There once was a time when the world was run by Britain, a world in which the winds of trade and industry were navigated by our hands. It may not have been pretty, or even remotely fair but we were in charge. Sadly however, this empire has long since been deconstructed and what we’re left with is a pointless monarchy, shady immigration policies and the justice system of a decent African republic. We’ve simply been overtaken in certain areas and left behind entirely in others. Never before has the death of the Great British legacy been more apparent than it was in this week’s ruling of the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ involving the unfortunate Paul Chambers.
The moniker ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ is incredibly apt, with regards to both the joke that has landed the defendant in so much trouble and the joke that the trial has become. Earlier this year, a frustrated but jovial Chambers tweeted the following to just his mere handful of followers:
“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!“
The devil makes work for idle thumbs it seems. He was arrested at work the following day and has since lost both of his jobs, been made to pay over £3,000 in fines and court costs and now is the proud owner of his very own criminal record. All of this for the sake of a two sentence tweet that held less malice than a puppy parade.
Don’t get me wrong, in this modern climate I understand that you’ve got be careful. You cannot make jokes about terrorism nowadays, just like you can’t joke about religion or make a tasteless comment about wanting to stone an Asian journalist. However, context clearly needs to be found. Officialdom used to have a sense of proportion, a clue as when to use discretion and common sense. Where has this gone?
For starters, it’s ludicrous to suggest that there was any genuine intent in Chambers’ mind at the time. It seems fairly obvious that if his real plan was indeed to blow the airport up then he’d probably be best off keeping that a secret. Not many successful terrorists publicly advertise their latest plot and timescale next to a recent picture of themselves and their name. The wording of the tweet is also a pretty big give-away. The hyperbole in the pun ‘Sky-High’ suggests a jokey context and this is only further outlined by the use of the double exclamation mark and….y’know, the fact that it’s posted on Twitter.
I can completely understand his position whilst writing the fateful tweet. It’s a typically British trait to insert at least a base level of humour into any situation to counteract frustration and rage, It’s how we are and always have been. We live in a society built on laughing at ourselves and others. It is common for people in this country to jokingly claim they’ll kill someone for making a jibe at their expense. Comedian Jeff Dunham has made a career through a puppet of a dead insurgent who repeatedly states that he will kill his audience. It seems as though we’re capable of interpreting a joke from genuine danger in these cases, so why not here? It’s still hard to believe that it’s got to this point. When exactly is the bit where the authorities finally hold their hands up and say, “Shall we stop all this now? It really wasn’t meant to go this far”?
Sadly, Britain seems to no longer be a land of self-deprecating humour, this ruling and the subsequent failed appeal represents everything that the ‘New’ Britain is now. Hopelessly indoctrinated, humourless, obedient to the letter and guilty of using demented logic to a inconsistent end, Britain has become a spineless land and it’s the common person like Chambers who is literally paying the price.
It will be interesting to see how the police handle the fallout. It’s a very public case and it seems likely that there will be a string of similar tribute tweets will be posted for a decent period of time, under the #IAmSpartacus hashtag. Will there be a further flood of needless and ridiculous convictions to maintain a warped sense of consistency or will the British government finally realise how idiotic it was to prosecute in the first place?
At the end of the day, the unforgiving ruthlessness of the punishment handed down to Chambers was made all the more disappointing when you consider the absolute lack of action taken against the now-infamous ‘Remembrance Day Poppy Burners’.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of days, you’ll be unaware of the protest group calling themselves ‘Muslims against Crusades’ who set fire to a pile of poppies. It’s very difficult to talk about this without sounding like the type of out-dated, Daily Mail reading Neanderthal that far-too-commonly walks the streets of this country, but let me start by stating that it’s obvious that these are an extreme collection of religious zealots and do not represent the majority of the Muslim community any more than Fathers for Justice represent the British fashion market.
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s hard to understand why this act has (so far) earned no legal reprisal. Members of the MAC were pictured holding signs stating that ‘Our dead are in paradise, yours are in hell’, ‘Islam will dominate’ and the old classic of ‘infidels will be beheaded’. Is this not threatening behaviour? Is this not inciting racial hatred? Why is this such a one-way street lately?
Chambers’ crime was born purely of naivety and one that the British justice system has wasted piles of public money on trying to bring him to ‘justice’. However, when you see an act with such genuinely hateful agenda behind it such as the poppy burning, you have to wonder where the true meaning of justice lies now. The courts shouldn’t be wasting their time with characters like Chambers, they need to be out there doing their job with the young fanatics of all race, creed and colour who truly believe the hate that they spout.
How likely is that though? Britain is now a country of lost industry, a service country filled with people in charge who are scared to put a foot wrong, fighting against…..something but too scared to be outspoken for fear of offending a single person and in such says nothing. We’re a once great country brought to its knees by the sheer idiocy of the system put in place to protect it.
It’s not apparent who it is exactly we’re supposed to be fighting against every day, but it’s pretty clear that we’ve already lost.
