Twitter and terrifying tale of modern Britain | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer

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The head of MI5 has warned we must take the threat of new Islamist atrocities seriously. If the abuse of antiterrorist legislation in the Paul Chambers case is a guide, the people who most need reminding of the importance of seriousness, are MI5's colleagues in the criminal justice system. The 27-year-old worked for a car parts company in Yorkshire. He and a woman from Northern Ireland started to follow each other on Twitter. He liked her tweets and she liked his and boy met girl in a London pub. They got on as well in person as they did in cyberspace. To the delight of their followers, Paul announced he would be flying from Robin Hood airport in Doncaster to Northern Ireland to meet her for a date. In January, he saw a newsflash that snow had closed the airport. "Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed," he tweeted to his friends. "You've got a week… otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" People joke like this all the time. When they say in a bar: "I'll strangle my boyfriend if he hasn't done the washing up" or post on Facebook: "I'll murder my boss if he makes me work late", it does not mean that the bodies of boyfriends and bosses will soon be filling morgues. You know the difference between making a joke and announcing a murder, I'm sure. Apparently the forces of law and order do not. A plain-clothes detective from South Yorkshire Police arrived at Chambers's work. Instead of quietly pointing out that it was best not to joke about blowing up airports, he arrested him under antiterrorist legislation. A posse of four more antiterrorist officers was waiting in reception. "Do you have any weapons in your car?" they asked. "I said I had some golf clubs in the boot," Chambers told me. "But they didn't think it was funny. I kept wondering, 'When are they going to slap my wrists and let me go?' Instead, they hauled me into a police car while my colleagues watched." The Crown Prosecution Service wanted to charge him under the law's provisions against bomb hoaxers, a serious measure aimed at a serious public nuisance. But there had been no hoax. Paul Chambers had not caused a panic at the airport or intended to cause a panic. No one in authority knew about the tweet until some busybody decided to report Chambers. Instead of displaying a little common sense and letting the matter rest, the CPS dug up an obscure section of the 2003 Communications Act, which makes it an offence to send a "menacing message" over a public telecommunications network. Chambers pleaded not guilty after reading an outraged article on his case by David Allen Green, one of the new generation of free-speech lawyers. No good did his plea do him. In a Kafkaesque development, the CPS persuaded judge Jonathan Bennett that in the context of terrorist violence his tweet should be taken as a genuine threat, whether he was joking or not and whether the airport knew about the "threat" or not. The judge gave Chambers a criminal record and ordered him to pay £1,000 in costs and fines. In Milan Kundera's great anti-communist novel The Joke, the young hero tries to impress a beautiful woman with adolescent bravado. Forgetting what happens to dissenters in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, he writes on a card to her: "Optimism is the opium of the people. A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!" It's a silly joke. But Communist party officials cannot admit it is a joke once the card is discovered or they will be branded as Trotskyite traitors too. So they make him to do forced labour in the mines. The danger of calling the justice system Kafkaesque or comparing democratic Britain to Stalinist Czechoslovakia is that you risk repeating the exaggerations of hysterical writers. This is a free country, after all, and the state does not send the likes of Paul Chambers to the salt mines. In this case, the totalitarian comparison is only mildly hyperbolic, however. After his managers at the car parts business heard the police call him a "terrorist", they fired him. He moved to Northern Ireland to be close to his girlfriend and found a job working for a council. Last week, he told his employers that his appeal would be heard this Friday and his name would be in the papers. They heard the words "bomb" and "airport" and fired him too. Because of a joke, he has a criminal record and lost two jobs. The CPS is ruining his life – for no reason. With a bit of luck, the crown court will turn his case into a legal scandal. The CPS's claim that a person's intent does not matter when they tweet a joke strikes me as false in law. More pertinently, anyone who reads the reports of the original trial can guess that the police eventually dismissed the affair as a nonsense. If so, was the defence told? Beyond the law lies the politics. The hounding of Paul Chambers stinks of Labour authoritarianism. The prosecuting authorities showed no respect for free speech. They could not take a joke. They carried on prosecuting Chambers even when they knew he was harmless. They turned a trifle into a crime because a conviction helped them hit performance targets. Inside their bureaucratic hierarchies, it was dangerous to speak out against a superior's stupidity. Better to let an injustice take place than risk a black mark against your name. If the court condemns the CPS, I can guarantee that Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, will not fire or discipline the prosecutors involved. I doubt if he will even tell them they have undermined support for the anti-terrorist cause. I don't care what the polls say or how unpopular the coalition becomes – Labour must change the settled view of the majority of Britons that it is the party of politically correct jobsworths or it will never win another election.

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I dunno about never winning an election again. The economy and punishing the party in power for whatever ills happen to be taking place matters more to people than 10 Paul Chambers being kafka-esquely crushed by the system.

But it's an interesting subject. I was at a friend's place this week-end and some kids had sneaked into his building and he told them to move off the property or else he'd call the cops. We think they did. But I commented that the threat was somewhat silly. Cops would rightly prioritise a trespass with no violence or degradation (yet) as unimportant and come around 20 hours later, if at all.

Which would mean the kids would feel embolden.

I argued that the right way to deal with the situation would be to tell them to move off and, if they refuse, grab them by the collar, shake them up and throw them out. But that such a move would see you immediately arrested and thrown under the wheels of the system as a child abuser, a criminal worst than the Kray twins. To which he replied that, while that was likely to be true under New Labour, he felt that such behaviour would be allowed under the Conservative (the guy is a center-left like me and can't stand the economic policies of the present gvt).

That surprised me in the sense that I still suspect that the don't-ever-lay-a-finger-on-kids-especially-if-they-are-not-yours is larger than whoever is in power. He disagreed. Said, half-laughing, that this would be Big Society in action - Empowering the people.

Hmmmm. What do you think? Is it going to be OK to smack around or shake up yobsters and other dickheads that happen to be "children"?

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Certainly there is a strand of conservatism that approves of that sort of thing. The likes of the Daily Mail etc are always ready to support "have-a-go heroes" and sundry bits of vigilantiism.

On the other hand, the police don't like it, citing the dangers. Frex, the death of Philip Lawrence. Plus there is the more general problem of sorting out who-did-what-to-who in these sorts of situations.

I wouldn't beat them up just for being in the building (a bit Marcellus Wallace, isn't it?).

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I dunno about never winning an election again. The economy and punishing the party in power for whatever ills happen to be taking place matters more to people than 10 Paul Chambers being kafka-esquely crushed by the system.

No, but I think that people were genuinely tired of the po-faced intrusiveness of it all.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

I wouldn't beat them up just for being in the building (a bit Marcellus Wallace, isn't it?).

I wasn't suggesting beating them up. They were 9-11 yo kids. With 30 cms on them, adults don't actually need to beat up a kid - just grab, shake/toss...

It's different when they are 16 and they got 10 cms on you! Then, it's definitely more careful to call the police because any fight breaking out can get serious.

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No, but I think that people were genuinely tired of the po-faced intrusiveness of it all.

We can only hope. The police was grilled for having arrested 6 North Africans who were overheard by a colleague talking about assassinating the Pope while he was in-country. The police, reasonably, imho, said: "Well, we had to follow up. Imagine we didn't and something had happened". But it was a 1 or 2 days affair and, unplpeasant as it must have been for the 6 guys, it was established to be a joke and they're free to pursue their lifes as was.

I don't get the difference of treatment. I think this is where the system is still down to individuals. I bet you what you want that, in the Chambers' case, somewhere, there's one guy who decided to go all-out on him - for whatever reason. We should find that guy and get him fired. Maybe indicted.

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