Britain’s “Hate Speech” Trap

In one of the more famous Zen Buddhist riddles, or koans, an army officer meets with a monk and attempts to frustrate the contemplative monastic. “A man has been raising a goose in a bottle since it was a tiny gosling,” the officer explains. “Now it is fully grown and has no space left in the bottle. Without hurting the goose, and without breaking the bottle, how can the man get it out?” The monk doesn’t answer the question and instead moves the conversation to the weather. A little while later, the meeting coming to an end, the officer stands up to leave and approaches the door. As he reaches for the handle, the monk cries out “Oh officer!” As the officer turns, the monk smiles and continues, “There. It’s out!”

This particular koan is a good example of koans in general, in that the reader or student is presented with an impossible riddle, an intellectual trap that is totally unsolvable by logic. The goal is to sublimate the thinking mind to the instinctual mind that takes precedent in living “in the moment,” or “being present.” The koan came to mind recently while I read the horrifying news from Britain that a man has been found guilty of incitement to hatred merely for producing stickers bearing such non-aggressive slogans as “Reject White Guilt”, “Nationalism is Nurture”, and “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066.”

How has British speech legislation been used to secure this criminal conviction and, to return to the idea of the koan, how can pro-White advocates advocate for anything when even the more passive elements of their argument have been criminalized? The riddle is straightforward: What can be said when saying anything runs the risk of imprisonment?

The Public Order Act 1986: A Jewish Contrivance

Samuel Melia, a long-serving activist and a figure apparently well-known and liked in British nationalist circles, has been convicted under section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, which makes it a criminal offence to publish or distribute “written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting.” In the wording of the legislation, someone is guilty of an offence if “(a) he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or (b) having regard to all the circumstances, racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.” Melia was also convicted of “encouraging or assisting the commission of the offence of racially aggravated criminal damage,” presumably because, in an act of race terrorism, the stickers may have left tiny residues of glue upon removal.

As far as legal texts go, there is much left to interpretation in the Public Order Act 1986. It’s a highly subjective piece of work. Consider, for example, the necessary but inevitably tendentious speculation on a defendant’s intentions. This is to say nothing about “regard to all the circumstances” or how exactly the likelihood of “stirring up hatred” is to be measured. The document has always been vague, and because it has remained unaltered for almost 40 years, we might assume that this was by design.

Britain’s speech law is demonstrably Jewish in origin and design. The impetus behind the Public Order Act 1986 can be traced back to the 1910s with early murmurings among Britain’s Jewish elite about the potential criminalization of anti-Semitism. Following the Jewish bombing of the King David Hotel, then British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, in 1946, Jewish delegates attempted to pass a resolution “outlawing anti-Semitism” at that year’s annual Labour Party Conference.^[1] However, the bombing cost the Zionists a great many non-Jewish friends within the Labour movement, and the proposal was crushed. Following the notorious Sergeant’s Affair, in which Jewish terrorists murdered British soldiers in barbaric fashion, another explicit proposal to outlaw anti-Semitism was introduced in the House of Commons, but was rejected at its first reading in 1948. Direct and explicit efforts such as these continued to fail. In Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policy Making Since the 1960s, Erik Bleich notes that “during the late 1950s and early 1960s Jewish groups sought laws against anti-Semitic public speeches made during this era, but there is little evidence that this pressure achieved substantial results.”^[2]

Further attempts to achieve speech laws were attempted through stealth, in that they concerned race more generally rather than Jews explicitly. These measures were also introduced, though unsuccessfully, with the assistance of willing White M.P.s with a track record of assisting Jews. Bleich notes that “a small number of individual Labour Party Members of Parliament repeatedly proposed anti-discrimination laws. In the early 1950s, Reginald Sorensen and Fenner Brockway each introduced ‘color bar bills’ designed to prevent discrimination against blacks on British soil.”^[3] Brockway attempted no less than nine times over nine years to achieve laws against ‘discrimination’ and free speech. Although the full extent of the involvement of these politicians with Jews is unknown, a record of Parliamentary debates shows that Sorensen had been involved in assisting Jews since at least the 1930s, even participating in a 1945 symposium titled “The Future of the Jews,” where he gave a lecture to his mostly Jewish audience on “Our Common Humanity.” We have evidence that around the same time, Brockway was breaking the law by assisting Jews with forged passports and documents enabling them to enter Palestine.^[4]

