The writer is in Australia
ON THE face of it, I don’t have much in common with Eva Vlaardingerbroek.
Apart from curmudgeonly dissidence, Catholicism, being rabid right-wingers, having routinely misspelled surnames, and obviously, our shared good looks. (Well, everyone who ever mentions Eva feels the need to state that she is beautiful).
This week past, Eva (simply calling her Eva will save on endless spell checks), a Dutch critic of Keir Starmer and mass immigration, has been refused entry to His Majesty’s United Kingdom. She is not ‘conducive to the public good’.
This from a UK Government that won’t deport violent Muslim murderers and which lets child rapists into the country at will. Puts them up in nice hotels. Lets them run their own legal system (sharia law). Weird optics, right there.
Eva’s crime appears to be that she was a speaker at Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally and has criticised the British Prime Minister. Called him evil and despicable, I think. A non-controversial, fact-based observation.
But this story is more about Lucy Connolly than Eva, appalling though the latter’s situation is. Connolly, jailed for an offensive Twitter post at the time of the 2024 Southport stabbings, is now being threatened by her probation officer with a return to prison for more recent deemed-offences, viz reposting social media suggestions by myriad Brits that Donald Trump, following his widely admired arrest of a South American narco terrorist/tyrant, should next come for Starmer.
Here is what Connolly said in 2024, which sent her to prison: ‘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.’
The comment was nasty, to be sure. She did take her post down, fairly sharply. Understandably, tempers were raised at the time, in the wake of white children being stabbed to death for the colour of their skin, or whatever was in the head of the killer. The emotions of the moment, and all that.
This time around for Connolly, it is all about re-posting a joke. Well, perhaps it was a serious suggestion.
It was suggested by British probation officers that Connolly’s latest intervention might ‘incite violence’. Really.
In Australia, in the context of a hot, post-Bondi debate over free speech and anti-Semitism, New South Wales Premier Chris Minns wants to ban ‘globalise the intifada’ and similar phrases, and has set up an inquiry with a remit to examine how successfully the United Kingdom has dealt with hate speech. The Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney urges hitting the pause button.
Its submission to the inquiry says the criminalisation of hate speech is often imprecise, subjective, arbitrary and inconsistent.
The archdiocese agrees there must be a legislative response to the shootings at Bondi, ‘this dark day in our nation’s history’. However, it must be studied carefully to avoid the kind of ‘overreach’ that has occurred in the United Kingdom, where a spate of imprecise and subjective laws has led to an explosion in prosecutions. In the year to June 2025, there were 15,128 prosecutions and 13,013 convictions for hate crimes.
The archdiocese observes that ‘the UK is not a good model for NSW to follow in seeking to address the incitement of hatred and promote social harmony and cohesion’.
Indeed, there have some extraordinary cases. Like Graham Linehan. What about getting closer to root causes? As Connolly says, Twitter is not real life. Real life is gang rapes and stabbings. And Bondi.
The Australian PM Anthony Albanese has gone full hate speech post-Bondi amidst a severe backlash against him for his pro-Palestinian post 7/10 policy stances. He is being booed off stages and feels distinctly uncomfortable attending Bondi funerals. He senses the deep loathing. Albo’s own proposed hate speech legislation is way OTT. Threatens the innocent without seeking out the guilty. His appointment of a leftie judge to oversee a reluctantly agreed Royal Commission on the Bondi outrage is another marker of his ambivalence. These are the reflexive moves of a pro-Palestinian activist politician caught in the Bondi headlights.
The Lotus Eaters think Australia is a ‘dystopian nightmare’, with a focus on the up-till-now proposed hate speech legislation. They have some interesting and disturbing observations. Essential viewing.
A view is forming that Albanese’s anti-free speech hate laws may be dead already. If so, that’s cause for celebration. But don’t pop the champagne corks just yet. The Greens have put forward proposals that will make the draft law worse, a feat that I would have thought impossible. They want so-called ‘homophobia’, ‘transphobia’ and other imaginary fears added to the list of things that will land you in jail. Christian leaders are now lining up to tell the PM to reject this. Rightly so.
Lucy Connolly has become a free speech icon. As has Eva with the long name, and others who call out the deep state, especially when it uses Muslim attacks, whether perpetrated by Islamist cells like ISIS or by demented-and-radicalised lone wolves like the Southport killer, to introduce ill-advised, draconian, useless and unnecessary new laws that do nothing to solve the problem. But which tick the ‘do something’ box and which advance the globalist censorship agenda.
The real solutions are relatively simple.
Recognise the problem’s root causes. Re-educate people about Islam realities. Halt all Muslim immigration. Get rid of all illegals. Deport any Imam found to be inciting violence against Jews or Christians or anyone other infidels. Maintain free speech. Don’t make it the first casualty of terrorist acts. Better distinguish criticism from incitement. Get your domestic intelligence services back on the job and less focused on their diversity training and woke philosophies.
Meantime, we suffer illiberal, wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing measures that will maintain deep state narratives and crush freedom. Mission creep by Big Brother, all in the name of ‘safety’. It isn’t about safety. It is, as during the plandemic, about control. About compelled speech. About controlled speech, as Chris Davies noted on the Dan Wootton podcast linked above.
Starmer, like Albo, is (very obviously) simultaneously repressive and incompetent. Such is our good fortune to be destined to live in such times. Not. Living in times of tinpot dictators. In times of a long, deliberate march towards 1984. In times where, if you dare to critique tyrants and their absurd, hated policies, you will be thrown in jail for longer than those who commit actual crimes. See under Lucy Connolly. In times where progressivist governments pretend to care about anti-Semitism and introduce laws that will do nothing for the Jews but will do plenty for the woke conspiracy.
Good times? I think not.
