Dear Theresa May,

Firstly, congratulations on your election win. Fair’s fair, your party won the popular vote. (Mind you, our ridiculous first-past-the-post system has given you the MPs to totally dominate Westminster, despite winning barely one-third of the vote, but that is another matter.)

Let’s talk about the extremist bill that was trailed in the news today. You and your party really scare me. While I fundamentally disagree with quite frankly many people, freedom of speech is of critical importance. Most politicians spout a painful amount guff, but I would not wish to prevent them from spouting such utterances.

A quote from Mark Easton of the BBC [1]

“Under the proposals, ministers would be able to silence any group or individual they believe is undermining democracy or the British values of tolerance and mutual respect.”

Let’s keep it simple and break this down.

“Undermining democracy”

What do you mean by “democracy”?  Do you mean that what comes from Westminster? With just over a third of the public vote, Westminster can produce laws that nearly two-thirds of the nation voted against, for the next five years. Is there another definition you have in mind? Westminster is ruled by a party carried the will of a minority of the electorate.

Looking back into history, many great social improvements occurred when the “law” no longer represented the common will of the people. This then leads to a tipping point, and our political system has to buckle.

“The British values of tolerance and mutual respect.”

What on earth are British values? There are no such things. I’ve travelled quite a bit, and what are often described as British values are simply common values that exists elsewhere in the world. They are human values.

If freedom to live your life reasonably as you wish without harassment is important, that precludes imposing values, even British ones (whatever they are – see above). If someone wants to live a certain religious life for example, they may choose to live in a community with others who want to live the same way. I believe that is respecting the choice of others to live differently to you. I bet you like the sound of that.

My deep concern is that many of my political peers are to be found within anti-capitalist groups and anti-fracking groups. They and I do not see the world the same as the Conservative Party do. We reject your world view, and will march, argue and protest that we would like to see the capitalism as exists now brought to its knees. We want to replace it with a system that is fair and distributes the resources we have so everyone isn’t left needy. We recognise that as a human race we are exploiting the world beyond its sustainable limits. We change direction or crash and burn.

The narrow scope of the law that comes from Westminster only support the status quo. There may be a time when doing the right thing for the people means doing the wrong thing in the eyes of the law.

Does this make me and my contemporaries extremists? Are the police coming for us soon?

I do not support  terrorism in any shape or form. However, given the laws already in place, the authorities have plenty of powers. They do not need new ones.

So I reject your bill and its principles totally. It seems you are trying to legislate ideas you don’t like away. It seems you want to intrude deeper into our liberties.

You and this bill will fail. You can’t legislate ideas away.

The instruments you propose will just be petrol on the bonfire.

We have just commemorated VE Day.

I wonder what they would make of your brand of freedom?

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32714802