A salutary tale for our times. An Englishman who the judge condemned as a “keyboard warrior” has been jailed for three years for posts he made on Twitter/X during the recent UK riots. When Wayne O’Rourke from Lincoln first appeared in court, the BBC reported that prosecutors alleged his posts contained “anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric.”
Yes, you read that correctly: the police arrested the idiotic O’Rourke because they decided his online words were not only anti-Muslim, but also “anti-establishment.” Amid all the soul-searching chatter about the causes and consequences of the brief outburst of unrest in UK towns and cities, that should stand out as a warning for the future.
Of course the 35-year-old was not eventually convicted of writing that “Starmer has basically said it’s us against them. Hold the line,” because using “anti-establishment rhetoric” is not yet formally a crime. He was convicted instead of publishing written material likely to stir up racial hatred, after falsely claiming that the three young girls whose murder in Southport preceded the unrest were killed in a terrorist attack by a Muslim.
Nonetheless, the state’s careful coupling of “anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric” in court is a new political landmark. It captures the way in which the authorities, from Keir Starmer’s Labour government downwards, are exploiting the thuggish antics of a few ‘far-right’ rioters to try to outlaw any criticism of the Westminster elites’ disastrous policies on everything from mass immigration to law and order.
By equating anti-migrant and anti-establishment feeling, they have somehow twisted the public’s anger over the brutal murder of three working class girls in Southport to tar the working classes as racist ‘Islamophobes’ who must be censored if not incarcerated.
The last Democracy Watch warned that, although the riots might be over, the political “Counter-riot has only just begun.” “The UK establishment,” as I put it, “is interested not just in clearing the streets of rioters, but clearing the political battlefield of opposition views.” That counter-riot has spread even faster and more furiously than we might have imagined.
Since the short-lived unrest, which included localised clashes with police and a few reprehensible attacks on migrant hostels and mosques, well over a thousand people have been arrested. Many of them have been charged and fast-tracked through the courts and into jail with a speed we did not think our broken justice system capable of achieving.
Nobody would argue against those guilty of violent crimes being properly punished and imprisoned. However, some of the severe sentences handed down for relatively minor offences make it look as if the courts are settling political scores rather than upholding criminal justice.
It is not a stretch to see these cases as a form of show trials. No, we are not talking about the sort of merciless political frame-ups practised by the authoritarian regimes of history, and there are no death sentences at the end. Yet these are show trials, in the sense of turning the courts into a theatre for a show, a morality play, intended to make an example of the guilty and re-educate the public as to what they can or cannot do and say.
Top government sources have told The Times of London that Prime Minister Starmer, himself a former director of public prosecutions, “directly intervened” to ensure that the prosecutors and courts cracked down fast and hard.
“He leaned really heavily on the justice system,” said one official. “He knew from experience that people needed to see the system working to amplify the political message that rioting would not be tolerated. Prosecutions and sentences needed to be very visible.”
Yes, in the name of defeating the ‘far-Right,’ criminal trials are now being used “to amplify the political message” to the rest of us. This is British democracy in 2024.
There is no space here to detail the many sentences that have been imposed so as to make the government’s message “very visible.” They range from a child charged with riot in Sunderland, to drunk pensioners jailed for shouting “Who the f**k is Allah?” and chanting “You’re not English anymore” at the police near Downing Street in Whitehall; from a woman locked up for pushing a wheelie bin towards police before falling on her face in Middlesbrough, to a “quiet” 53-year old carer from Cheshire jailed for a single, appalling post—“Blow up the mosques with the adults in them”—to her Facebook community group (which didn’t incite anybody to do anything except report her to the police); from a gay couple imprisoned for “dancing and gesticulating” in front of riot cops in Hartlepool, to a 51-year-old man jailed for violent disorder for “making a nuisance of himself” on a Plymouth protest, despite even the judge suggesting he had committed no offence. There will be many more to come. All unpleasant incidents no doubt, and perhaps they really are all horrible specimens of humanity. But do their cases really live up to the “Anarchy!” headlines?
Let’s be clear, this counter-riot is not just about dealing with public unrest. Starmer’s intervention has also led to police trawling social media, actively fishing for hidden thoughtcrimes. The current director of public prosecutions boasted to the media that special teams of “dedicated police officers” were “scouring social media” for “insulting or abusive” material, which they would “then follow up with arrests.” If insulting or abusive words are now to be put on a par with rioting, they really are going to need bigger prisons to accommodate all the rounded-up social media users.
No doubt some will say Starmer was right to intervene this way, that keeping the people safe should be the government’s priority. The question is, however, which people? The Labour leadership somehow didn’t have such a hardline response to the Black Lives Matter unrest that broke out in Britain after the killing of George Floyd in America. On that occasion, far from “leaning really heavily on the legal system” to act, Starmer and his deputy only leant on a knee in his Westminster office, to show the rioters they had their sympathy.
But unrest in working class communities, of course, is treated differently, branded as ‘far-right’ and racist. The reality gap between the worldview of the political elites and the public is starkly confirmed by the August Ipsos issues poll, conducted straight after the brutal murder of three young girls in Southport ignited riots.
It shows that 34% of the British public—rather more than the 20% of the electorate who voted for Starmer—now say immigration is a big issue for Britain, putting it top of the issues list for the first time since 2016. Even more starkly, the proportion who now see crime as a big issue has shot up to 25%, from just 6% last month.
Little wonder that the political establishment wants to equate public anger about these issues with racism, declare slogans such as ‘Stop the Boats’ to be outside the accepted limits of debate, and in the process deny those millions of people their democratic voice.
Some conservatives may feel rather uncomfortable with being put in the radical, anti-establishment camp today. Yet it’s important to recognise that the ruling leftist establishment—“a group in a society exercising power and influence and resisting change,” just as the traditional establishment once did—is on the other side of the battlelines in everything from the crucial fight for free speech to the wider culture wars.
Anybody who wants to change the direction in which British and European society is heading, and stand up for free speech and democracy, needs to ignore their ‘far-right’ name-calling and declare that we are all anti-establishment now.