The Death of the Most Basic Liberties in the UK: A Warning for the West, By Richard Miller (Londonistan)
The United Kingdom, once a beacon of liberty that inspired the American Founders, is now a chilling case study in the erosion of fundamental freedoms. Andrea Widburg's article in American Thinker, titled "Speech and Self-Defense Are Dead Letters in England," lays bare this grim reality. From the arrest of a retired police officer for a "thought crime" tweet to a woman's 30-year sentence for defending herself against sexual assault, the UK's descent into authoritarianism is a stark warning for anyone who values free speech and self-defence, especially in the U.S. and Australia, where similar progressive policies lurk. This is a globalist blueprint for crushing dissent and disarming citizens.
Widburg's first example is the arrest of Julian Foulkes, a 71-year-old retired special constable from Kent. His crime? A tweet expressing concern about rising antisemitism in Britain, tied to Leftist and Muslim support for Hamas and criticism of Israel. This wasn't a call to violence or hate, just a citizen's opinion. Yet, Kent Police sent six officers to handcuff him at home, search his possessions, and scrutinise his "Brexity" books by authors like Douglas Murray and his Spectator magazines. They even raised eyebrows at his wife's shopping list (bleach, tin foil, gloves, hardly a terrorist arsenal). Body-camera footage, reported by The Telegraph, captures this Orwellian overreach, with officers treating pro-liberty literature as evidence of wrongdoing. This happened in November 2023 under a supposedly conservative government, but Widburg notes the current Labour government is even more radical, suggesting no reprieve for free speech.UK laws now criminalise statements causing "alarm" or "distress," a far cry from the limited speech restrictions of 25 years ago.
The second case is equally horrifying. Martyna Ogonowska, an 18-year-old, received a 30-year sentence for stabbing a man, Filip Jaskiewicz, who was sexually assaulting her. Widburg details how Ogonowska tried to escape Jaskiewicz's "grabby" control but was convicted largely because she carried a knife, a tool deemed illegal in public in the UK, where even kitchen knives can land you in trouble. The jury didn't buy her claim of trauma from a prior rape, and the judge ruled her actions weren't self-defence, citing the knife. Meanwhile, Banaras Hussain, a Rotherham gang leader who raped and tortured girls as young as 11, walked free after serving less than half his 19-year sentence. The British public's fury, Widburg argues, stems from a deeper sense of losing their country, disarmed by laws that defy their 1689 Bill of Rights while violent immigrants face leniency.
Why has the UK fallen so far? Widburg ties it to unchecked immigration from "Third World (mostly Muslim) countries" and a Leftist government that values political correctness over justice. This echoes broader critiques in American Thinker about Britain's immigration mess and Labour's "Stalinist" speech restrictions, which jail citizens for online opinions or even burning a Quran. The UK's Net Zero obsession, also noted by Widburg, compounds this by undermining energy infrastructure, paving the way for a "Muslim-controlled polity" that stifles dissent. This pattern is familiar: the UK buries inconvenient truths about crime and immigration to maintain a narrative of "diversity." The state's hostility to self-defence mirrors its rejection of bodily autonomy, both strip individuals of agency under the guise of public safety.
This isn't just Britain's tragedy; it's a warning for the West, especially the U.S. Widburg explicitly states that the "leftist British approach to governance is what the Democrat party desperately wants" for America. The parallels are stark: progressive calls for hate speech laws, gun control, and centralised power echo the UK's playbook. American Thinker articles warn of global elites, like those at the World Economic Forum, pushing censorship and control, with figures like Mark Carney in Canada amplifying this agenda. If Democrats emulate the UK, they could see Americans arrested for tweets or jailed for defending themselves, all while politically protected groups escape accountability. Australia is just behind the UK on this road to tyranny.
