If Mrs. Jones had not committed a crime, what were the police doing at her door?
So, JD Vance was exaggerating when he suggested that free speech in Europe was under attack?
I wonder whether Helen Jones, a 54-year-old school administrator and grandmother living in northwest England, would agree.
Mrs. Jones was not impressed when she learned about what had been said in a WhatsApp Group that included a couple of Labour MPs (including Andrew Gwynne, the now former health minister) and eleven Labour councillors (elected local government representatives).
BBC:
In messages seen by the Mail on Sunday, Gwynne said he hoped a 72-year-old woman would soon be dead after she wrote to her local councillor about bin [trash] collections [or the lack of them, a near permanent point of contention in British local politics].
The councillor [David Sedgwick] shared the woman’s letter with Gwynne and other Labour figures in a WhatsApp group called Trigger Me Timbers, the newspaper reported.
The newspaper said he also joked about a constituent being “mown down” by a truck.
Gwynne also reportedly posted sexist comments about Angela Rayner, and racist remarks about Labour MP Diane Abbott.
And he reportedly responded to a message containing the name of an American psychologist, Marshall Rosenberg, saying he sounded “too militaristic and too Jewish”, adding “Is he in Mossad?”.
The newspaper reported further comments it said appeared to make light of antisemitism.
Mrs. Jones repeatedly took to Facebook to argue that Sedgwick, the councillor who had shared the contents of the letter about trash collection should stand down.
In one post on a Facebook group called 4Heatons Hub, Mrs Jones said of Cllr Sedgwick: “Let’s hope he does the decent thing and resigns. I somehow think his ego won’t allow it.”
In another, after posting screenshots from the Trigger Me Timbers group, Mrs Jones wrote: “Not looking good for Cllr Sedgwick!!!”
Readers familiar with the state of free speech in Europe will probably be able to guess what happened next.
The Daily Telegraph:
Mrs Jones said two plain-clothes officers arrived at her home in Stockport last Tuesday at around 1.30pm, but she wasn’t in and they spoke to her husband Lee via an intercom. She rushed home fearing something had happened to a relative.
At 2.15pm she received a phone call from an officer thought to be the same sergeant who knocked on her door and was told the police had received a complaint about her recent social media posts.
Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, Mrs Jones said: “It was actually quite scary. It made me think I best just keep quiet for the rest of my life, because you just can’t say anything these days.
“I asked the police officer, have I committed any sort of crime — why did you call at my door? They said, ‘Someone has spoken to us about your social media posts’.
“I then said: ‘If I don’t take your advice and continue doing what I am doing, will I be committing a crime?’ He said no. I then asked: ‘What will you do about it?’ He said: ‘There’s not a lot we can do, we are just giving you advice’.”
Mrs Jones also asked why they had come to her within 48 hours of a complaint despite neighbours claiming they had reported more serious crimes, and had not been visited by the police.
Two-tier policing is, of course, a myth.
But if Mrs. Jones had not committed a crime, what were the police doing at her door? Well, it seems that her posts had been “reported” by someone — such is the society that is being built in Britain — and that it was being treated, at least potentially, as a “non-crime hate incident” (I wrote about NCHIs here), something that falls short, as its name indicates, of being criminal, but may end up on a police file.
The test for deciding whether some act, comment, or post qualifies as an NCHI is essentially subjective, as the British government explains:
A non-crime hate incident (NCHI) means an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.
As noted above, Mrs. Jones says that the whole episode had made her think she “best just keep quiet for the rest of my life, because you just can’t say anything these days.”
Mission accomplished.