WI: Sex Pistols prosecuted for treason

The charge, had any been brought, would have been sedition, not treason.

The chances of any such charge being brought are significantly less than zero. Not. A. Fucking. Chance.

We are British, not a nation of rabid maniacs.
 
As for the UK having avoided the excesses of McCarthyism...



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Oh, please. In the US, leading and not-even-so-leading Communists were jailed for advocacy and teaching of Marxism-Leninism. Orwell wasn't proposing to jail the people on his list or even to bar them from all government employment. He simply said he thought them unsuitable for the Information Research Department, whose job after all was largely anti-Communist propaganda. Given Fuchs, Burgess, Maclean, Alan Nunn May, Bruno Pontecorvo, etc., the surprise is not that there were some anti-Communist excesses in the UK but that there were so few, especially compared with the US. Sir Waldron Smithers' proposals to establish an Un-British Activities Committee similar to HUAC got nowhere: AHC: British McCarthyism

Indeed, a number of people blacklisted from the entertainment industry in the US moved to the UK and found work there. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/nov/22/1
 
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Here's another way the Sex Pistols could get in a LOT of trouble.. what if John Lydon pressed on with his claims about Jimmy Saville.


In OTL it was a comment made in an interview that was edited out at the time, and lacking in specifics - but what if he splashes it to all who'll listen - and in more detail than OTL?
Might potentially save a number of kids from abuse. And please notice he was saying, it wasn't just Jimmy Savile but a whole bunch of them.

Maybe, maybe if John Lydon caught a moonbeam and saw what rumor, place, time period the police would be most likely to look into. And it helps to go to the police not just by yourself, but maybe with someone else who has seen the same victim both before and after? ? Even though this might be a pretty definite poker read for you, in trying to put it into words and tell someone else, might seem pretty vague.

Or, here in states, I remember hearing a woman telling about going to the police about a domestic violence situation. The police are supposed to have received all this recent training. And yet a female police officer seemed to really downshift what she was saying, my guess being to keep case load down.

So, often the police are pretty lousy, sometimes they come through.
 
Might potentially save a number of kids from abuse. And please notice he was saying, it wasn't just Jimmy Savile but a whole bunch of them.

Maybe, maybe if John Lydon caught a moonbeam and saw what rumor, place, time period the police would be most likely to look into. And it helps to go to the police not just by yourself, but maybe with someone else who has seen the same victim both before and after? ? Even though this might be a pretty definite poker read for you, in trying to put it into words and tell someone else, might seem pretty vague.

Yeah, the inkling that Lydon knew about a range of figures (not just Saville) opens the possibility that he could've "called out" the industry (and big organisations) rather than just one perpetrator.

Frankly, if it was just Saville being accused, the BBC management could have just cut him loose and considered it the end of the story. However, I feel in that case victims (or a bitter Saville himself, wanting to take down others with him) may blow the whistle on wider abuses and coverups. A domino effect of sorts.
 
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Minty_Fresh

Banned
Well, they could just decide to have the band detained if for some reason they should stray into Northern Ireland and see how the trial goes there.


But really, its unlikely anything like a prosecution happens. People may have disliked the band or the song, but they also didn't want to be Commie propaganda fodder.
 
Yeah, the inkling that Lydon knew about a range of figures (not just Saville) opens the possibility that he could've "called out" the industry (and big organisations) rather than just one perpetrator.

Frankly, if it was just Saville being accused, the BBC management could have just cut him loose and considered it the end of the story. However, I feel in that case victims (or a bitter Saville himself, wanting to take down others with him) may blow the whistle on wider abuses and coverups. A domino effect of sorts.
Outside chance Lydon or some other public figure who's heard enough similar stories might be able to do some good.

More likely it will be a victim backed up by a very strong and supportive family and/or a network of friends and professional allies.

And hopefully, another previous victim will come forward also back up by a very strong family and/or network of friends and allies.

And perhaps the point about educating people about abuse is that then the family doesn't need to be so spectacular. That just an average family with flaws and all is enough back up.
 
AND, the controversy would push their sales through the roof.

Would ? they went true the Roof and into space...
according the NME Charts it was number ONE single in UK
According the BBC Charts it was number TWO single in UK (there some controversy that BBC had "fixed" there charts to prevent it be number one)
and in rest of world also became Number one hit.

oh by the way the official video

according the legend they actually try to play the song on Queen parade on river Thames, but were pull out by Police (show in video).
 
