Put a smile on your dial. Or else.

Ann Farmer

November 27, 2024 8 Reactions

This left-liberal minority sees itself as speaking for the more numerous but less powerful and prosperous minorities, but the solutions they propose conveniently coincide with their own vested interests. They fail to ask whether poor women might prefer the practical help offered by pro-life vigils, merely sympathising in a solipsistic way, along the lines of “If I were you, I wouldn’t want a child”.

Poor women and minority women, without the luxury of luxury beliefs, get the majority of abortions but this keeps the clinics open for those who feel they might need one at some point, even if they never avail themselves of this uncaring “healthcare”. As the advertisers would say, “They have abortions so you don’t have to”.

Goodwin recalls that a few years ago, a former policeman, Harry Miller, took the College of Policing to court after he was warned that “a transgender lyric he had tweeted was step one of five towards genocide” and required “necessary intervention”. Thankfully he won the case. The judge noted:

“The effect of the police turning up at [the claimant’s] place of work because of his political opinions must not be underestimated. To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom. In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

Goodwin comments that just “as actual levels of racism and prejudice are falling rapidly across Western societies, the rise of these ‘non-crime hate incidents’ is fuelling a creeping and deeply oppressive climate in which everybody is encouraged to spy on everybody else … we are urged to be instinctively suspicious of, if not turn against, one another.”

We have been here before, remember? There are priest-holes across the country to prove it. During the Reformation, the penalty for being Catholic – being hanged, drawn and quartered – was a more definitive way of being cancelled. And neighbours were paid to spy upon neighbours. It all has a very contemporary ring.

Admittedly, it made the news when a prominent journalist was doorstepped by the police and interrogated about an anonymous non-crime hate speech report. But don’t think that it will stop. Progressives never change their minds, they just change the subject. Lesser-known individuals will continue to quietly suffer harassment in those “abortion protection zones”.

What comes next, now that the government has banned silent prayer as a thoughtcrime? Will we be forced to cheer when the word “abortion” is mentioned? Could Orwell’s nightmare come true?

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. … to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.”

Oh well, it might be a good way to ensure that everybody in Britain is smiling, 24/7, indoors and out.

If you're British, do you feel threatened by hate speech laws? 

Ann Farmer writes from the United Kingdom.

Image credit: Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, who was arrested for praying near a British abortion clinic / Alliance Defending Freedom UK