A 50-year-old man has been charged with a public order offence after he was seen at a pub wearing a T-shirt mocking the Hillsborough disaster.
Paul Grange, from Worcester, was charged by West Mercia police with displaying threatening and abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
He may be a dickhead. But he is not as offensive, or as dangerous to the general public, as the man who shopped him or the police officers who proceeded to charge him.
Britain used to be a nice liberal country full of nice liberal people. Now it is just full of cI*nts. People like BiG and Rusty are everywhere and their values are prevailing.
“…displaying threatening and abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.”
Completely agree. Spelling & grammar are dreadful. Now, cops, about all these grocers..
Oh yeah, there were a number of people charged before wearing a t-shirt that wasn’t exactly complimentary about a certain Mr T. Blair, can’t remember what happened there, bloody stupid.
On the other hand with that specific t-shirt even without this new(ish) law he could very easily be charged and sent down for quite some time for behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace, which is an awful (and abused) catch all but in this case probably justified, you’d only need one relative of someone there to see that and there’d be more than just a breach of the peace.
However this is perfectly permissable
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=islamic+protests+london&client=firefox-b&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXprGJ44PNAhVkJcAKHYcYAI0Q_AUICCgC&biw=1600&bih=750#imgrc=y1u6ur71MlD8RM%3A
MatGB – “you’d only need one relative of someone there to see that and there’d be more than just a breach of the peace.”
Only if you think that northerners have such poor impulse control that they would invariably (and it could be reasonably predicted that they would) react with violence.
Besides, that sounds like a perfectly acceptable solution to me. Civil Society sorting this out without the need for the state to intervene. As actually happened – the community expressed its opinion when the landlord kicked him out. What more was needed?
SMFS
I was with you until you wrote:
“People like BiG and Rusty are everywhere and their values are prevailing”
Which added nothing to your well-made point. I occasionally find myself disagreeing with BiG and Ironman (who, incidentally, is one of the most acute critics of the Murphatollah on here), but I don’t find them illiberal or intolerant – or regard them as the enemy.
Funnily enough, there are countries with minority Muslim populations where they don’t have Islamic “acting out”. It’s almost as if Muslims in the West were being encouraged to believe such behaviour was OK.
Or indeed those who parade around displaying the hammer and sickle, the direct symbol of an ideology responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. People like that cause me alarm and distress, yet no-one arrests them.
The real “threatening and abusive writing likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress” was writing the law in the first place.
RlJ
I am reminded of the incident last year (?) when Spanish police fired rubber bullets at illegals attempting to land on the Andalucian coast. Cue for severe reprimand from Brussels.
“Bollocks to Blair” t-shirts landed a few people in hot water back in 2005-ish. For all Britain’s pretence at being a liberal country, things like this remind you that we don’t have any freedom of speech. This kind of freedom is far more important than knowing which celeb has been bonking which non-celeb.
“we don’t have any freedom of speech”
CENSORED
Yet more “free speech, but…”
Whilst out walking yesterday I passed a middle-aged imbecile wearing a ‘Red Brigade’ T-shirt. What an utter scumbag.
I wanted to punch him, very, very much. But I didn’t. That’s because I’m a grown-up, and I have self-control.
If a man can be charged for wearing an ‘offensive’ T-shirt about Hillsborough, then why can’t we be charging students and Dick heads who walk around wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, Che Guevara, or Lenin? Can someone whose family were abducted, raped, tortured, or murdered by a Communist regime (and here we are spoilt for choice) not press charges against those people?
CENSORED
Before Tim’s amusing censorship, that read: That’s bollocks.
Two things to bear in mind….
Hillsborough….must never be forgotten, the truth must out, the victims must be mourned forever, the culprits must be brought to book, shrines must be built, statues erected, programmes made, the story told…….
Heysel….Hey come on, that was ages ago, let the past be the past.
‘I am reminded of the incident last year (?) when Spanish police fired rubber bullets at illegals attempting to land on the Andalucian coast. Cue for severe reprimand from Brussels.’
Was that Andalusia or Ceuta? (Not that it matters for your story, just interested.) They’ve been very robust in the latter for a long time, inc building a big fuck off fence.
“f a man can be charged for wearing an ‘offensive’ T-shirt about Hillsborough, then why can’t we be charging students and Dick heads who walk around wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, Che Guevara, or Lenin? Can someone whose family were abducted, raped, tortured, or murdered by a Communist regime (and here we are spoilt for choice) not press charges against those people?”
Maybe its time we started playing these people at their own game. Start reporting such examples to the police. Say you are alarmed and offended at the public display of the symbol of murder, torture and repression of tens of millions of people.
Its precisely because we say nothing that nothing is done, but the people who wear these sort of leftist T shirts have no compunction in complaining about whatever ‘offends’ them.
Jim is right.
The way to sink such utterly risible regulations is to repeatedly ram them up against the wall. Use them to process ever more specious and ridiculous complaints until the police and the courts are made to look utterly stupid.
This is one problem as others have said can be solved by self policing, without the need for the State to intervene.
Many years ago when I was at Portsmouth Polytechnic there were many Cornish people there. One night a group of them had a bad taste party. The guests who turned up as Penlee life boatmen had to make a rather hurried effort I understand. Cornish people don’t do irony.
Interested
You’re right: it was Ceuta.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/10638607/Spain-admits-firing-rubber-bullets-at-migrants-swimming-to-enclave.html
It’s almost as if everyone has forgotten Barry Thew…
Still awaiting arrests:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1384726/Ed-Milibands-regret-link-Maggie-grave-man.html
“So being a dickhead is a criminal offence now. Who knew?”
On the Continent its been one for a while now – and that attitude crossed the channel a decade or more ago. You saw that report about the Scottish git who got arrested for teaching his girlfriend’s pug to to the Nazi salute?
Its even threatening to spread across the Atlantic to here.
As US has already ruled that personal discomfort doesn’t trump someone’s civil rights (which they trotted out in support of the gender bathroom argument) then I would think any law there like this would fall foul of free speech rights. Sometimes there is something to be said for a written constitution.
Agammamon:
The Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute was copied by Hitler from the standard American (U.S.) flag salute. The U.S. didn’t change it to the present form until we were at war with Japan (and with Germany). I was in school at the time and can remember the changeover. Not until much later (1953, when I was graduating high school) were the words “under God” added.
Most of the “Founding Fathers” considered the matter of an official “pledge of allegiance” to be demeaning to the very idea of a free people. The pledge of allegiance was adopted in 1895 after years of urging of Congress by a Communist (whose name escapes me at the moment).