My dear deluded Madam
@leicesterliz,
One observes with a mixture of fatigue and faint amusement your latest proposal to whet the Online Safety Act yet further against those wicked souls who dare “incite violence and disorder” amid national crises.
How very convenient.
It permits the governing class to strike the pose of stern protectors of the peace whilst the root causes of that very unrest—failures squarely attributable to ministerial incompetence and ideological blindness—continue to fester unmolested.
Let us speak plainly, as Englishmen once did.
The State, through its servants in Parliament, bears a solemn and enforceable duty to safeguard the lives and property of the King’s subjects.
This is no airy abstraction drawn from dusty tomes, but a principle rooted in Article 2 of the ECHR (as domesticated by the Human Rights Act 1998) and long affirmed by the courts: the positive obligation to take reasonable steps to protect life where a real and immediate risk is known (see Osman v United Kingdom and the line of authorities following it).
A government that imports unvetted masses, refuses to deport foreign criminals with the vigour the public demands, and then responds to the inevitable disorder not with remedial action but with fresh gags on free speech, has manifestly abdicated that core duty.
The recent outrage in Belfast—another knife attack by a Sudanese national, predictably followed by public disorder—is not some spontaneous eruption of 'Twitter' malice. It is the predictable harvest of policies that prioritise the stranger over the citizen and legalistic hand-wringing over effective protection.
Public anger does not spring from thin air or mere online provocation; it arises when the primary function of government—securing the realm—is subordinated to every other fashionable fetish.
To then reach for yet more censorship is not statesmanship; it is the classic refuge of those who would rather punish the symptoms of their own misrule than confront the disease.
As one perceptive correspondent has rightly suggested, we require statutory duties upon ministers, with personal accountability for wilful neglect of public safety, and even mechanisms for dissolving a government that has comprehensively failed in its most elementary responsibility.
Such ideas are not radical. They are the bare minimum required if the social contract is to retain any meaning.
A polity unable to hold its rulers to account for endangering the people has already descended into something resembling anarcho-tyranny.
Tightening the Online Safety Act will achieve nothing save to confirm the public’s suspicion that the real threat, in the eyes of officialdom, is not the criminal element but the Englishman who notices.
History is littered with regimes that answered legitimate grievance with repression rather than reform; the results have seldom been edifying.
One can only hope that wiser counsel eventually prevails over this instinct to treat the British public as the problem rather than the victims of serial governmental dereliction.
Until that happy day, the nation will continue to observe, to remember, and—within whatever shrinking bounds remain—to speak.
Yours in profound contempt for those who invert the ancient duties of office,
A Gentleman from the Old School
#Beflast #Remigration