The bacon hate crime

A man has been arrested for singing ‘we love bacon’. Free speech is cooked.

The history books of our time will read like the memoirs of a lunatic. Just this week, we’ve seen activists across the country protesting against imaginary hordes of the ‘far right’, even though the actual ‘far right’ could barely fill a semi-detached bungalow. We’ve seen residents decorating potholes in the road with the St George’s flag, because that’s the only way to encourage the council to fill them in. We’ve seen a neo-Nazi in Germany granted permission to relocate to a women’s prison because he’s put on some lipstick and called himself ‘Marla’. And now, a man has been arrested in the UK for saying ‘we love bacon’.

This pork-based hate crime took place at a protest in the Lake District against the planned construction of an immense mosque. Naturally, the protests have been dismissed as examples of race hatred or ‘Islamophobia’, even though Islam is not a race and ‘Islamophobia’ is a meaningless term concocted to silence dissent. As has become typical of today’s culture wars, word games have superseded the need for adult conversation.

For most of the protesters at the Lake District, this is not a matter of religion at all. There is a long history of residents opposing construction plans that threaten to disrupt the natural beauty of this UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Sandford Principle enshrines in UK law the necessity to prioritise conservation over development. But even if one takes the view that the building of mosques in iconic British areas is a form of goading, and that such displays of ideological dominance ought to be resisted, your right to make this point peacefully is enshrined in law.

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