The United Kingdom gave up on protecting any real semblance of freedom years ago. It has become an authoritarian state, to the point that it will prosecute a Christian preacher for the crime of being too close to an abortion “safe access zone.”
Clive Johnston, a 77-year-old preacher, is standing trial for allegedly violating a Northern Ireland law about influencing women away from getting an abortion. Johnston had set himself up across the street from Causeway Hospital to preach, though he notably did not say or display anything related to abortion at all. Johnston sang, read Bible verses, and told his life story, and for that he was arrested and is facing a punishment from the state for “influencing” someone seeking an abortion.
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Johnston is the first person prosecuted under the “Safe Access Zones Act,” but he is not the first person to be targeted under the U.K.’s authoritarian abortion regime. Last year, a 75-year-old woman from Scotland was prosecuted for setting up a table outside a hospital with a sign that read “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.” As in Johnston’s case, this so threatened the abortion industry in the U.K. that she was arrested.
There is no freedom of speech in the United Kingdom, no matter how much Prime Minister Keir Starmer pretends to the contrary. There is also no freedom of religion in the U.K., as evidenced by Johnston being arrested for being a Christian in the vicinity of a place where women can get abortions. The United States is monitoring the U.K.’s censorship, and Johnston’s case in particular, as it should, because this is a rejection of the principles of freedom that the Western world is supposed to be support and uphold.
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This has become the norm in the U.K. over the past several years. Fans of Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv were banned from attending a game against British team Aston Villa, because the U.K. refused to protect those fans from expected violence from antisemitic criminals. The U.K. had a comedian arrested the moment he landed on British soil for criticizing transgenderism. All the while, Starmer insists that he is disappointed, as if he is some powerless nobody rather than the leader of the country. Feigned concern about your slide into authoritarianism simply enables that authoritarianism, and the state of the U.K. now shows that clearly.
The United Kingdom has given up on protecting freedom in any real sense. It has adopted a sanitized concept of what freedom means, embracing only the freedoms that don’t offend the sensibilities of secular liberals. Speech is protected as long as it’s not offensive, and free exercise of religion is protected as long as no one else may discover it. That isn’t real freedom, though, and the United Kingdom is no longer a truly free country as a result.