Special Ed: Conservative Hero

Wait..... did I sleep through Conference Season?

No, it just seemed that way. It says something about the pointless of the modern party conference that the closest we got to an actual conservative point during the whole nightmare came from Ed Milliband.

Personally, I liked Special Ed's idea to divide businesses into 'good' and 'bad' categories with different laws and tax rates for each. It's like a liberal version of the Flat Tax, a way to sweep away bureaucratic complexity in favour of a more streamlined system. True, you could say it's a little arbitrary and open to corruption, but not noticeably more so than what we have now, and at least we won't have the pretence that it's anything other than the raw exercise of government power.

All that's without considering the other upside. In so far as the leader of Britain's main party of the left has called for the state to abandon the whole 'equal under law' thing in favour of the legal equivalent of a blank cheque, with nary a dissenting voice on the left, Special Ed has exposed the true nature of the left's civil liberties frauds. What could be more injurious to liberty than the state claiming an open-ended right to arbitrarily victimise any business it pleases? Don't ask Shami and pals though - they're too busy investigating allegations that a terrorist was given lukewarm milk on his coco-pops.

Reminder: Liberty Is Not Actually A Civil Liberties Organisation

Here's Universal Shami preaching in defence of the vital civil right to parade round in fascist regalia. The thing is there's at least two problems with her position.

The first problem is that the pro-regalia tendency don't just want the freedom to wear the uniform of this nation's enemies in time of war, they want the state to repress the freedom of anyone who might think worse of them for being fascist weenies, lest they discriminate against these charmers.

Problem number two is that non-partisan campaigning group Liberty only ever seem to get excited about the liberties of certain people. If the right to wear enemy uniform in wartime is an essential part of British liberty, how about the vital Right to Comedy?

Was the gag funny? Probably not, but neither are most club acts, and no one's suggesting their performances should be interrupted by cops jumping out shouting 'Satire Squad! Drop the mike, you're under arrest'! Armed entertainment criticism would be a strange use of police resources at the best of times, but there's the other thing that there may not even have been an actual offence committed.

I'm not a lawyer, but these people are, so let's hear what they say:

Threats can be calculated and premeditated, or said in the heat of the moment. The defendant does not have to have the intention to kill but there has to be an intent that the person to whom the threat has been issued would fear it would be carried out. Where it is doubtful whether the threat carried the necessary intent a charge under section 4 Public Order Act 1986 may be appropriate. Refer also to Public Order Offences incorporating the Charging Standard elsewhere in the Legal guidance.

OK, so let's see what Sec 4 says:

The following types of conduct are examples which may at least be capable of amounting to threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour:

* threats made towards innocent bystanders or individuals carrying out public service duties;

Hey, I'll take a shot in the dark here and say that the definition of 'towards' requires the accused to actually address the alleged victim, not be tapping away on a twitter feed that the victim has to be specifically told to look for.

These airport guys remind me of nothing so much as the old joke about the woman who called the police because her neighbour was sunbathing nude in his garden. The cop comes round, looks out the window and says 'I can't see anything', and the woman says 'you can if you go upstairs and climb on the wardrobe'.

All of which is by way of saying, they must have gone to an awful lot of trouble to be harassed, alarmed and distressed.

To the point, in so far as a young man exercising his right to free speech has been seized by agents of the state on a charge that's legally absurd and morally ludicrous, it is exactly the type of thing a soi dissant civil liberties organisation should regard as nearly as important a freedom as the right to coerce employers into hiring people dressed in enemy uniform.