As Army veteran and father of two, Adam Smith-Connor, spoke stoically this afternoon to the gathered media outside Poole Magistrates Court after his conviction for the first ‘thought crime’ in modern British history, you could be forgiven for feeling that the great Orwellian dystopia had finally arrived.

Mr Smith-Connor’s case is just the latest exchange in a longstanding and increasingly tense stand-off between Christian campaigners and a government that is clearly committing itself to a determinedly secular agenda.

The new abortion facility ‘buffer zones’ that are being implemented on 31st October represent a potentially chilling new chapter in the incursion of government into the public space, as this particular legislation has all the capacity to make it a criminal offence to be even discussing abortion in your own home, if you’re unlucky enough to be within an exclusion zone and your conversation is overheard.

Whilst it’s fully understandable that no-one should be intimidated or harassed for going about their legal business even if that is something as abhorrent as seeking an abortion, the notion that citizens need to be insulated and protected legally from contrary views and opinions is a dangerous new erosion of the concept of a civil democracy. It’s also made worse by the fact that the underlying motivations for this particular societal development are rooted in relativist notions around the supremacy of the rights of the individual, with little consideration given to the interconnectedness of the human person to wider society.

Bournemouth, Christchurch and pool Council filed charges against Adam Smith-Connor after it was found he has paused for a few moments outside an abortion clinic to pray privately and silently for his deceased son. Before Adam’s conversion to Christianity, he had paid for the abortion of his first son, Jacob, whom he conceived with an ex-girlfriend – a decision that he deeply regrets. Today he says he’s found forgiveness but knows firsthand the trauma of abortion and the loss of life it causes.

Speaking outside the court after the guilty verdict had been delivered, Mr Smith-Connor made reference to his 22 years of military service to the UK, and to his current work as a physiotherapist and church volunteer.

“I never imagined that the nation I love and has been so good to me in the past would turn on me for doing nothing more than offering up a prayer for my deceased son,” he said.

“I felt like my government had foresaken me … I’m extremely saddened that the judge has found me guilty; this marks a dark and dangerous day for our nation.”

Of course, no-one’s in any doubt here that this case is a test of provocations on all sides – most will see it that Adam’s actions were no random pause on a morning walk and were intended fully to test the law in this particular area of freedom of speech. Equally his highly-politicised actions demanded that the state and its agencies responded in the anticipated manner to what it perceived as threat to its underlying secular narratives.

In some respects this was merely the latest iteration of the individual, and the right to protest vs the state – from suffrage in the 19th and early 20th century, through the Chartists, to Cable Street, Aldermaston, Bloody Sunday, Orgreave, Iraq and on to the present day, the right to protest – and especially peaceful protest – has been one of the defining charactistics of British life. It has also been flaunted particularly by British governments keen to call out less democratic nations.

What makes the Connor-Smith case such a defining moment in British legal history is that it has slipped the extent of the law over into the realm of defining guilt in terms of ideologies rather than just actions. When the government’s Public Order Act 2023 came into effect last year there were deep concerns from civil liberties groups that legislation was an ominous redefinition of the existing public disorder offences. A development of the Public order Act 1986 the 2023 law created a number of new criminal offences, such as ‘locking on’ where protestors fixed themselves to objects, ‘tunnelling’ – a specific response to road protests, and obstructive behavior likely to interfere with the functioning of key national infrastructures.

Key to this piece of legislation was the use of the phrase ‘serious disruption’, which to the sensible mind placed the legislation as an obvious and – to many – justifiable response to the increasingly disruptive and frustrating tactics being used by particular protest groups. Attached to the phrase ‘serious disruption’ was the sub-deck ‘to more than a minor degree’, which created at least some trace of a line in the sand to delimit what was acceptable protest and what wasn’t.

In UK legal parlance the test of what is reasonable comes down to “the man on the Clapham omnibus”, a phrase generally attributed to Liberal MP and Cabinet Minister John Burns (1858-1943), but often thought to stretch back to Lord Justice Bowen‘s remarks in the McQuire v Western Mornings News Co Ltd  of 1903. For more than a century the ubiquitous ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ has stood for the reactions of the ‘reasonable’ person, and one would think that Clapham Omnibus man would have experienced little trouble seeing a clear distinction in civil disobedience terms between standing on a pavement praying silently, and supergluing oneself to the fast lane of the M25.

Sadly, after today’s risible decision, the Clapham omnibus is clearly no longer in service, as ‘reasonable behaviour’ is evidently no longer what the public ethic determines, but what the state dictates. Simply, the state is no longer the servant of the public; and the public is now the serf of the state. At the heart of this profound shift in the body of English law is that no longer will it be sufficient to define anti-social behaviour, rather legislators will be free to categorise any unwelcome behaviour as potentially contrary to the secular common good.

Elsewhere this week we have seen other parallel instances of this change of societal pace, most of it driven by a small elite of leftist, liberal intellectuals whose wealth and privileged status will most likely ensure they will be the least affected by the changes being pushed upon the broader public body.

Most concerning has been the introduction in parliament his morning of legislation that is seeking to introduce assisted dying into British society – in yet another example of intellectual elites trying to impose their values and predelictions on a society whose experience of such things is likely to be extremely less noble than the arguments being presented. Much like the right to peaceful protest, the right to life is enshrined deeply in British society; such rights have only been won with decades, often centuries, of painful and sustained protest and it’s only right that we should be asking deep and urgent questions about who exactly is seeking to remove these hard-won rights, and for what reasons? For those of us old enough to remember the heady days of protest from the 1950s onwards what is being presented right now bears little resemblance to a continuation of liberties gained over the past half century. To most protest veterans what’s going on looks a lot more like an ominous drift toward a totalitarian state – which you can usually sense when its proponents start talking endlessly about liberty and choice; invariably the first pillars to fall when freedom is being eroded.

Many of the recent controversies about public liberty have become narratives about religion, from inflated concerns about the Islamification of Britain to the need (apparently) to pull Britain away from its defining 2,000-year-old Christian past. In many respects – and especially in secular minds –  these two narratives are one and the same, a preoccupation with the delusions seemingly caused by living one’s life through the principles of a faith.

It is one of the great, and utterly obvious to all, delusions that faith of itself is somehow a cause of civil disquiet. Some notable recent prime ministers have even been fond of arguing that multiculturalism is impossible, and of course it well suits the secular narrative to pit one faith, or one culture, against another so that all forms of adherence become the fount of public disorder. In such a tumult there’s a tendency for religious narratives to become deeply polarised and we are already seeing this happening as the rights of freedom to express a faith are being increasingly pitted against the rights of non-believers to be protected from them.

It is one of the deep ironies of contemporary British society that the more it becomes fixated with tolerance, inclusivity and multiculturalism, the less it actually tolerates. In the face of this it’s vitally important for faith communities never to lose sight of their own central teachings, and to resist all temptations and inducements to isolate and radicalise. We only have to look back to the dark days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland to see the consequences of falling for radical agendas and the false messaging of governments.

Over recent decades Britain has been a country where those of different faiths, and those of differing viewpoints, have been able to co-exist perfectly well in an atmosphere of mutual respect and co-operation. If ever we forget this, we will be at grave risk of allowing a state where liberty and tolerance will eventually be eradicated – by the inept decision-making of a small cabal of wealthy bureaucrats and political idealogues with little meaningful understanding of the deep humanity and intrinsic goodness of the human person.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian

Pictured: Adam outside Poole Magistrates Court with ADF UK legal counsel Jeremiah Igunnubole.