Cover Story

Let the people of England speak

Rod Liddle

01 January 2005

The BNP may be odious but, says Rod Liddle, there is something fishy about the arrest of its leader

And then there’s this. Griffin was forced to watch all his speeches with the coppers in attendance — but no single specific phrase was identified by the police as having contravened the laws against inciting racial hatred. Instead, the policemen explained to him that it was the totality of what he had said: in other words, we can’t quite put our finger on it, but we think you might have broken the law. But as I say, there’s nothing we can actually point to. Isn’t that approach a bit dangerous? And are we happy with the way in which legislation is invoked to punish people to whom we may be politically opposed?

For the man in the street, the taxpayer, the voter mulling over the question of law and order, there’s this question: West Yorkshire police spent an awful lot of money and an awful lot of man hours investigating a man who will almost certainly not face a criminal charge nine months later, no matter how liberally the charge of inciting racial hatred is interpreted. Is this a responsible use of police time and effort?

And despite the denials, don’t you suspect that this was precisely a politically motivated and, indeed, directed operation which will, in the end, do nothing to improve race relations and only ensured that a few more burglars and other such recidivists, who are a genuine menace to the public, were able to go about their business unhindered because of the priorities of this government? Would West Yorkshire police have spent so much time and effort on the case had it not been for political involvement from — as that errant officer put it — ‘higher than that’?

And there is the broader, more general philosophical point: as an indirect result of the War on Terror, our freedom to say what we believe is being swiftly eroded. It’s not just the Muslims who want people silenced or banged up: the Sikhs have been getting in on the act too, forcing a play which was critical of their religion to close. On the day it closed the Sikhs got support from a particularly fatuous spokesman for the Archbishop of Birmingham. He said that people should be free to criticise religion if they did so ‘responsibly’. What a pompous ass. Surely it would be better if God, rather than the West Yorkshire police or the Sikhs or Muslim community leaders, decided what constituted responsible criticism — and delivered His terrible judgment in that black nanosecond after we have drawn our terminal breath. Otherwise the law courts are going to be full for a while to come.