April 11, 2022 - 4:47pm
Ali Harbi Ali, the man who murdered Sir David Amess in October of last year, has been convicted. According to Sky News: “The Old Bailey heard how Ali was a “bloodthirsty” Islamic State supporter who had spent years hatching his plot to kill an MP.”
Not only did Ali plot his assassination in cold blood, but he chose Sir David after weighing him against other potential victims, and making multiple reconnaissance trips to the Houses of Parliament.
The story is a grim reminder of the risks facing people in public service, and the difficulty of balancing the accessibility of the constituency surgery with the demands of an increasingly security-conscious age.
What it tells us very little about, however, is ‘online harms’. The Sky report makes no mention of Ali sending anonymous abuse to any of his potential targets.
Yet in the wake of the assassination, that seemed to be all politicians could talk about. There were demands that the Prime Minister pass ‘David’s Law’, as the Guardian put it, “to crack down on social media abuse of public figures and end online anonymity”.
We didn’t need the trial to tell us that this was a bizarre connection. Even at the time, the police weren’t making any connection between the murder and complaints around online anonymity.
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SubscribeFar right extermists lurk behind every corner. Islamists are just friendly misunderstood people, I’m surprised white privilege or patriarchy wasn’t blamed for David Amess’ death
After Sir David’s murder, I was at first puzzled, then utterly sickened by the narrative being followed as loads of women MPs tried to make it all about them.
Now the perpetrator’s been tried, during which he readily confessed and calmly explained his reasoning and the actions he’d taken, there’s still no acknowledgement of the truth!
Felt like we spent a lot of time listening to Brendan Cox and even the rise of the far-right on line? Ignoring Sir David’s unswerving support for Friends of Israel and Iranian dissidents. The latter seeming the more likely cause for Ali to wander so far off-piste in search of a victim.
Don’t be too hard on the poor old left. The murder of David Amess caused them a meltdown. Only old white blokes are supposed to be wicked, not women, Muslims, black guys or whatever. They don’t know what to do with themselves now.
They know what to do: kick up a fuss about the wrong cause, distracting attention from the true cause.
To do away with online anonymity will only accelerate the future that technocrats fear. The ideas that go against the so-called “mainstream” that has been propped up for many years now by the ever-lingering fear of being cancelled for not having the right opinions or ideas.
This has led to a dam holding up years of floodwaters of suppressed openness for ideas more radical and the want for change. The dam has cracked in recent years and has only been relieved of some pressure by the ability for people to escape the real world to a virtual one and express their opinions in secret.
If the technocrats were to take away this final space of freedom it’s likely the dam would finally crack fully open. So be it if I can’t express my opinions in secret anymore.
And when people finally realize that there opinions and ideas aren’t so against the mainstream as they once thought, the floodgates will finally be open.
Governments may get away with failing to acknowledge reality in the short term, but they typically pay the price at the subsequent election/referendum.
The electorate see the blindingly obvious – even if “the bubble” can’t/won’t.
To use a cliche – “hard cases make bad law”. Unfortunately we are seeing this a lot, especially when the law is prefaced by a person’s name. Sometimes I think many people feel “something must be done”, but legislating for one particular “hard”, outlying case and applying that across the board, almost always leads to problems. In this particular case it’s a red-herring anyway as they problem is not hate-speech it’s hate-acts. Perhaps he was radicalised on-line, but that a case for seeking out these web-sites, not making laws to cover other aspects of the internet, even though I do deplore the sort of disgusting bile level at our representatives.
That’s exactly what popped into my mind before I scrolled down and read this post.
In our society today, the immediate response of politicians and journalists is to change the law, and to do so in haste.
Politicians compete with one another to prove that they have acted, while journalists gorge on filling the airwaves or screen or page before looking for the next hot topic.
In the meantime, three important things are damaged:
-attending to the enforcement of existing laws
-wise consideration before enactment of the effectiveness of a new law, and the possible unintended consequences (such as more repression of the fundamental principle of free speech),
-the creation of a vast and complicated body of statute law.
Cumbersome, unworkable, unenforced, offering grand incomes to a specialist few (often on the back of the tax payer) – ‘the creation of a vast and complicated body of statute law’…indeed, there should be just 10.
What have we become when we allow our most able, committed, hardworking public servants to be executed in cold blood? Neave, Cox, Amess,…defenceless and unprotected, the ideal conditions for cretinous cowards. Governace? …who would feel safe with a poisoned chalice like that?