Imagine a country where a man could reporting a crime or a potential crime to the police but who ends up being charged with what he said when witnessed the crime? Sadly there’s no need to imagine such a society or a country as that country is Britain.

The Daily Sceptic has published one of the most bizarre examples of anarcho-tyranny in British law enforcement that I think I’ve ever seen. Here’s what the Daily Sceptic said about this astonishing and worrying case:

“The Free Speech Union (FSU) has fought more than 7,000 cases since 2020 and, frankly, I thought I’d seen it all when it comes to the police overreacting to an ‘offensive’ remark. Surely, the Met dispatching five armed officers to arrest Graham Linehan when he got off a flight from America for a tweet is the absolute nadir? But no. We were in court last week defending a man who was being prosecuted for saying something verboten while driving his car. The only person who heard it was his four year-old son, yet he was charged with “threatening or abusive behaviour” with a racial aggravator.

The story begins in April last year, when our member – let’s call him Craig – was driving his son back to their home in Glasgow after a day out at an amusement park in Falkirk. At around 4pm, when he was exiting the M80, he was cut up by another vehicle, forcing him to swerve to avoid a collision. He got the impression the other driver was drunk and called the police from his car. In due course, both vehicles stopped and the police arrived. They declined to breathalyse anyone, but took our member’s dashcam footage to see if any laws had been broken.

A week later, the officers returned the footage and told him that an offence had indeed been committed – but by him, not the other driver. His ‘crime’ was muttering the words “smelly black bastard” under his breath seconds after almost being driven off the road. The windows were closed, so no one outside the vehicle could have heard him, and the other driver wasn’t looking in his direction so couldn’t have seen him say it. The only evidence against Craig was the dashcam footage he’d turned over to the police in the hope of seeing the dangerous driver brought to justice.”

Thankfully in this astonishing case of police overreach and ideological capture there was a positive resolution. When the FSU member appeared in court he was acquitted within minutes thanks to the legal help that the FSU could give him.

However many may be missing the underlying point here which is that this matter should never have been pursued by Police Scotland in the first place. The force didn’t seem interested in going after the allegedly dangerous driver but instead went after the innocent driver for ‘wrongspeak’.

This is just one example of the anarcho-tyranny that Britons live under where words are punished but crimes are not. This case shows that you don’t have to be the sort of person who sticks their head over the parapet to run into Britain’s ludicrous and dangerous ‘speech crime’ laws. You just need to be an ordinary man with his small child who mutters something under his breath that nobody outside of the car would have heard were it not for the audio recording that was handed to the police.

If you are wondering why there is so much public disgust at the nation’s institutions, including the police, then look no further than cases such as these, cases which should not even be considered as crimes let alone brought before a court.

Links

Daily Sceptic article on this case

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/11/12/beware-the-crime-of-muttering-to-yourself/

Free Speech Union video on the man’s acquittal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtzx6yxazUs

Join the Free Speech Union

https://freespeechunion.org/