eChurch Blog

In last week’s positively surreal broadcast of BBC tv’s Question Time, deputy prime minister Jack Straw blathered on about how Parliament had boldly preserved freedom of expression in Britain by deliberately refraining from making Holocaust denial a crime. In yesterday’s Times,  Straw was joined by his cabinet colleague, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, blathering on about how wonderful for Britain is its membership of the EU and how Euro-sceptics should stop whinging and learn to love the wonderful new international power bloc that it will finally become after ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.

Meanwhile, the fundamental right of freedom of expression in this country is about to be severely curbed by a brand new directive from Brussels which has crept up on us all with all the customary stealth its edicts typically do.

The directive in question is the Equal Treatment Directive. It is due to go before the Council of Ministers next month for final ratification, having been approved by the European Parliament in April 2008.

Initially, it was primarily concerned to ensure disabled people would not be discriminated against when accessing ‘goods and services’, but it was seized on by ‘diversity’ merchants and its scope dramatically extended.

In its current form, it is drafted to make it a criminal offence for anyone to ‘harass’ another by, among other things, ‘creating an… offensive environment.’

If someone complains against someone else for having created an offensive environment, it will be left to the person about whom the complaint has been made to establish that he or she did not did not make the environment offensive to the complainant. Should they fail to do so to the satisfaction of the courts, they will be liable to unlimited fine.

Basically, it will be a charter to curb all criticism on secular or religious grounds of other people’s life-styles and faiths. In the interests of protecting diversity and minorities, essentially everyone is to be silenced.

I personally feel deeply offended by this new proposed directive, regarding it as creating an ‘intimidating, hostile, and offensive environment’.

Should it be approved by the Council of Ministers when it goes before them and so becomes law, will I be able to take them to court for harassment under its terms?

Somehow, I doubt it, although I fear that it won’t be long before someone is on my case, unless I cease to complain about the directive.

For some really chilling information about it, read the piece about it by Paul Belien on the Hudson Institute’s blog and watch the video clip in which law professor William Wagner explains why the new directive promises to be such a threat to liberty.