Is Britain turning into East Germany?

A local councillor’s hounding for using a perfectly common turn of phrase was like something from the Stasi handbook

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

The former Stasi headquarters in Berlin (photo: Nick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

In communist East Germany, it wasn’t at all uncommon for citizens to snitch on their neighbours and workmates to the state’s secret police – the Stasi.

That tyrannical outfit maintained a huge network of informants – many of them ordinary people doing ordinary jobs – who would think nothing of reporting the subversive private utterings of their compatriots.

It all led, unsurprisingly, to the most repressive atmosphere – one in which the average person would, in everyday conversation, constantly be thinking one step ahead to avoid saying something incriminating.

That sort of menacing society, in which expressing opinions that conflict with the dogma of officialdom is punished, seems to be creeping ever closer in Britain.

Thanks to an expanding web of restrictive laws, we have seen a litany of cases – too numerous to list here – in which citizens have been arrested, and sometimes convicted, for saying or doing things which, in a country that genuinely valued liberty, they would be perfectly free to say and do.

And where the law can’t quite reach the ‘offender’, the pernicious phenomenon of cancel culture, or the ignominy of having a ‘non-crime hate incident’ recorded against one’s name, will suffice.

All of which brings me to Claire Mackie-Brown, a Reform UK councillor on Falkirk council.

Councillor Mackie-Brown recently found herself the subject of a police investigation following a complaint from a member of the public. The complaint had apparently been sparked by a quite extraordinary exchange between the councillor and a local TV reporter.