Since 1945, the Board of Deputies of British Jews had also been working on drafting a “group libel law” that it eventually hoped to get passed in Parliament.^[5] Efforts to further tighten libel laws were made in 1952, when Jewish M.P. Harold Lever introduced a Private Members’ Bill modifying Britain’s libel laws for the first time in over fifty years. However, Lever’s efforts were later mauled by a hostile Parliament to such an extent that by the time his Bill became an Act of Parliament, his provisions were not extended, as he and his co-ethnics had hoped, to cover groups.^[6] Britain’s first legislation containing any such provision as prohibiting ‘group libel’ was introduced in Parliament by Frank Soskice, the son of David Soskice — a Russian-Jewish revolutionary exile. Scholars Mark Donnelly and Ray Honeyford state that it was Soskice who “drew up the legislation” and “piloted the first Race Relations Act, 1965, through Parliament.”^[7] The Act “aimed to outlaw racial discrimination in public places,” though it was soon felt, in Jewish circles, that it hadn’t gone far enough. Crucially, the 1965 Act created the Jewish-led ‘Race Relations Board’ and equipped it with the power to sponsor research for the purposes of monitoring race relations in Britain and, if necessary, extending legislation on the basis of the ‘findings’ of such research.

In 1985, another Jew moved to criminalize expressions of White racial solidarity when M.P. Harry Cohen introduced a “Racial Harassment Bill” to Parliament. Sociologist Rob Witte reports that Cohen’s attempt only failed because of “lack of parliamentary time.”^[8] The following year, Cohen made a second attempt, which failed, only for Jews to return to more stealthy methods when racial elements were included with the much broader Public Order Act (1986).

The Public Order Act had been introduced to Parliament by Leon Brittanisky (renamed Leon Brittan) and supported primarily by Malcolm Rifkind, a descendant of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. It was another clever piece of work. Brittan’s team had been tasked with drafting a White Paper on Public Order to deal with a series of miners’ strikes and demonstrations. Although issues of race were not remotely related to the events provoking the White Paper, Brittan saw that the government was eager to pass legislation restricting the miners as soon as possible and, sensing that the wide-ranging bill would endure little opposition, he ensured that additional elements were included, such as the criminalization of “incitement to racial hatred.”^[9] It is Brittan’s clever little addition which has posed problems for more vocal racial nationalists in Britain today, and has led to the criminal conviction of Samuel Melia for “stickering.”

Legislative Evolution

In the early years of the Act, sentencing on conviction was a maximum of two years in prison and this was normally reserved for blunt expressions of animosity towards non-White groups. John Tyndall for example, founder of the British National Party, was one of the earliest victims of the Public Order Act and was sentenced in 1986 to 12 months in prison, serving four. In 1998, Tyndall’s successor Nick Griffin was given a nine-month suspended sentence for publishing his Who Are The Mindbenders? pamphlet in the course of which he pointed out Jewish influence in the British mass media and how this had flooded the nation with “anti-British trash.”

The Act was problematic, and had a gagging effect on British nationalism, but its reach was sufficiently blunt, and sentences relatively short, for Jonathan Bowden to remark during one of his speeches in the late 2000s that one could still discuss many controversial topics in public so long as this was done in an abstract or slightly indirect way. This seemed partially proven in 2004 when Nick Griffin was arrested and charged again, this time for remarks he made in a pub about Muslims and Islam. Although subjected to a trial, both Griffin and his co-accused Tyndall were found not guilty. Today, however, we can have no doubt that Bowden’s analysis no longer applies.

The vague wording of the Act has allowed the transformations in British culture to carry it to greater extremes without the need for an entirely new law. And there can be little doubt that culture has shifted radically further to the Left in the last 20 years. An amendment led to the extension of the maximum sentence from 2 to 7 years, with the result that sentences are now averaging 3–4 years rather than 10–12 months.

More important, the law has been gradually reinterpreted in light of new cultural ‘understandings’ of hate. ‘Hate’ used to mean that you had extreme and quasi-violent feelings of animosity towards a particular individual or group, but we now live in an age where hatred can be something as simple as insisting on the biological basis of gender, or conducting a survey of intelligence or crime alongside racial taxonomies. Hate has moved from being understood as an active and aggressive position against a given entity, to being something as banal as adopting a neutral or non-radical position on a sensitive cultural question treasured by the Left. Crucially for Mr. Melia, ‘hate’ now also encompasses the position that Whites as an ethnic group have interests and should defend them. Stickers with slogans like “No White Guilt” are seen as hateful, and part of an extreme and dangerous ideology. In such a context, we can assert that Britain has criminalized White self-defense.

