23 Comments
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Chris Patten's avatar

I'm a plastic paddy who actually lived in NI/SC for a decade. It's easy to be swept up in the superb PR of the armed struggle but working with people who had been mutilated and emotionally traumatised by the actions of all sides really curbs such feelings. I think that the rather pathetic band need a brief exposure to the reality of what they are monetising.

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Michael Patrick O’Leary's avatar

I met a fellow called Chris Patten in Northern Ireland in 1983. He was a Catholic.

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Chris Patten's avatar

It's quite a common irish name. Of course it might have been a famous politician…….

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Michael Patrick O’Leary's avatar

It was indeed that famous politician. He told me that he had that very day upset Ian Paisley by using the word “Derry”.

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Chris Patten's avatar

I was literally having the same discussion in Oxford yesterday with a couple I had asked for directions. He had been 'corrected' when asking for the train to Derry by a NIR employee.

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Simon Riley's avatar

“The point is that rebel songs are, largely, fun to sing along to, and even for the middle-aged and elderly, offer a little frisson of transgression.”

Not if you lived through the Troubles in Northern Ireland, witnessing every few days another decent person picked out for summary execution by the IRA, or any of the other terror gangs. Honestly my blood boils at people laughing about it all now. It was grim. Who was going to be next? We didn’t know. Kneecap typify the glibness of those with IRA sympathies towards the horrors they put people through. “Rebel songs” were never harmless, then or now - to people who suffered through their violent hatred, these songs glorify an awful sectarian murder tradition.

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SamJordison's avatar

Glad to read this. I agree both about the absurdity of this kind of literalism - and the very real and dangerous consequences of being so daft about things. (I also enjoyed your damning Kneecap with the very faintest of praise. Although, personally I loved the film and think some of their music is great. The film made me laugh and laugh too.)

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James Farrar's avatar

The problem is, Lucy Connolly got 31 months for something several orders of magnitude less serious.

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Phorize's avatar

I'm not sure that her tweet was less serious, she called for attacks on asylum hotels at the precise point that such attacks were happening and every police force, fire brigade, health system and local authority in the country was on standby for a major incident. There is no legislation that can avoid these decisions to prosecute speech offences being made without reference to some subjective moral axiom or other, the police and Courts have a difficult job. Fans of Kneecap either imply that it's it's just fine to troll British Jews by promoting Islamist groups, or that it's all intended as irony. What ever is happening is clear that Kneecap will become irrelevant the day they stop spewing this sort of tedious bile, so we should expect them to continue. At the end of the day it feels likely that Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh is just a left wing Katie Hopkins.

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FionnM's avatar

Also worth mentioning that Lucy Connolly thought better of her statement and deleted it the same day. The interval in which someone could have seen it and been "incited" to violence against an asylum centre was a few hours.

Kneecap, on the other hand, have been unequivocal about their support for Hamas and Hezbollah for years. And far from this advocacy being tongue-in-cheek (as the author implies), I think they approach it with a far greater degree of intellectual seriousness (e.g. https://x.com/antisemitism/status/1915405369041670437). It's only now that they're at risk of facing legal consequences that they're now backtracking and claiming never to have supported either organisation.

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Michael Patrick O’Leary's avatar

You make a good point. Kneecap have made a career of this class of thing whereas she has not.

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Forest's avatar

At the precise point that news was breaking about the nature of a horrific attack on innocent children.

And she has never starred in an award winning film nor sold out venues to hundreds or thousands of paying fans.

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Phorize's avatar

1)Public Order Act 1986 s.19(1)

A person who publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or having regard to all the circumstances, racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.

