23 August 2016
City Hall, headquarters of the London Mayor. Photo The Meat Case (CC-BY-SA 2.0)
London's Mayor Sadiq Khan has reacted to reports of a rise in cases of alleged verbal and physical abuse in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum result. His office of policing (MOPAC) has been granted Home Office funds to set up a Police Online Hate Crime Hub with the cooperation of social media providers. The idea is to protect individuals and “communities” (unspecified) from Internet “trolls”.
Experience, though, has shown that police investigators are poorly equipped to differentiate between legitimate expression on the one hand, and racism or threats of terrorism on the other.
As recently as August 2016 the popular Siddiqui brothers who feature on Channel 4’s Gogglebox were reported and investigated by Derby police for posing in camouflage and joking in a caption on Facebook about taking part in an ISIS training day.
In another case in 2014 a Northern Irish pastor charged with making “grossly offensive” remarks online about Islam was subjected to an 18-month investigation and prosecution before being found not guilty this year. The judge ruled that “it is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances”.
In an extension of state intervention, supported by the proposed Counter-Extremism Bill, volunteers are to be authorised by MOPAC to report on non-criminal as well as criminal online hate incidents. Such snooping could well inhibit the sort of passionate working class arguments that rage online about ethnicity, identity, religion and democracy.
Free speech is in danger of being criminalised, and social divisions sharpened. The test of the correctness of Khan's mayoral policy will be whether it unites or divides us.