In Britain, there is a growing perception that the law is enforced unevenly, depending on who you are and what you believe. This week, the case of Ricky Jones brought one of the most glaring examples yet.
Ricky Jones, a 58-year-old Labour councillor from Dartford, has been found not guilty of encouraging violent disorder after telling an anti-racism rally that far-right protesters’ throats should be cut. The remarks, made on 7th August last year in Walthamstow, were captured on video. In the footage, Jones refers to the counter-demonstrators as “disgusting Nazi fascists” and declares “we need to get rid of them all.”
Following his remarks, he proceeded to initiate a chant among the audience, repeating “free, free Palestine”.
Such words are not subtle. They are not the sort of harmless aside that slips into a speech unnoticed. And yet, despite their violent imagery, a jury acquitted him. Jones told police his phrasing was “ill-advised” and that he did not intend to incite violence. The Labour Party has suspended him, but the verdict itself is the most revealing part of the story. It comes against a backdrop in which police and prosecutors have pursued – often with astonishing zeal – individuals whose “offences” consisted of nothing more than typing a sentence online that someone, somewhere, may or may not have decided was “offensive”.
The scale of such prosecutions is now beyond dispute. According to data obtained by The Times, police in England and Wales are making more than 30 arrests a day under the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. That adds up to roughly 12,000 people a year being detained and questioned for messages that may cause “annoyance,” “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others – a deliberately vague sweep of language that can apply to almost anything.
In practice, this means thousands of ordinary citizens, from teenagers to pensioners, are being fingerprinted, interrogated and sometimes dragged through the courts for social media posts, emails or even private messages. It also means that scarce police resources are being diverted away from investigating serious crimes. Only 11 per cent of violent and sexual offences in England and Wales were closed with a suspect charged in the year to June 2024 – the lowest figure in modern records.
One does not need to be a libertarian purist to see the imbalance. On the one hand, a public figure can call for literal throat-cutting against political opponents and walk free. On the other, an anonymous citizen can be arrested, fingerprinted and prosecuted for using a phrase deemed unpleasant in a Facebook comment. If this is not the definition of two-tier policing, what is?
The question is not whether Jones should have been jailed. Freedom of speech in a mature democracy ought to be broad enough to accommodate heated political rhetoric, even when it is crude or intemperate. The real issue is why that same generosity is not extended to everyone. The difference is not the nature of the words – in many online “hate speech” cases, the comments are mild by comparison – but the identity of the speaker and the prevailing political climate.
This is where the danger lies. When the law is enforced selectively, it ceases to be law in the true sense and becomes an instrument of politics. Public confidence erodes, suspicion festers, and the idea of equal treatment before the courts is fatally undermined. That perception, once embedded, is almost impossible to reverse.
It is not as though Britain’s political leaders are unaware of the problem. When the US vice-presidential candidate JD Vance raised concerns about free speech in Britain during a meeting at the White House earlier this summer, Sir Keir Starmer emphatically denied there was a crisis. Yet the evidence says otherwise. The figures on arrests for “offensive” communication speak to a country that is criminalising language at an alarming rate.
The Communications Act’s Section 127, introduced under Tony Blair, was originally aimed at preventing malicious hoaxes and obscene phone calls. In the age of social media, however, it has morphed into a bludgeon against any expression deemed disagreeable. The Malicious Communications Act, dating back to the late 1980s, suffers from similar mission creep. Together, they give police vast discretion to decide what counts as “grossly offensive” or “menacing” – a power ripe for abuse.
It is not hard to see why these laws are attractive to overstretched forces. Investigating a violent assault, sexual offence or burglary is time-consuming and resource-intensive; hunting down someone who posted a rude joke on X (formerly Twitter) is quicker, cheaper, and far easier to record as a solved “crime.” But easy policing is rarely good policing. The real-world consequences of ignoring serious offences are visible in the declining charge rates for violent and sexual crimes. Victims wait months, sometimes years, for justice, only to see their cases dropped. Meanwhile, the digital “thought police” march on.
The Jones case crystallises the hypocrisy. If you stand on the “right” side of the political spectrum – which, in modern Britain, means the progressive Left – you are far more likely to benefit from leniency in the courts and indulgence from the police. If you stand on the “wrong” side, you will be treated as a danger to public order for far less inflammatory language. This is not paranoia; it is observable reality.
Defenders of the current system often argue that context matters, and that courts must consider the surrounding circumstances of any statement. Fair enough – but context cannot be a euphemism for political alignment. To preserve public trust, the threshold for prosecution should be consistent and rooted in principle, not in the prevailing winds of ideology.
Britain has long prided itself on a tradition of robust debate and the right to speak freely, even at the risk of offence. That tradition is now being hollowed out from within. The state’s tolerance for speech is narrowing, and the line between criminal conduct and unpopular opinion is blurring. What remains is a patchwork of enforcement in which political identity dictates legal outcome.
It is telling that Starmer’s government, like its Conservative predecessors, shows no appetite for reform. Both parties have learned to live with – and sometimes to exploit – the ambiguous powers granted by communications laws. Rolling them back would mean relinquishing a convenient means of controlling public discourse. The beneficiaries of such control rarely volunteer to give it up.
Yet this is precisely why reform is needed. The principle at stake is not whether we approve of Ricky Jones’s rhetoric, but whether the same rules apply to all. If they do not, in the UK and in the EU, then our justice system is no longer impartial. It is simply another arena in which politics dictates outcomes. That is the surest path to cynicism, division, and the slow death of democratic legitimacy.
Britain can survive a thousand ill-judged speeches. It cannot survive the collapse of the idea that the law applies equally to all, it clearly does not.
Main Image: via X
