Silent (But Visible) Prayer

Adam Smith-Connor stood silently outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth. Head bowed. Hands clasped. Not a word spoken. He says he was praying – silently, for his son. But he did so within a legally defined buffer zone, where councils have banned displays of approval or disapproval regarding abortion. He was warned. He stayed. The court said his posture was expressive, political, and therefore unlawful under the local order. He walked away with a conditional discharge and a bill large enough to make you think twice before folding your hands in public.

He’s appealing – that much we know. But here’s the twist. If his case fails in the domestic courts, he could take it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. Yes, that European court. The one that sends the Free Speech Brigade into a monthly state of patriotic cardiac arrest. The one they accuse of undermining British sovereignty, overruling our judges, and letting dangerous foreigners stay in Britain on the grounds that deporting them would make them sad.

And now it might be the last hope for a British man’s right to silently pray in public.

You can’t make it up. The same court that gets blamed for all of society’s ills – from unisex toilets to the decline of common sense – could soon be called upon to defend a devout ex-serviceman punished for having a quiet word with God outside a clinic.

Imagine the fallout. The very people who usually yell “Get us out of the ECHR!” may have to put down their pitchforks and whisper, through gritted teeth, “Thank goodness for Strasbourg.” And if they don’t, they’ll have to explain why it’s acceptable for their side to invoke international human rights law, but not anyone else.

This is the beauty of it. It exposes, with surgical precision, the real position of the Free Speech Brigade: they don’t actually oppose the ECHR because it protects rights – they oppose it because it occasionally protects the wrong people. Protestors, asylum seekers, muslims, climate campaigners - and let’s be honest, it’s only a small fraction of the court’s total caseload. But those few headline-grabbing cases are enough to send them into orbit. Because the outrage was never about numbers. It was about narrative.

So here we are, watching the spectacle of culture warriors desperately trying to square a circle they drew themselves. A Christian man prays silently and gets charged. His last legal resort may be a European institution they’ve spent the last decade denouncing. And somewhere in the middle of it all, the rest of us are left marvelling at the sheer, glorious absurdity of it.

You couldn’t script it better.