In the UK, it has become depressingly common for the police to try to silence people who express unpopular opinions – even when it is perfectly legal to do so, writes FSU Advisory Council member, Prof Andrew Tettenborn, for Spiked.
And yet a recent trickle of legal victories offer some hope for street preachers.
Last week, a Christian street preacher successfully won compensation from Police Scotland for being wrongfully arrested for a homophobic ‘hate crime’. Angus Cameron was preaching in Glasgow city centre when he was handcuffed, searched and held in a police van for more than an hour in 2022 following a complaint that he had been using “homophobic language”.
Mr Cameron was never charged and denied saying or doing anything criminal but Police Scotland logged a hate incident, rather than crime, under his name. With the help of the Christian Institute he sued the police, and has now been awarded £5,500 in compensation and £9,400 in costs.
This is certainly good news for free speech, and it’s not the first such victory.
In 2019, preacher Oluwole Ilesanmi had a similar experience to Cameron, this time in London. Following complaints about supposed ‘Islamophobia’ in his preaching, Ilesanmi found himself summarily arrested. He was driven four miles in a police car only to then be ‘de-arrested’ and dumped at the side of the road. Ilesanmi later recovered £2,500 from the Met Police.
Hazel Lewis was arrested under Section 4A of the Public Order Act while preaching a biblical message outside Finsbury Park tube station in North London in 2020, after false accusations were made against her by members of the public.
Ms Lewis was later told there was “no case to answer” by a district judge. (Hazel’s case is the first time a Christian woman has faced trial for street preaching since 1997, when in Redmond-Bate v DPP, Judge Sedley famously ruled in the preacher’s favour and said that: “Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence.”)
Then there’s 71-year-old pastor John Sherwood, who was pulled off his platform (again in North London) and arrested for expressing his view that marriage was between one man and one woman – a belief of course rooted in the Bible and core to his faith. A year later, he was acquitted and cleared of all charges.
Similarly, last year in Leeds, preacher David McConnell had his sentence overturned. He had previously been found guilty of harassing a transwoman by calling him a ‘man’. Immediately after McConnell was convicted, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) issued a bellicose press release saying the case should serve as a warning to anyone thinking of speaking out against trans ideology. The CPS was curiously silent, however, when McConnell’s conviction was later overturned.
So, good news. But as Prof Tettenborn points out, not all speakers have the resources or perseverance to take the police or prosecutors to court. Cameron, for instance, had his case taken up by the Christian Institute, while Lewis was helped by Christian Concern. But many speakers without such luck will probably end up doing as they are told by the police.
Part of the problem is that the police never seem to learn from their mistakes. Public authorities are supposed to guard against a ‘heckler’s veto’ being created whereby a speaker could be prevented from speaking by a member of the public complaining that they are unhappy with the content of the message. Yet for officers on the ground it seems it’s often far easier to tell a speaker to stop expressing an unpopular opinion than to tell an aggressive complainant to pipe down.
All this amounts to a worrying use of state power to enforce a de facto heckler’s veto, says Prof Tettenborn.
It also sends the disconcerting message that if someone wants to shut you up, then all they have to do is tell the police they are offended. This problem is only set to get much worse if a future Labour government follows through on its threats to strengthen hate-crime laws and crack down on supposedly transphobic acts, like ‘misgendering’ someone with the wrong pronouns.
