The tyranny of lawyers

Ihave spent most of the morning trying to convince people online that Huw Edwards’s conviction does not mean that all, or even a majority, of Welsh people are sexually attracted to children. ‘We thought it was just sheep. It isn’t,’ one furious interlocuter named only as ‘Ned’ posted with what I assume he thought was bitter irony. Another mentioned that Edwards’s supposed ‘friend’, from whom he procured the disgusting photographs, was also Welsh and that there had been recent, very serious paedophilia cases in both Swansea and Cardiff crown courts.

This is a perfect example of how false news is generated. Long before the end of these lengthy and malevolent exchanges, someone had argued that Owain Glyndwr hung around nursery schools with a bag of sherbet lemons and that our first Welsh king, Henry VII, was born to a woman who was 13 years old. I tried to rebut all this rubbish with hard facts – except the bit about Henry VII, which I discovered is actually true – but nobody would listen. They were borne aloft on an energising collective hatred and the truth was an unwanted interloper at their party. On another site, the thesis was different – namely, everyone who works at the BBC is a paedo, regardless or not of whether they are Welsh. The Marxist Blair Broadcasting Corporation is chock full of them! And so on, interminably.

We might worry similarly about the propensity of the public to buy into another theory, which is that we have a two-tier judicial system and that Edwards would be in prison right now if he had merely tweeted his approval of an anti-immigration march (if you’re on the right) or climbing gantries on the M25 (if you’re on the left).