In July 1967, the Black Power activist Michael X addressed a meeting in Reading. “The most savage human being in the world,” he told the audience, “is the white man.” He was arrested the following month, charged with inciting racial hatred and sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment.

It’s worth recalling this small episode in British race relations given the popularity within sections of the right to talk, in the wake of the summer riots, of “two-tier policing” and “political prisoners”. Last week, Peter Lynch, serving a sentence of two years and eight months for violent disorder outside a Rotherham hotel housing asylum seekers, died in prison, possibly by suicide. Reform MP Richard Tice called him a “political prisoner”, while Daily Telegraph columnist Isabel Oakeshott mourned him as “Britain’s first political prisoner”, no less.

The claim that we are entering a new era of “two-tier policing” and that, in Oakeshott’s words, “never before, in modern times, have people been jailed in this country, for such thin offences”, rests upon wilful ignorance. Throwing people into prison for what they have said or written is, unfortunately, a long and ignoble British tradition, as is applying different standards of policing to different groups.

Dozens of people have, in recent decades, faced jail for expressing objectionable views, from the imprisonment in November 1967 of four members of the United Coloured People’s Association for inciting racial hatred at Speakers’ Corner; to Abdul Saleem, imprisoned in 2007 for four years for chanting “Denmark, USA, 7/7 on its way” during a protest against the Danish cartoons; to drill rappers Skengo and AM, given suspended sentences for performing a song, Attempted 1.0, at a gig in 2018.

Most people would find many of these views repellent. But then, so were Lynch’s. Many of those now claiming him as a “political prisoner” seem more concerned........

© The Guardian