Your government is afraid of you

The rape gangs climbdown shows the campaign to delegitimise public opinion will fail, but a showdown with liberal authoritarianism is inevitable

There was a story in the Yorkshire Post last week. A “drunk Yorkshire man” had been prosecuted for following and sexually harassing a fifteen-year-old girl on a train. The court heard how Zainal Osman, who was already on the sex offenders register, had continued to harass the girl even after she made clear her age to him. This was all reported, but details such as Osman’s nationality or immigration status were missing. The Post asked us to believe he was as Yorkshire as Fred Trueman.

Such dishonesty is a common theme these days, and it is not limited to the media. When Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls and injured more in Southport last summer, Merseyside Police said, “this incident is not currently being treated as terror-related.” The Prime Minister and members of his government all stuck to that line, with Angela Rayner saying speculation that details of the murders were being kept from the public, and that the murders were an act of terrorism, was “fake news” and “conspiracy theories.”

But it was not fake news. On 29 October Rudakubana was charged with murder, and offences under the Biological Weapons Act and the Terrorism Act. The police had discovered the chemical weapon ricin at his home, and a training book called Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants – the al-Qaeda Training Manual.

Keir Starmer later admitted that he had known about the discovery of ricin and the terrorist manual all along, but he justified keeping the information secret, warning if he had revealed these details he would have risked the collapse of Rudakubana’s trial. The police justified their own obfuscation, saying “for a matter to be declared a terrorist incident, motivation would need to be established.”

But this was all nonsense. The police and government itself often confirm that crimes are being treated as acts of terrorism, before the motives become clear. And anyway, we were finally given the missing details when Rudakubana was charged, before his trial. He was, as we all know, successfully prosecuted despite this information being in the public domain. There was nothing to stop the police or Starmer saying the murders were being treated as terror-related, nor saying ricin had been found. The Prime Minister had simply decided not to tell the country the full truth.

It has become a bitter joke among sceptical members of the public that when the police fail to describe the ethnicity of a suspect, it must mean that the suspect is not white. Recently, when I sent Freedom of Information requests to various police forces asking them for written records of their policies and decisions to describe a suspect, they stonewalled. Some referred me to the College of Policing guidance regarding the circumstances when an arrested or charged suspect can be named – deliberately missing the point of my questions. But the public can see what is happening.