A cliche, I grant you, but amateur hacks like yours truly really do have to ‘walk on eggshells’ when writing these weekly diatribes, to save being ‘cancelled’. This fragile disposition, certainly relevant to my situation, what with my being a teacher, is par for the course and goes with the territory.

But now the landscape has changed immeasurably with two-tier Kier and his silencing of dissent. Such is the foreign perception of Blighty now, that countries including Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and the UAE all issued travel alerts in response to the media’s portrayal of ‘violent’ riots across the UK, post the senseless, barbaric killings in Stockport.

It's as if we have been hoodwinked into believing these were planned riots. They were planned protests, with a few of them turning into riots where a small handful of intellectually-challenged eedyats decided to smash up a Shoezone, burn a vehicle and loot a Greggs. In summary, it’s a push to claim it was a seismic ‘rising up’ of the people, yet it was portrayed as such in many quarters allowing for the Government to use a fire engine to extinguish a match.

It's true to say that the scattered protests that became riots were, whether we care to admit it or not, born of the cultural and population changes this country has seen since 1997.

Despite Labour opening the floodgates, and the Tories failing to close the gates regarding, in particular, illegal immigration, Labour are now back in power and, without a workable plan for a situation of their making, the easiest thing to do is completely suffocate opinion and stifle dissent.

With an overuse of the threat of conviction to control the masses, they have been successful in administering over its populous collective amnesia as we forget, with the passage of time, the true political catalysts of the angst felt among many quarters at this moment in history.

The sledgehammer smashing a nut approach has seen Phillip Hoban of Leeds, a 48-year-old online Paedophile hunter who has snared some dangerous individuals, being jailed for right months for using ‘aggravated’ harassment including gesturing that the police were cry-babies.

He did not physically assault anyone, or loot anything, but he did act foolishly and should really have known better, yet he received eight months in chokey for practising the sacred democratic right to protest that has been afforded to citizens of this country for centuries.

The new online safety bill contains a ‘false communications act’ as Labour continues to model itself on the authoritarian Chinese iron fist of rule.

Lee Dunn, of Egremont, a Sellafield worker was jailed for eight weeks for sharing, not constructing, three separate Facebook posts, the first of which showed a group of Asian men with the caption ‘coming to a town near you’. Silly? Yes. Misguided? Yes. Racist in intent? Quite possibly, but all you do by breaking a nut with a sledgehammer is drive folk into a sinister underground movement as their views are silenced at every turn.

Did Dunn deserve a prison term for acting like a silly billy and sharing Facebook posts? Does he deserve to now lose his job, and income, and future career prospects due to his incarceration? I would argue his punishment is draconian.

The Human Rights Act, 1988, states ‘everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This includes the freedom to hold opinions ‘without interference by public authority'.’

So as many of us slap ourselves on the back for attending the ‘anti-hate’ marches recently having been hoodwinked by 30 apparent protests that were but a fantasy, we really need to look ourselves in the mirror. Is this what we want? To silence and imprison anyone who dares to say, write, or repost anything that may be classed as offensive?

Freedom of speech should be sacrosanct, and the true test of a society's progress is how well we welcome views that differ from our own.

Yet, sadly, the regression has been drastic on this particular facet of our national identity recently and, if not careful, we could easily find ourselves succumbing to a despotic political structure as twisted and suffocating as those of China or North Korea…

  • Brett Ellis is a teacher