Race-hate probe is the death of freedom, says ANN WIDDECOMBE
IF ANY proof were needed that we are not living in a free society, the police have now provided it with a decision to investigate Darren Grimes, the journalist who interviewed David Starkey when he notoriously used the phrase "damn blacks".
Is a journalist seriously supposed to predict the terms of an interviewee's answers? If Starkey's phrase means Grimes himself is guilty of stirring up racial hatred then I am guilty of stirring up anti-Catholicism in an interview I carried out in 2005 with the late Reverend Ian Paisley.
I was making a programme about the Reformation and was in Ulster to cover the Orange March. While there I interviewed Ian in his office in Stormont, stupidly expecting to find the man I knew at Westminster, where we had often made common cause on moral issues.
This however was Paisley on his home turf and that turf was unapologetically, sometimes militantly, Protestant. When I asked him what he thought of the Pope he replied "he is the son of perdition and the anti-Christ"!
Could I reasonably have been held responsible for such a reply?
Guilt by association is the new trial by ordeal. I may often have been irritated by unfair or inaccurate criticism but only once have I felt personally hurt. That was last summer when The Jewish Chronicle contacted me to say that I was being accused of anti-Semitism.
The Judaeo-Christian tradition has guided my life.
Not only that, but I had also been consistently active in defending Israel and had addressed more Jewish groups and societies than I had had hot dinners.
Yet now I was being accused of anti-Semitism because I had given an interview to a small radio station which some months earlier had interviewed a holocaust denier! Aside from the purely practical issue of how I am supposed to know who has interviewed whom on what station, why should I be stopped from airing my own views on another topic?
The investigation of Darren Grimes goes beyond censorship. It is tyranny.
Freedom in Britain RIP.