Hate Crime Entrepeneurs

The increasingly extreme reach of British hate speech law has led Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society, to call for the government to “hold an inquiry to determine, review and potentially repeal all elements of the law that conflict with freedom of speech, for example: Section 127 of the Communications Act, offences of stirring up hatred under the Public Order Act 1986, and the offence of ‘indecent or racialist chanting’ under the Football (Offences) Act 1991.” Of particular concern to Civitas are what it calls “hate crime entrepreneurs,” or “groups with a vested interest in presenting their members as victims of hate crime” and are thus able to “influence hate crime legislation.”

Civitas point out that the very concept of hate speech has led to a loss of freedom orchestrated by an unelected elite of lawyers and intellectuals.

Each new Act of Parliament and clarification of police guidance introduces a more subjective element into the law. The state, either through the Crown Prosecution Service or the police, comes to define what is offensive, threatening or abusive. Such understandings are grounded in a perception of the ‘lived experiences’ of ‘victims’ as members of historically oppressed groups and a belief that words can have an impact as harmful as an act of physical violence. … Every aspect of people’s lives will come under legal scrutiny in order to promote a set of state sanctioned values that have been determined by lawyers rather than voted on by the electorate.

Civitas explain that “identity groups are represented by ‘hate crime entrepreneurs’ who are incentivized to report ever increasing harms experienced by members of their community. The law comes to play a role in affirming the identity of victim groups, recognising suffering, re-educating offenders about the ‘correct’ way to think and sending a message to the rest of society about the values deemed ‘appropriate’.” In other words, society is undergoing an incentivised brainwashing and the reduction of freedom across the board. All minority identity groups have a vested interest in expanding definitions of hate crime to encompass the groups they represent, and obviously they have a vested interest in seeing increased reporting of hate crimes committed as a basis for their own future fundraising.

The groups insinuate themselves, in undemocratic fashion, into the police and legal structure, with one group noted by Civitas as boasting “we have also established joint training between the police and Crown Prosecution staff to improve the way the police identify and investigate hate crime.” So the very manner in which the police see crime and speech is being determined by non-elected minority agents. Civitas also make some comments which match up well with the historical and contemporary record of Jews ensuring their place as a privileged and protected elite within Western societies.

Such organizations lobby for better protections for their members. In order to secure these protections, they are incentivized to increase the reporting of hate crimes committed against members of their particular identity group. This lends itself to ever looser definitions of hate crime and ever more expansive cohorts of victims. Furthermore, many groups that lobby on behalf of particular communities receive government funding for their work. For example, Challenge It, Report It, Stop It reports on plans to support a range of groups such as the Jewish Museum, Show Racism the Red Card, Searchlight Educational Trust [founded by a Jewish communist] and Faith Matters’ Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks (MAMA) project.

Jewish, Muslim, and other groups hold almost constant “meetings with legal and academic experts, police and the Crown Prosecution Service (‘CPS’), charities and civil society groups, and numerous individuals with an interest in hate crime laws.” The hate crime entrepreneurs thus “play a significant role in determining the assumptions and theoretical underpinnings for the Law Commission’s analysis.”

In other words, it is the activities of these groups, as well as the problematic Jewish-led Public Order Act 1986 itself, that have led to the current predicament of Samuel Melia for mere stickering. Mr Melia is the victim of a vast and corrupt “hate crime” industry that is fuelled both by material greed and by a seething and entirely genuine hatred of the native peoples of the British Isles. To that extent we can say that the nation is in fact host to a hate crime of gargantuan nature and scope, but that it is totally forbidden, and now illegal, to speak its name.

^[1] P. Medding, Studies in Contemporary Jewry: XI: Values, Interests and Identity, 108.

^[2] E. Bleich, Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policy Making Since the 1960s, 42.

^[3] Ibid, 41.

^[4] C. Knowles, Race, Discourse and Labourism, 172.

^[5] D.S. Wyman, The World Reacts to the Holocaust, 617.

^[6] C. Adler (ed), The American Jewish Year Book, 1953, 234.

^[7] M. Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics, p. 115, & R. Honeyford, The Commission for Racial Equality: British Bureaucracy Confronts the Multicultural Society p.95.

^[8] R. Witte, Racist Violence and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, France, and the Netherlands, p.71.

^[9] T. Brain, A History of Policing in England and Wales Since 1974, p.104.