By way of sobering example, take the news that an E-list British celebrity named Ursula Presgrave was this week found guilty in London of “malicious communication.” Her crimes? To have written on Facebook that “anyone born with down [sic] syndrome should be put down” before they are subjected to the “pointless life of a vegetable,” and to have saved onto her smartphone a series of memes that mocked the disabled. When asked by prosecutors whether she accepted that she had committed a crime, Presgrave confirmed her liability without so much as a fight. Within the month she will be sentenced, and, depending on the judge’s mood, required to spend half a year in prison or to pay a £5,000 fine. Another hammer has been used to crack another nut.

That a putatively free person so readily accepted the prospect of being jailed for holding ugly opinions should provide some insight into the contemporary state of intellectual liberty in Britain. Presgrave is without doubt a fool, and her views are morally repugnant. But that is the business neither of Her Majesty’s government nor of those under who operate beneath its carapace. There were no threats made here; there was no imminent danger or incitement to law-breaking; no conspiracies were uncovered. Instead, a person of below-average intellect and questionable ethical calibration issued an abstract opinion that both the majority and the chattering classes found abhorrent. In a country whose people are at liberty, this cannot be a crime. To the contrary: Toleration of precisely this sort of culturally egregious expression is what distinguishes free nations from tyrannies. By prosecuting Presgrave for what amounts to nothing more than thoughtcrime, Britain has erred badly.