The UK's death of liberties, free speech crushed by "hate crime" laws, self-defence outlawed by weapon bans, is a globalist experiment in submission. We know this tactic: control the narrative, punish resistance, and gaslight the victims. We must resist this slide, amplify voices like Widburg's, and protect our constitutional rights before they become "dead letters" too. Britain's fall is a clarion call, don't let it happen in your back yard!
Speech and self-defense are dead letters in England
Just yesterday, I wrote about Britain's decline as its embrace of unlimited immigration from Third World (mostly Muslim) countries and its commitment to the insane Net Zero carbon dioxide metric are leading it toward a Muslim-controlled polity and a pre-modern energy infrastructure. Today, I awoke to two more reports about Britain's decline, this time related to speech and self-defense. These reports matter because the leftist British approach to governance is what the Democrat party desperately wants to see in America.
The first story comes from The Telegraph, Britain's (slightly) right-of-center outlet, and its title says it all: "Retired police officer arrested over 'thought crime' tweet." Julian Foulkes's thought crime was that he tweeted about his concern regarding rising antisemitism in Britain, as seen with leftist and Muslim support for Hamas and demonization of Israel.
Nor was Foulkes merely arrested. The police searched his home from top to bottom, viewing with concern his pro-liberty literature and pawing through the cuttings he'd collected following his daughter's death at the hands of a drunk driver:
A retired special constable was arrested and detained over a social media post warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain, The Telegraph can reveal.
Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from Kent Police – the force he had served for a decade – after challenging a supporter of pro-Palestinian marches on X.
Police body-worn camera footage captured officers scrutinising the 71-year-old's collection of books by authors such as Douglas Murray, a Telegraph contributor, and issues of The Spectator, pointing to what they described as "very Brexity things".
They were also shown raising concerns about a shopping list containing bleach, tin foil and gloves drawn up by Mr Foulkes's wife, a hairdresser.
This is what's happening in the country that gave our Founders the entire concept of free speech and freedom of conscience. It's dead in Britain, because free speech sees ordinary British people challenging the Islamic ethos that is slowly overtaking their country. Islam, of course, rightly means "submission." There is no room for free thought, speech, or action in a Muslim country.
The British Home Office pointed out that what happened took place in November 2023, under a different government (Rushi Sunak's sort-of conservative one), so it shouldn't be held against the current government...which sounds good, until you realize that the current government is even more radicalized and pro-Islam than the past one was.
I'm normally very respectful of giving links only to an official site, even if it's behind a paywall, because these sites need money to pay the bills. However, this article is so shocking and horrible, and the footage so disturbing, that I'll share with you a link to read the article and view the video in case it is behind a paywall.
Also in Britain, the land that gave us the idea of self-defense, it seems that a woman just had reaffirmed her 30-year sentence for stabbing to death a man who was sexually assaulting her:
The details of what happened to her show that, while Ogonowska made poor decisions to begin with, at the moment she stabbed Filip Jaskiewicz, she had already made futile attempts to escape his grabbing and otherwise controlling her.
It's important to note here that the flip side of this case is that Jaskiewicz was getting grabby, but not rapey, when she stabbed him and that the jurors didn't believe Ogonowska's unsupported testimony that she'd been traumatized by a previous rape.
It seems that Ogonowska's real sin was in having a knife in the first place. After all, the UK is a place where even the knives one uses to slide peas around are illegal if carried in public.
It's a lot easier to control behavior than it is to address Britain's moral failings, many of which stem from the massive influx of people from violent, but politically correct Third World countries, along with the pass that its leftist government gives to violent immigrants. Thus, the judge explicitly stated that what happened wasn't self-defense because Ogonowska had a knife on her.
The British are outraged by the sentence, especially because just last month, Banaras Hussain, a man who raped and tortured over a dozen children for years walked free after serving less than half his prison sentence:
At the end of the day, the outrage over Ogonowska's sentence has less to do with the possibly debatable facts of her case and a lot more to do with the British people's sense that they are losing their country. The law has disarmed them in defiance of a thousand years of British history and the Bill of Rights of 1689, while being singularly accommodating to immigrants who quite literally rape and torture their children. Moreover, these anguished Brits had better be darn careful about speaking of these issues, or they could find six police at their door, arresting them, and pawing through all of their possessions.