2) Here's the Court decision, you can see that the evidence submitted to the Court was that Lucy Connolly intended to incite racial hatred-the decision to convict was right legally speaking, as she was shown to have committed the offence. Her own barrister agreed that was shown by the evidence. The sentencing was also explained. She will serve 40% of a 3 year sentence. The mitigations of her previous good record contributed to a lenient sentence that compares reasonably to other cases with similar facts. What went against her was 1) the police were able to trace similar tweets that were indicative of racist intent prior to the Southport incident (which wouldn't have been an offence in and of themselves) and 2) at the point of sentencing she didn't agree that the sending of a tweet essentially saying it would be a good thing to burn down buildings full of people on the grounds of their ethnic origin was really a problem. In other words she was bang to rights but didn't accept it. If she'd shown genuine insight into why encouraging arson on the grounds of ethnicity (which a basic common sense reading of her tweet indicates) was a problem she'd have likely been sentenced more lightly, and you can be certain that her barrister (funded by the tax payer) would have been clear to her about this. The most generous thing you can say about her that she made a mistake but when it came to facing the music she behaved like a petulant child to her own cost. Womp womp.

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Connollysentence.pdf

3) Kneecap are clearly propogating antisemitism for the lols/money or some other reason and a prosecution under the Terrorism Act looks appropriate for the act of waving the flags or two proscribed organisations at a gig whilst changing in their favour. The thing that this brings out to me is that between the progressive left and the populist right about half ten Country only believes the law should be enforced against those the disagree with, and therefore don't believe in the rule of law at all.

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Forest's avatar

Thanks for that comprehensive response, very informative.

It’s more the two tier thing that’s causing the anger though; justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done is a truism for centuries.

And it’s certainly not being seen to be done, an angry tweet in response to barbarism is being treated as harshly as violent crimes by others, and much more harshly than unpleasant statements from others.

Whatever else about the populist right, their preferred outcome would be harsh punishments for premeditated crimes, and the same standards for all. That’s not what they are seeing.

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James Farrar's avatar

Incorrect. She did *not* "call for attacks". She said she didn't care if there were attacks.

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Phorize's avatar

The tweet was “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.” I think a majority of fluent English speakers would interpret that as unambiguously expressing sympathy for/encouraging arson. It's a precisely worded and actively voiced instruction, tagging the end with 'for all I care' doesn't change the meaning of the first part of the sentence. It's is then followed with precise language about the envisaged victims. It's a good example of what incitement, and is remarkably similar to the rhetoric used by the RTFM radio station during the Rwanda genocide as an example.

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James Farrar's avatar

There's a massive difference between expressing sympathy for and encouraging. And the key phrase is the one you dismiss because it dismantle your argument:"for all I care" - she's saying she doesn't care if it happens or not. In no way is it an "instruction".

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Phorize's avatar

I think we are going to have to agree to disagree. I would invite you to read the Public Order Act, because you'd see that what she said fits quite comfortably within it's incitement framework given the context at the time.

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Jane McCarthy's avatar

Interesting comparing this with the Lucy Connelly case. Context is everything - a young band whose literal hook is rebellion against 'whaddya got' and no doubt, like many people, sincere feelings about what is going on in Gaza, shouting out provocative distasteful statements and waving flags during a live performance, and everyone goes home. Meanwhile then a local pillar of the community, married to a local councillor, at a time of great national shock and fear, and no doubt, like many people sincere feelings about what has happened, tweeting out an unashamedly racist and inflammatory comment, as tensions rose and eventually broke out into riots, led by the spreading of misinformation...Context and consequences?

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Phorize's avatar

The context is that they repeatedly appear to glorify violent Islamists who place the hatred and repression of non believers, Jews, women and gays at the centre of their doctrine and practice. I spent enough time within the British radical left to realise that antisemitism runs through sections of it like a stick of rock. Kneecap appear to be illiterate enough to have no awareness what they are doing, but the moral self immolation that many more educated people are performing in their defence is the more interesting (and depressing) spectacle.

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Jane McCarthy's avatar

And you've ignored the context of Connolly tweet...

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Jane McCarthy's avatar

They would point out their context is what is happening right now in Gaza?

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Phorize's avatar

They would, but it's trivially easy to effectively rail against the situation in Gaza without supporting murderous religious fascists. Given that it would be so easy do to this, what do think this says about Kneecaps actual beliefs? What should gay people in Lebanon make of Kneecaps glorification of Hezbollah, whose leader called for them all to be killed in 2023? What should British Jews make of Kneecaps chants of support for murderous Jew haters no more than 2 miles away from where the black shirts matched though the east end? This is what hatred of Jews looks like.

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