We are now in the position in Britain where the police instead of protecting us from crime or investigating crime now do the bidding of those who some might call political extremists. Nobody is safe from police forces who use their powers not to go after criminals but to harass journalists and writers who have angered extremists such as the Green Party.
That knowledge that journalists are now getting police attention for merely saying that they don’t want Green canvassers knocking on their door should chill us to the bone. However this is what happened to respected journalist and broadcaster Jonathan Sacerdoti back in June of this year.
Mr Sacerdoti was at home when he got a knock on the door. It was a plain clothes female police officer wanting to have ‘a voluntary interview’ with Mr Sacerdoti over his alleged conduct towards a Green Party canvasser. According to Mr Sacerdoti he had told a previous Green canvasser that he didn’t want to be visited by them again (sensible choice) but the Greens ignored him and later on sent a second canvasser around to his house. Mr Sacerdoti said that he walked with the first canvasser for a few doors to challenge the canvasser’s views, something that in my view has always been acceptable behaviour especially when the canvasser is representing a party that hangs around with and supports those who want people like Mr Sacerdoti dead or oppressed. Despite it being clear that Mr Sacerdoti didn’t want Green canvassers on his property they sent another one later.
Mr Sacerdoti said in the Spectator magazine:
“Ten weeks later, the police arrived. I had harassed nobody – I had argued, heatedly, with a party representative who’d come to my home after being told not to. Canvassing carries an obvious risk: voters may answer back.
Though she came to fish for ‘evidence’ from me, the police officer let slip far more than she’d intended to, in answer to my questions. The woman in the keffiyeh hadn’t even made the complaint. It was the earlier canvasser, who she revealed was actually a Green candidate then and now a councillor, and who alleged I’d called her ‘terrorist scum’. I had not. Worse still, the Greens knew all about me and had a ‘system’ to collate their intelligence, according to the policewoman.
My professor looked on aghast – he’d presumably read Kafka; now he had front row seats, or had even become an extra to my Josef K.
‘What evidence has she got?’ I asked, then: ‘how can you harass someone that comes to your house…knowing that I didn’t want her here?… She came to harass me in my home.’
Harassment in law requires a course of conduct involving at least two separate incidents, aimed at the same person. I didn’t know either woman, didn’t know where they lived or worked, or in fact anything about them other than their allegiance to the nasty party. They knew where I live, what I do, my ethnicity and religion, and even my husband’s name. I know who I think was harassing who.”
Mr Sacerdoti has got the Free Speech Union involved in this case and I will wait and see what the outcome of this case is. However Mr Sacerdoti’s case is one among thousands of cases where Britons have been harassed by police merely for exercising their right to freedom of speech which in this case amounts to telling unwanted political canvassers to go away and why they should go away.
This is the second case that I’ve come across where the Greens or their representatives have allegedly used the police as their own personal bully boys, the other case is that of Alistair Hilton who was visited by police in a pub for criticising a Green councillors alleged involvement in the removal of a pub’s riverside seating for their customers (see link below). I wonder how many similar cases of Greens using the police to harass or intimidate opponents are out there and which have not come to my attention? If the police can do this to someone as high profile as Mr Sacerdoti then they can do it to anyone. How many other cases are there where someone has been visited by the police or arrested not because they are criminals but because they’ve objected to the actions or words of politicians or those who wish to be politicians or those canvassing for them? It must be a much bigger number than many might expect it to be.
Mr Sacerdoti added:
“After the officer left, I called my lawyer, who was funded by the heroic Free Speech Union. Even the police seemed to sense the problem. The complainant, whom they insisted on calling the ‘victim’, was pressing them to act, though the CPS itself recognised the weakness of an allegation with literally no evidence. Maybe, they said, I’d like to write a letter of regret, to make this all disappear?
Regret? For what? I’d broken no law. I declined. If ‘voluntary interviews’ and letters of regret are becoming the new tools for silencing lawful political speech, we must refuse them at every opportunity.”
Well said there Mr Sacerdoti. We must resist these attempts to silence Britons and our political speech. If they are going after someone as respected and as high profile as Mr Sacredoti then they’ll go after you as well.
Please read the rest of Mr Sacerdoti’s excellent but worrying piece via the link below.
Links
Original Spectator piece about this latest attempt at political harassment.
https://spectator.com/article/the-green-party-tried-to-get-me-arrested/?edition=us
Alistair Hilton harassed by police over issue of pub outside seating in London.
Be the first to comment on "From Elsewhere: A politicised police force obeying the orders of the lunatic Greens."