Blair calls for a crackdown on social media!

 

Tony Blair

Tony Blair, the 'Devil Incarnate', is calling for restrictions on what people can say on social media.

Any journalist can tell you, that there are already plenty of laws that restrict free speech in Britain, so why do we need any more laws? We've already seen 'keyboard warrior's' sent to prison for what they said online during the recent riots. Many of these were jailed for stirring up racial hatred online or inciting violent disorder. We're also seeing journalists being arrested in Britain for making online comments about the deaths and destruction in Gaza.

Many politicians and even journalists, are pissed off at the way in which social media has broken down barriers and given people a voice to influence public opinion. King Henry VIII, was opposed to translating the Bible into English because he thought it would give every pot boy an opinion. William Tyndale, who was the first to translate the Bible into English, thought that every ploughboy should be able to read it and he was burnt at the stake for doing so.

I find it laughable to hear a politician like Lindsay Hoyle, tells us that "Misinformation can be dangerous." Blair misled and lied to the British people in order to drag us into a phoney war against Iraq at the behest of the Americans, following the 9/11 attacks. Blair introduced a Freedom of Information Act, and later declared that it was the worst political decision he'd ever made.

I think some politicians should be locked up for the dangerous misinformation that they spread and the dangerous rhetoric that they use, to inflame public opinion. These dirty dogs, pour fuel on the fire to stir up the people for their own political purposes and ends. The job of a responsible politician should be to curb the instincts of the mob and not to exploit it.

The pro-hanging, populist politician, Lee Anderson, who was formerly the Conservative MP for Ashfield, was suspended by the Conservative Party, when he claimed that 'Islamists' had got control of the mayor of London. He provided no evidence to substantiate this scurrilous and ridiculous allegation. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, described his remarks as "pouring fuel on the fire of anti-Muslim hatred."

The Tory peer, Baroness Warsi, accused the Conservative Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, of using dangerous "racist rhetoric" that put British Asian families at risk. Braverman had claimed that grooming gangs had a "predominance" of British Pakistani males, who hold cultural values totally at odds with British values. Baroness Warsi said that Braverman "was tarnishing a whole community" by focusing on British Pakistanis, who were a "small subset" of perpetrators in a context of half a million children a year being sexually abused.

A 2020 Home Office study, that Braverman must have been aware of, had found that offenders in child grooming gangs "are most commonly white", based on data from just under half of all police forces.

In 2023, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), ruled that the claim made by the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, that UK child grooming gangs were "almost all British-Pakistani men" was misleading. IPSO instructed the Mail on Sunday to publish a correction to an opinion piece written by Suella Braverman in April 2023. A source close to Ms Braverman, called the IPSO ruling "perverse."

Politicians have always used inflammatory and divisive racist language to further their own political ends. I remember the headmaster, Peter Griffiths, who was elected the Conservative MP for Smethwick (north-west of Birmingham), in the 1964 General Election, using the racist slogan, "Vote Liberal or Labour and get a n….r  for a neighbour." The Labour leader, Harold Wilson, called Griffith's, a "Parliamentary Leper."

This sort of language would shock many of us today, but it was quite common to hear this kind of language expressed in 1960s Britain. Birmingham was a bit like Birmingham Alabama for racism and segregation. It wasn't unusual to see lodging houses displaying a sign in their window which said: "No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish!"