The police are coming for your WhatsApp groups. And if that doesn’t strike terror into your heart, you’re not using WhatsApp properly.
The hapless former health minister and Labour MP for Gorton and Denton, Andrew Gwynne, hasn’t just been sacked by Keir Starmer for his offensive messages about pensioners, Mossad and Diane Abbott. He’s also been reported to the police by a local councillor, meaning that, right now, Greater Manchester’s finest are weighing up whether to open a file on ‘Trigger Me Timbers’ – the group in which Gwynne inflicted his off-colour, often racially charged jokes on some of his fellow Labourites.
Personally, I think we need to draw a bright line between public and private here. How people talk – and joke – can be wildly different when they assume the door is closed.
Perhaps Gwynne was revealing his true, ugly self when he suggested Abbott was only speaking at Prime Minister’s Questions because it was Black History Month. Perhaps when he said American psychologist Marshall Rosenberg sounded ‘too Jewish’, ‘too militaristic’ (apparently a play on the word ‘martial’) and could potentially be an Israeli spy, he was betraying a secret anti-Semitic streak.
But it seems unlikely. And without a window into Gwynne’s soul, it’s hard to tell where any prejudice ends and a weird sense of humour begins. WhatsApp groups, after all, are the closest the tech nerds have come to replicating the pub chat, where offensive humour reigns. I’d rather not damn people forever on the basis of their worst, most outrageous missives.
In any case, I hope we can all agree that these messages should not be a police matter. If for no other reason than self-preservation. For while most people would never indulge in jokes such as these, we all know it can take a hell of a lot less to ‘trigger’ the speech police these days.
We live in a time in which a man can be fined for making a comedy skit about his pug becoming a Nazi. In which an autistic teenager can be arrested for telling a police officer she resembles her ‘lesbian nana’. And in which schoolgirls can have ‘non-crime hate incidents’ recorded against their names for saying another pupil smells ‘like fish’.
I’d rather not damn people forever on the basis of their worst, most outrageous missives
Worse still, censorship has begun to creep into the private online sphere, too. Paul Bussetti was given a ten-week suspended sentence in 2022 after he filmed the burning of a cardboard effigy of Grenfell Tower, complete with black and brown figures in the windows. He sent the video to two WhatsApp groups, before someone posted it online and it went viral.
Bussetti was convicted under Section 127 of the Communications Act, which criminalises ‘grossly offensive’ online speech. Serving police officers and assorted other scumbags have also fallen foul of this law for sending flagrantly racist messages, videos and memes to private groups on social-media apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat.
Of course, what Gwynne said doesn’t come close to that level of bigotry. But we should be equally concerned whenever any joke told in private sparks calls for a police investigation. This is the definition of tyranny.
Plus, the explosion of woke censorship in recent years shows us that what is seemingly reserved for racist speech today will be visited upon simply controversial speech tomorrow.
So no, let’s not cancel Andrew Gwynne. And let’s definitely not prosecute him, either. Instead, let’s rip up the thicket of laws that pose a threat to everyone’s freedom and privacy.
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