So how exactly was JD Vance wrong when he denounced this? Everybody on here knows that I’m not a fan of JD Vance but when he’s right, he’s right. A society where police come for people over online messages has gone very much off the rails.
Truly incredible that these are the descendants of Anthony Trollope’s characters who had more of a backbone that today’s Brits can begin to imagine.
A society where police come for people over online messages has gone very much off the rails.
Unfortunately British society has definitely turned Orwellian, and not recently. The rot started to set in much earlier, already under recent Conservative governments. The trigger moment if I am not mistaken is the way the legal landscape changed as a result of the Stephen Lawrence case and the ensuing Victims Act.
The murder of a black young man in 1993 was the George Floyd moment for British society. As a result, a lot of crimes today are considered as such based not on objective elements but on the presumptive victim’s feelings. In such cases it is how the victim perceives a person’s actions that determines whether a crime was committed.
There is also a new type of offence which leads to police involvement and this bears the positively Orwellian title of non-crime hate incident (NCHI), that is to say, an action or behavior perceived to demonstrate hostility or prejudice.
There are more people currently serving time in jail in the UK (around 3000, average sentence: 18 months) for this kind of freedom of expression cases than for similar cases in Putin’s Russia. Welcome to Britain 2025!
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So then, freedom of speech is at least temporarily dead in the land whose freedoms two hundred years ago served as the basis for our own “freedom of…”
laws written into the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. That’s disappointing and a bit scary, but I don’t think that such restrictions are going to be reaching our shores anytime soon.
The current “mutual hostile insults” mode of public discourse in America, where Hilary and Trump are allowed to hurl mean-spirted but not completely off-base comments at each other without fear of the “acceptable manners police” kicking in their front doors, is encouraging. We appear to have made a complete break with Europe over the question of enforcing so-called “polite speech,” and that is a very good thing for America.
Dreidel
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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