend. And an Albanian murderer, who lied about his identity on his asylum application, won an appeal to remain in the UK using, you guessed it, the ECHR.
There appears to be no willingness to reconsider their “Rightist” purge, even after Donald Trump’s decisive victory across the Atlantic.
The prospect of Britain becoming a “Woke North Korea” — isolated from Europe and the USA, as they return to national sovereignty and social conservatism — is more likely than a Machiavelian bureaucratic class “putting Woke away” for expedient reasons of political legitimacy.
I discussed this with my friends
and Harrison Pitt on Deprogrammed this week.The idea that our ideologically-captured international political and business class are intellectually dynamic enough to pivot from unpopular intersectional grievance-mongering seems to have been disproved by the recent debacle with Jaguar.
As I discussed with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV on Wednesday, quite what a bunch of black transsexuals living on Mars, dressed like characters from the Hunger Games, has to do with classic cars is beyond comprehension.
This new advert, just like international human rights law, can only be understood as another tiresome exercise in anti-White, man-hating social engineering.
As I explained in a previous essay for The Critic, representation in media serves the following purpose:
Hannah F. Pitkin provides a useful definition:
Representation, taken generally, means the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact. […] What matters is being made present, being heard; that is representation.
Any representation effort values something over another, and feels it warrants raising the salience of.
The purpose of the Jaguar ad is not to sell cars; but rather to be another brand in a homogenous chorus trying to bring an offence-free utopia into being.
The people who made the ad, the people featured in the ad, and the very few people praising the ad are self-described social outcasts: “marginalized people” who are not ordinary — who would like to “delete” ordinary, and who want their ailing consciences and insecurities soothed. Therefore, they make everything, even if unrelated, about validating their lifestyles — about themselves.
The Jaguar ad — as with all Woke rebrands — is a bunch of ethno-narcissists androgynous misfits, and sexual eccentrics who are really insecure about not fitting in, making a classic car brand about themselves because they have a problem with the white men who buy them.
These people are who the human rights and censorship regime is empowering; and this is why it deserves our unqualified opposition, if we hope to salvage and reconstitute a working civilisation from our intolerable present.