British police do some good things. In 2023, officers were credited with reducing the number of phone snatchings by punks on mopeds. Great.
Let’s have more of that, less of telling victims of totalitarian dictatorship to shut up for their own good.
The UK police wanted expatriate Hongkonger Carmen Lau, a pro-democracy activist and former Hong Kong politician who has been living in Britain since 2021, to stay out of trouble with China. So in March, London bobbies asked her to sign a “memorandum of understanding” obliging her to avoid public gatherings and “cease any activity likely to put you at risk.”
What activity?
Not hang gliding.
The sickening effort to muzzle Lau came after neighbors got letters “offering a £100,000 bounty (US$131,947) for information on her movements” leading to her arrest by Hong Kong’s Chinese Communist Party authorities.
Hong Kong denies sending the letters. But in 2024, it placed bounties on the heads of six pro-democracy activists, including Lau, who had fled overseas in the wake of China’s repressive national security law of 2020, which targeted Hong Kong liberties.
Lau felt constrained to submit to the police request when they came to her door but has continued to speak out. “A truly democratic response should center on protecting the rights of those targeted, not advising them to retreat from public life,” she says.
Responding to the revelations, Thames Valley police say that they’d never “confirm or deny safeguarding tactics that we may or may not use. . . .”
Is this the free world? Not if under China’s thumb.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “UK as China’s Thumb Puppet”
When the institutions of liberal governance have been perfectly hollowed-out, attempting to use litigation or elections to set things right entails mistaking surface forms for absent instruments. Petitioning, voting, or suing are reduced to participation in a cargo cult.
The United Kingdom is lost; I’m inclined to believe that Great Britain itself is lost. In any case, the United States and America more generally should disengage, at least until the Britons rise up.
The UK is no longer free. Free speech has been abolished for those who go against government policies. The Starmer government has created a national internet intelligence team to monitor anti-migrant speech. The case you cite here is yet another example of the UK cracking down on dissidents rather than protecting their right to freely and peacefully express their opinions. The aim is to avoid clashes with those protected groups who might take offense. To quote Daniel Greenfield: this is what a police state looks like.
It looks like the only ones they are protecting are the illegals.