A salutary story for our times. An Englishman, whom the judge condemned as a “keyboard warrior”, was sentenced to three years in prison for posting on Twitter/X during the recent unrest in the UK. When Wayne O’Rourke, of Lincoln, first appeared in court, the BBC reported that the prosecution claimed his posts contained “anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric”.

Yes, you read that right: the police arrested the idiot O’Rourke because they decided that his online comments were not only anti-Muslim, but also “anti-establishment.” Amid all the self-critical talk about the causes and consequences of the brief outbreak of unrest in British cities, this should serve as a warning for the future.

Of course, the 35-year-old was not ultimately convicted for writing: “Starmer basically said us against them. Stay tuned,” because using “anti-establishment rhetoric” is not technically a crime. He was convicted rather than publishing written material likely to incite racial hatred after falsely claiming that the three young girls whose murder in Southport preceded the riots were killed in a terrorist attack by a Muslim.

Nevertheless, the court’s careful combination of “anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric” is a new political milestone, showing how the authorities, from Keir Starmer’s Labour government downwards, are exploiting the brutal antics of a few “far-right” rioters to ban any criticism of the Westminster elites’ disastrous policies on everything from mass immigration to law and order.

By equating anti-migrant sentiment with anti-establishment sentiment, they have somehow twisted public anger over the brutal murder of three working-class girls in Southport into denouncing the working class as racist “Islamophobes” who should be censored or even imprisoned.

The last issue of Democracy Watch warned that while the riots may be over, the political “counter-riots have only just begun.” “The British establishment,” I wrote, “is interested not only in clearing the streets of rioters, but also in clearing the political battlefield of oppositional views.” This counter-riot has spread even faster and more violently than we could have imagined.

Since the brief unrest, which included local clashes with police and some reprehensible attacks on migrant shelters and mosques, well over a thousand people have been arrested, many of them charged and moved through the courts and into prison at a pace we would never have expected from our broken justice system.

No one would object to those who commit violent crimes being appropriately punished and imprisoned. However, some of the harsh sentences imposed for relatively minor offenses give the impression that the courts are more concerned with settling political scores than with providing criminal justice.

It is not far-fetched to consider these cases a form of show trials. No, we are not talking about the kind of ruthless political intrigue that has been practiced in authoritarian regimes throughout history, and these trials do not result in death sentences. And yet these are show trials in the sense that the courts are being turned into a theater for a show, a morality play, the aim of which is to make an example of the guilty and to educate the public about what they can and cannot do and say.

Senior government sources said The London Times that Prime Minister Starmer, himself a former Director of Public Prosecutions, had “intervened directly” to ensure that prosecutors and courts took swift and tough action.

“He relied heavily on the justice system,” one official said. “He knew from experience that people needed to see the system working to reinforce the political message that insurrection would not be tolerated. Prosecutions and verdicts needed to be clearly visible.”

Yes, in the name of fighting the “far right”, criminal trials are now being used to “reinforce the political message” to the rest of us. This is British democracy in 2024.

There is not space here to detail the many sentences handed down to make the government’s message ‘clearly visible’. They range from a child accused of rioting in Sunderland to drunken pensioners jailed for shouting ‘Who the hell is Allah?’ and ‘You’re not English any more’ at police near Downing Street in Whitehall; from a woman jailed for pushing a wheelie bin at police officers in Middlesbrough and then falling on her face; to a ‘quiet’ 53-year-old carer from Cheshire locked up for a single, horrific post – ‘Blow up the mosques with the adults in them’ – in her Facebook community group (which prompted no one to do anything other than report her to the police); from a gay couple jailed for “dancing and gesticulating” in front of riot police in Hartlepool, to a 51-year-old man jailed for violent disorder for “getting on each other’s nerves” at a demonstration in Plymouth, even though the judge himself said he had committed no crime. There are many more to come. All unpleasant incidents, no doubt, and perhaps they are all truly terrible examples of humanity. But do their cases really live up to the “Anarchy!” headlines?

To be clear, these counter-riots are not just about dealing with public unrest. Starmer’s intervention has also led to police scouring social media and targeting hidden thought crimes. The current Attorney General boasted to the media that special teams of “dedicated police officers” would “scour” social media for “abusive or violent” material and “then follow up with arrests”. If abusive or violent words are now to be equated with rioting, prisons will really have to be bigger to accommodate all the social media users rounded up.

Some will no doubt say that Starmer was right to intervene and that the safety of the public should be the government’s top priority. But the question is: which public? The Labour leadership did not respond with such a hard line to the Black Lives Matter riots that broke out in the UK following the killing of George Floyd in the US. On that occasion, Starmer and his deputy did not “really lean heavily on the legal system” but simply took a knee in his Westminster office to show their sympathy for the rioters.

But riots in working-class areas are of course treated differently, branded as “far-right” and racist. The reality gap between the worldview of political elites and the public is clearly confirmed by the August Ipsos poll, conducted immediately after the brutal murder of three young girls in Southport that sparked the riots.

According to the survey, 34 percent of the British public – significantly more than the 20 percent of voters who voted for Starmer – now say immigration is a major issue for Britain. This is the first time since 2016 that it has topped the list of issues. Even more striking is that the proportion of those who see crime as a major problem today has risen from just 6 percent last month to 25 percent.

No wonder, then, that the political establishment seeks to equate public anger over these issues with racism, declaring slogans like “Stop the boats” to be outside the bounds of acceptable debate, thereby denying these millions of people their democratic voice.

Some conservatives may be uncomfortable being pigeonholed today in the radical camp of the anti-establishment movement. But it is important to recognize that the ruling left establishment—“a group in a society that wields power and influence and resists change,” just as the traditional establishment once did—is on the other side of the battlefield in everything from the crucial battle over free speech to the larger culture wars.

Anyone who wants to change the direction of British and European society and stand up for free speech and democracy must ignore their ‘far-right’ insults and declare that from now on we are all anti-establishment.