The assault on Christian street preachers in NOT so great britain

BCF : They have become a target of both speech-policing cops and violent extremists.

Has the UK become a hostile place for Christian street preachers?

Hazel Lewis was arrested while preaching outside Finsbury Park Tube station in north London on 12 February 2020. She was falsely accused of homophobia and racism. Passers-by said she had called for gays and non-believers to be stabbed. Officers decided she had not, in fact, used homophobic or racist language, but she was still charged with a public-order offence.

Now, following an 18-month court battle, Lewis has finally been vindicated. The judge said there was no case to answer and that her words had not been threatening or abusive. Fortunately for Lewis, she had a recording of the offending sermon, which made clear that the hate-speech allegations were baseless.

It is great news that Lewis has won. But it is worrying that she was charged at all. You don’t have to be a Christian to see what’s at stake here: an innocent woman was handcuffed, arrested and prosecuted based on entirely false allegations. This case highlights the risk that we all face when we give the state free rein to police ‘offensive’ speech.

Lewis is unlikely to be the last preacher to face the force of the law for her sermons. Worryingly, her prosecution arguably contradicted recent legal precedent. This was the first time that a Christian woman had faced trial for preaching the gospel on the street since Alison Redmond-Bate in 1999. Back then, the presiding judge ruled in Redmond-Bate’s favour. In his ruling, he famously said that ‘free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to provoke violence’.

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