Heard the one about Rod Liddle and the police state?

You might think that the phrase ‘the satire police’ refers to the sort of humourless prudes who tut-tut about ‘edgy’ jokes. But according to the humourless prudes who run the Labour Party, it seems the satire police are now the actual Sussex constabulary.

The Labour leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, one Bella Sankey, has asked Sussex Police to investigate the journalist Rod Liddle for ‘incitement to terrorism’. Liddle’s thoughtcrime was to write a satirical column for the Spectator magazine, entitled ‘And now let’s bomb Glastonbury’.

Acid tongue firmly in cheek, Liddle suggested that ‘a small-yield nuclear weapon’ dropped on the Glastonbury music festival in Somerset ‘would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying’. For good measure, he added, ‘One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery’. As a bonus, Rod suggested, bombing the centres of Britain’s woke culture in such a fashion would mean that ‘The BBC would cease to exist, too’.

This being post-free-speech Britain, where expressing the wrong opinion even in jest can land you in jail, Rod and Spectator editor Michael Gove felt obliged to spell out that he was not seriously advocating nuclear strikes in Gloucestershire and West Sussex. ‘I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way’, says the article.

However, the Labour leader of Brighton council still failed to see the joke. Ms Sankey pointed out in a tweet last week that ‘Brighton was bombed in the Second World War and also during my lifetime in a terrorist attack in 1984’. So she has ‘asked Sussex Police to investigate this incitement to terrorism published by Rod Liddle and Michael Gove’.

In the dullard minds of Labour leaders, it seems that making a joke about a bomb now equates to inciting terrorism. You could not make this stuff up.

Several other tweeters were quick to point out that Sankey’s law would also have landed the late poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman, in trouble. After all, Betjeman’s 1937 poem, ‘Slough’, expressing his snobbish distaste for the suburban town, begins:

‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!’

During the Second World War, which began just two years later, Slough was indeed bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Should the future poet laureate have been interned as a Nazi propagandist? The response from Sankey’s defenders was no, of course not, because unlike Liddle, Betjeman was not a rabble-rousing Brexiteer writing in the despised ‘Murdoch press’ (Rod is also a columnist for The Sunday Times and the Sun).

In which case, it occurs to me that another infamous Brexiteer and poet, the singer-songwriter Morrissey, might need to look over his shoulder as this satire police state takes power. After leaving the Smiths, he released the solo single ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ in 1988, a coruscating critique of a soulless English ‘seaside town that they forgot to bomb / Come, come, come, nuclear bomb’.

Meanwhile, the other subjects of Liddle’s Glastonbury column, Bob ‘Death to the IDF’ Vylan and Hamas-cheerleading Irish rappers Kneecap, spread their hate at the festival of peace and love unmolested by Labour councillors. Of course, as spiked has argued and Rod himself concluded, these morons should not be locked up for spewing their toxic bilge. Free speech is for fools, frauds and fanatics, too. But the left would deny that freedom to satirists whose punchlines fall on ‘the wrong side of history’.

It might be tempting to dismiss this little episode as an attempted joke, a wind-up. After all, the deadpan Bella Sankey does sound rather like a satirical character. But I fear her ridiculous report to the satire police is a serious sign of which way the wind is blowing.

We might recall that, back in 2010, a man called Paul Chambers really was prosecuted for tweeting a poor joke about bombing Nottingham’s Robin Hood airport. When Chambers’s second (and ultimately successful) appeal against his conviction was due to be heard before the High Court, staff at the Crown Prosecution Service reportedly favoured dropping the case. Sources claimed they were overruled by their boss, the director of public prosecutions, who was determined to pursue the joker to the last. That DPP is now the Labour prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer.

In a free country, nothing should truly be considered beyond a joke. But in Britain today, the attacks on free speech are no laughing matter.

Mick Hume is the editor-in-chief of europeanconservative.com and a visiting fellow at MCC. He worked in communications for Reform UK during the 2024 General Election campaign.