Can an implication be a crime? Britain’s hate-speech laws are notoriously draconian—except for those who are chanting “jihad” at a pro-Palestine event, apparently. For the rest of society, a recent ruling has expanded the scope of hate-speech laws to a grim new level.
Earlier this month, Michael Chadwell, a former officer in London’s Metropolitan Police, was found guilty at London Magistrates’ Court of one count of sending by public communication grossly offensive racist messages.
Chadwell retired in 2015. The message, a meme he had not created but merely shared, was sent last year in a private WhatsApp group of other retired police officers. Now convicted under the Communications Act 2003, this “grossly offensive” message could land the 62-year-old former officer with a prison sentence of up to six months when he is sentenced in December.
The image that Chadwell shared showed parrots of different colours and children of different ethnicities with the words “Why do we cherish the variety of colour in every species except our own?” Below this was a Facebook comment: “Because I’ve never had a bike stolen out of my front yard by a parrot.”
The image contained no racial slur, nor did it mention any specific ethnicity. Chadwell was convicted not for the meme’s content, but for what it allegedly implied. The “absolute clear implication” of the post, ruled district judge Tan Ikram, is that “black people steal.” “It’s a clearly racist generalisation and characterisation, and caricature of ethnic people,” he added. “I have no doubt in my mind that it’s grossly offensive.” He rejected Chadwell’s argument that the image was merely a silly joke in the style of Monty Python.
Even if one does not accept Chadwell’s account (“oops, not too woke,” he wrote after sending the image), this ruling sets a very worrying precedent. Ikram has taken it upon himself to draw an inference from the image, and has then decided that this inference is grossly offensive and potentially warrants prison time.
Hate-speech laws, turning as they do on the concept of ‘offence,’ are already highly subjective and thus open to being politicised, raising the question of who decides what counts as offensive, and to whom. But the prospect of judges ruling on the putative “implication” of a message is a recipe for even more arbitrary tyranny.
It looks an awful lot like thought-policing. After all, making an implication and drawing an inference are both things that may or may not happen in someone’s mind. Who is to say what the correct interpretation of a given text is, what the author’s intent was, and whether these match up? (If this were straightforward, there would be little need for literary criticism, for one thing). All communication contains ambiguity, and whether a possible implication is taken depends on the reader. Indeed, even Ikram’s own description of the supposedly “clear implication” of the image is far from precise: does it suggest that “black people steal” or is it a “caricature of ethnic people” more generally? Yet despite being unable to say clearly what the image’s implication is, Ikram has seen fit to rule that it is criminal.
This sets an extremely censorious precedent: that, if a judge can infer a politically incorrect meaning from a message—even on a private group chat, and regardless of whether that meaning is intended—it could potentially land the sender in prison. This is a particularly worrying prospect for speech online, where irony and satire are frequent, and context is king. Given that such offences are subject merely to summary conviction, when these cases end up in court, innocence or guilt rest on the whim and interpretation of a single magistrate.
This situation is all the more worrying given that Britain’s judiciary contains judges like Ikram, whose record leaves little doubt as to the political views which motivate his rulings.
Ikram seems fully to have embraced cynical racial narratives which are common in the U.S., as evinced by a lecture he gave in February to American law students on “Diversity in the Judiciary.” He noted that black Britons are more likely to be stopped and searched or subjected to force by the UK police. He castigated the Metropolitan Police over the Gangs Violence Matrix, a crime database which it was forced to retire last year after a review found that 80% of those named on it were black. Ikram, following the dogmas of critical race theory, argued that such statistical disparities are evidence of police racism. Of course, this is not a valid inference to draw if one accounts for disparities in underlying crime rates. But this hasn’t stopped Ikram from attempting to change what he sees as a culture of racial bias in British policing, telling students, “We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
He even boasted how he had jailed for 20 weeks another former policeman, constable James Watts, after he posted in a WhatsApp group “offensive” memes mocking George Floyd, the 46-year-old African-American whose death in May 2020 sparked the Black Lives Matter riots. “This was a [former] police officer bringing the police service into disrepute,” he said. “So I gave him a long prison sentence. The police were horrified by that.”
Given his embrace of identitarian ideologies, few will be surprised to learn that Ikram waxes hyper-sensitive about speech only in select cases. In August, Ikram heard the case of “Sarah Jane Baker,” a transwoman (i.e., a man) who had been out on licence while serving a life sentence for attempted murder, kidnapping, and torture. In July, Baker told an audience of trans activists, “If you see a TERF [trans-exclusionary radical feminist], punch them in the fucking face.” Ikram somehow ruled that this was not criminal speech inciting violence against gender-critical feminists. Again using his gift for seeing into defendants’ minds, he decided that Baker was simply seeking “publicity.”
All this would be bad enough if Ikram were merely a rogue activist judge. But he and his ideas are in truth well embedded in the British judicial establishment. Ikram is among contributors to the Equal Treatment Bench Book, UK judiciary diversity guidance which employs critical-race-theory concepts like “systemic” or “structural” racism, “unconscious bias,” and “micro-aggressions.” Last year, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for “services to judicial diversity.”
In the past month, as protests have rocked Britain’s streets, the public have rightly been outraged to see “pro-Palestine” activists violate sacred monuments to our war dead with impunity, even as police zealously kettle and arrest any white “football hooligans” wherever they gather. Last week, after a hugely disrespectful pro-Palestine march marred the solemn remembrance weekend, an anonymous Met Police officer admitted the reason for the double-standard to the Daily Mail: “Put simply, senior officers are terrified of being accused of racism if they fully enforce the law against pro-Palestinian protesters.” Little wonder, given how extensively identitarian ideologies have captured the British justice system.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/britains-captured-justice-system/