Oh, please. In the US, leading and not-even-so-leading Communists were jailed for advocacy and teaching of Marxism-Leninism. Orwell wasn't proposing to jail the people on his list or even to bar them from all government employment. He simply said he thought them unsuitable for the Information Research Department, whose job after all was largely anti-Communist propaganda. Given Fuchs, Burgess, Maclean, Alan Nunn May, Bruno Pontecorvo, etc., the surprise is not that there were some anti-Communist excesses in the UK but that there were so few, especially compared with the US. Sir Waldron Smithers' proposals to establish an Un-British Activities Committee similar to HUAC got nowhere: AHC: British McCarthyism

Indeed, a number of people blacklisted from the entertainment industry in the US moved to the UK and found work there. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/nov/22/1

Point taken that there might not have been Smith Act-type trials in the UK(at least that I can find), and since that's basically what's being posited for the Sex Pistols in this thread, it's a relevant pojnt.

I will say that the UK government's violation of leftists' civil liberties was not confined to blacklisting people from the IRD. According to that LRB piece, Hobsbwam had his mail opened; and was denied, under official pressure, university positions; had MI6 follow him to South America when he was lecturing for the Rockefeller Foundation, after they had failed to get the tour cancelled altogether. The article also mentions that MI5 commited burglaries(presumbaly against left-wingers) in the 1950s, and seems to imply that Hobsbawm himself was targetted.
 
John Mortimer would have eaten any charge for tea. Perhaps a real life use of "The Golden Thread which runs through British justice."
 
Hobsbwam had his mail opened; and was denied, under official pressure, university positions; had MI6 follow him to South America when he was lecturing for the Rockefeller Foundation, after they had failed to get the tour cancelled altogether. The article also mentions that MI5 commited burglaries(presumbaly against left-wingers) in the 1950s, and seems to imply that Hobsbawm himself was targetted.
and I think this same article says while they were doing all this to interfere with and keep an eye on leftists, (?) MI5 I think it was, had but a single person looking into rightist organizations ? ? Apparently, so.
 
The charge, had any been brought, would have been sedition, not treason.

The chances of any such charge being brought are significantly less than zero. Not. A. Fucking. Chance.

We are British, not a nation of rabid maniacs.
America, unfortunately, is a nation of rabid maniacs.
 
and I think this same article says while they were doing all this to interfere with and keep an eye on leftists, (?) MI5 I think it was, had but a single person looking into rightist organizations ? ? Apparently, so.

Well, I assume they had more looking into them in the 1930's and World War II. In the 1950's, with Nazi Germany gone, it is not exactly surprising that the Soviet Union was looked on as *the* menace, and its local supporters viewed with suspicion. And it is actually true that not only people like Philby but open Communists like James Klugmann were involved with the KGB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Klugmann Hobsbawm himself, while insisting that "I knew those of my contemporaries who became Soviet agents as militant members of the student Party, which makes it 99 per cent certain that they were not yet recruited for work which, by general convention, was quite separate from the open activities of a legal political party and, if discovered, might be regarded as discrediting these" added that "We knew such work was going on, we knew we were not supposed to ask questions about it, we respected those who did it, and most of us – certainly I – would have taken it on ourselves, if asked. The lines of loyalty in the 1930s ran not between but across countries." http://www.rulit.me/books/interesting-times-a-twentieth-century-life-read-233799-31.html
 
America, unfortunately, is a nation of rabid maniacs.

The majority of those citizens I've met from either coast seem okay (flag type weirdness aside - this does seem rather unique to Americans, generally) - the hinterlanders, however, seem, broadly, to be a different proposition - but this is maybe sweeping generalisation based solely upon my personal experience. Your legislature, on the other hand, does seem to be largely composed of cunty fuck - tards, though.

Maybe it's just symptomatic of being a young nation (I've got furniture older than your country) with a broad, cultural aggregation - that would only be natural, I suppose. We're just that little more sanguine about such things and have a healthy culture of satire & generally poking fun at and criticising the establishment dating back to at least the early eighteenth century.
 
Well, I assume they had more looking into them in the 1930's and World War II. In the 1950's, with Nazi Germany gone, . . .
No, the article says this is not the case. Even in the '30s the British intelligence community seemed to view Nazis as at least intelligence allies, and 'communists' as the main enemies.


