The insane two-tier bias of Britain’s speech police

In response to the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk earlier this month, British social-media influencer Charlotte Hayes posted a video on TikTok appearing to celebrate his death.

Hayes, a 25-year-old from Folkestone, Kent, said that Kirk’s beliefs were ‘inherently violent’ and that, when it comes to conservatives, we should ‘kill them all’ – a line she repeated more than once. ‘I’m sick of this idea that you can’t meet violence with violence’, she also told her 212,000 followers. As a result of her comments, she was questioned by Kent Police. However, they decided last week not to arrest her.

Good. No one should be arrested for words they say online, unless there is clear evidence that they intended to incite real-world violence. Yet, while we can welcome the fact that Hayes will not be prosecuted, we should also recognise this as a clear-cut case of two-tier justice. In fact, it offers a perfect illustration of the authorities’ blatant political bias.

As a solicitor, I have repeatedly acted for those on the right of politics who have been arrested and interviewed for saying far less inflammatory things than what Hayes said, and to far smaller audiences. Two well-publicised cases from last year, both from the immediate aftermath of the Southport murders, reveal just how favourable Hayes’s treatment was.

In July, former soldier Jamie Michael posted a video on his private Facebook page in which he said that Britain was ‘under attack’. He said that community groups need to be formed to keep children safe from Islamist terror. For this, he was charged with stirring up racial hatred under the Public Order Act and made to stand trial.

Also in July last year, Northampton childminder Lucy Connolly posted the following on X: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.’ She was arrested and repeatedly denied bail. After pleading guilty, she was sentenced to 31 months in prison for stirring up racial hatred. She was only recently released, having spent nine months inside.

Yes, Connolly pleaded guilty to an offence. However, her words were arguably less incendiary than Hayes’s. Hayes was more direct and even repeated her call to ‘kill’ conservatives. I have little doubt that if Hayes had been right-wing and had encouraged her followers to kill, say, all asylum seekers, there would be no chance she would have escaped prosecution.

What’s more, the police could not have been more generous in their interpretation of Hayes’s comments. They afforded her an extraordinary benefit of the doubt. They didn’t even interview her under caution to confirm that she did not intend to incite violence. She was given ‘words of advice’, presumably informally, and told to take the post down. Officers took the sensible decision not to upend her life over a repugnant social-media post.

As we have seen, the opposite approach is taken with those on the other side of the political spectrum. In Michael’s case, the police had to assume the worst about every word he said to make his remarks appear criminal. Fortunately, the jury in Michael’s case refused to go along with this, acquitting him after just 17 minutes of deliberations.

The approach taken to Hayes should be applied across the board. There will be cases where people use social media to incite violence or make direct, credible threats to individuals. These are crimes and should be treated as such. But all too often, language that is merely offensive and inflammatory is interpreted by the authorities as a direct call to action. Far too many people are being criminalised simply for expressing an opinion that the authorities dislike.

As the case of Charlotte Hayes shows, people on the right are held to an entirely different standard than those on the left. This is what two-tier justice really looks like.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.