And just remember, this is the dream that Democrats have for you.
Watching Britain's decline is like rubbernecking a car accident
My parents were Anglophiles. Therefore, I was an Anglophile, gobbling up Masterpiece Theater, majoring in British history at college, and spending an utterly delightful junior year abroad in England a long, long time ago. Of late, though, I've come to revisit my fondness for England. That's because England doesn't really seem to exist anymore. Instead, it's an increasingly Third World country, complete with blasphemy laws, and a likely collapse of its power grid.
The trigger for this, my latest in a series of essays I think of as illustrating that "there won't always be an England," is a paywalled article in the Daily Mail that looks at the city of Leicester.
This Midland city is linked to major events in British history. The Celts were there, as were Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans. The Lancaster dynasty, which gave rise to the Tudors, had a power base there, and Richard III's body was uncovered in a Leicester parking lot. Because of water, railways, and nearby coal mines, Leicester became a major industrial center in the 19th century.
In sum, Leicester is interwoven with the warp and woof of British history. It's currently the 11th largest city in Great Britain. And, as the Daily Mail reports, Leicester, "is now among the first of our cities to have a majority non-white population..."
While the City still has classic British architecture, that's just a remnant. The non-British part of the population is primarily Muslim, with Hindus following behind:
According to the 2021 census – the most recent – Leicester is roughly split in two between white and Asian populations, with 43.4 per cent identifying as Asian and 40.9 per cent as white. Within that, 23.5 per cent of the population are Muslim and 17.9 per cent are Hindu.
But there is another striking trend.
Only 57 per cent of Leicester residents were born in England, down from 65 per cent in 2011. More recently, a mid-2023 estimate calculated that 3.6 per cent of the city's total population had arrived from abroad in a single year.
Among 34 Leicester neighbourhoods, at least a fifth of the population can't speak the language, according to census data. It is almost as if parts of this city now are British in name only.
In last year's general election, the sitting Labour MP, Jonathan Ashworth, lost his thumping 22,000 majority to independent candidate Shockat Adam, who ran on a single issue: Gaza.
It's not just that the most important issue to the residents is a country thousands of miles away that shows Muslim preeminence. Storefronts advertise Halal food or give themselves names with the words Gaza or Jerusalem in them.
And of course, there are always the myriad women dressed like tents. Women are not welcome in any of the Muslim restaurants (which is the same thing that happened to a friend of mine who thought she could have a coffee break at a Muslim-run coffee shop in London). Given that Leicester now has a surplus of people from the non-Western world, it's incredibly impoverished and violent.
Looking at Leicester, it's no surprise that, in 2023, the most popular boy's name in the UK was Mohammed. Admittedly, while non-Muslim boys can have a variety of names, there's a rule that Muslim boys must have Mohammed somewhere in their name so that the numbers will add up quickly. But still...
It also shouldn't surprise any of us that the British government is moving in the direction of Sharia blasphemy laws, which are the antithesis of the free speech and worship we've come to expect in the West since the Enlightenment. Thus, a Turkish man who burned the Koran was charged with "harassing Islam." He should be grateful, I guess, that he wasn't in Pakistan or Bangladesh, where a vigilante mob would have beaten or burned him to death. Soon, perhaps...
And as Britain lapses ever deeper into Third Worldism, it seems appropriate to note that a grid operator says that Britain's push to Net Zero, which imagines the nation reliant solely on wind and solar renewables, is not only insanely costly as Britain tries desperately to shore up a grid increasingly dependent on unreliable renewables but that it could also lead to "months-long" blackouts as whole power grids collapse. In other words, what happened to Spain and Portugal could happen in the UK, only on a grand, back-to-the-pre-modern-era scale."
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