Stuck on the Flypaper, London Review of Books, Frances Stonor Saunders, April 9, 2015.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n07/frances-stonorsaunders/stuck-on-the-flypaper

" . . . ‘Arrests upon arrests,’ Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction. ‘Now the Red pest is being thoroughly rooted out.’ By April [1933], 25,000 communists were in ‘protective custody’. Dachau, the first official concentration camp, was set up to hold them. . . "

" . . . The week Hobsbawm left Berlin [April 1933], Guy Liddell, MI5’s German-speaking deputy head of counter-espionage, arrived from London. . . assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief . . . "

" . . . Liddell and Foley were introduced to Rudolf Diels, head of Abteilung 1A, who explained urbanely that it was his intention to exterminate communism in its widest sense. By this he meant not only the Communist Party and its subordinate bodies but also left-wing pacifist organisations. It was immediately clear to Liddell that there was ‘certainly a good deal of “third degree” work going on’ and that ‘Jews, communists and even social democrats’ were being ‘submitted to every kind of outrage’. Swallowing his distaste (he witnessed a man being dragged into the building while ‘protesting loudly that he had never had anything to do with politics’), Liddell settled down with Foley, in a room placed at their disposal, to examine the files of Abteilung 1A, . . . "

" . . . Of particular interest to Liddell were documents belonging to the KPD and the front organisations of the Comintern, looted by SA men ‘who just threw [them] into lorries and then dumped them in disorder in some large rooms’. ‘If placed virtually at our disposal,’ Liddell noted, ‘[these records] will be of great assistance in establishing how the Comintern’s work in Western Europe and the Colonies is being organised.’ . . . "

" . . . Liddell left Berlin on 9 April (after a congenial dinner with Ribbentrop the previous evening), satisfied that a crucial liaison had been established. In their present mood, the German authorities ‘were extremely ready to help us in any way they can’ – after all, were they not tied to the British by the same enterprise of saving Europe from the menace of Bolshevism? Any normal restrictions on the ‘free interchange of information’ (what is now called ‘intelligence sharing’) had been pushed aside, and Liddell was confident that if ‘constant personal contact [were] maintained’, the relationship would persist after the current ‘rather hysterical atmosphere of sentiment and brutality dies down’. . . "
So, in April 1933, the British Intelligence services seemed to view fascists as rather allies in a sense, with communists (expansively defined) as the main enemy.

Well, this was still very early in the history of Nazi Germany and things would change, certainly by Sept. '39, and perhaps considerably earlier. Alright, I'll try and be open-minded to that.
 
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The majority of those citizens I've met from either coast seem okay

Its always been my experience that coastal living people are relatively well balanced and accepting but you go inland and the sanity starts to slip in direct proportion to distance. It must be lack of salt or negative ions.
 
America, unfortunately, is a nation of rabid maniacs.

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Stuck on the Flypaper, London Review of Books, Frances Stonor Saunders, April 9, 2015.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n07/frances-stonorsaunders/stuck-on-the-flypaper

" . . . Guy Liddell, MI5’s German-speaking deputy head of counter-espionage, . . . assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief . . . "
This was April 1933.

On the question of British intelligence's working relationship with the Nazis. . .

Speaking as a U.S. citizen, in the deepest days of the Great Depression, meaning 1933, I'd say there was about a one out of three chance of some kind of coup. And within this one-third chance, I'd say there was about a 70% chance of it being a rightist coup and only 30% of leftist coup. So, only focusing on communists and ignoring fascists was stupid.

Persons more familiar with the UK can draw their own conclusions.
 
This was April 1933.

On the question of British intelligence's working relationship with the Nazis. . .

Speaking as a U.S. citizen, in the deepest days of the Great Depression, meaning 1933, I'd say there was about a one out of three chance of some kind of coup. And within this one-third chance, I'd say there was about a 70% chance of it being a rightist coup and only 30% of leftist coup. So, only focusing on communists and ignoring fascists was stupid.

Persons more familiar with the UK can draw their own conclusions.

The Fascist party in Britain in 1933 had about 40,000 members many of whom were older and retired. The British Communist party had a roughly similar number of members and strong support in coal mining areas of Scotland and Wales, it was well funded by the Soviets and was a party of the young. I think chances of a coup were somewhere less than a one in zero but if any party worried me it wouldnt be a party of rascist old biddies from Eastborne and Harrogate.
 
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