Anyone who thinks the police aren’t interested in diversity will be amazed by the links they have built with Scientology
Marina Hyde
The Guardian,
Saturday May 24 2008
Once again our great nation has entertained the world, putting on two stunning exhibition matches this week. First was the Champions League final, between the clubs who finished first and second in our very own Premier League. The second – and whether the parties were quite as closely matched as Manchester United and Chelsea will be for you to decide – was between a 16-year-old schoolboy and City of London police, who arrested him for carrying a placard referring to Scientology as a “cult”. The files went all the way to the Crown Prosecution Service before finally being dropped yesterday.
This story has gone around the world beneath such edifying headlines as “UK minor faces charges for calling Scientology ‘cult’ at protest”; and when you’ve finished wondering why we’re such a pathetic country sometimes, we should endeavour to divine precisely what it is he was meant to have done wrong.
PC Plod – very PC, by the looks of things – arrested the child under section five of the Public Order Act, which makes it an offence to “display any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress”.
Presumably, the persons the police deemed likely to be given a fit of the vapours by the word “cult” were the Scientologists themselves. Most surprising. You’d think they’d be such sanguine, unemotional people, what with it being the religion with science right up there in the title. Yet the faith’s website states: “The word Scientology literally means the study of truth”; and while L Ron Hubbard was no credit to his classics teacher – it means the study of knowledge, surely? – something in that hints at a certain unwillingness to brook dissent.
That’s the way, mind you, with a lot of luxury brands – and you’d certainly struggle to argue that the Church of Scientology is competitively priced. It is said to cost $380,000 to reach the top level of enlightenment, Operating Thetan VIII, so it’s a little less reasonable than, say, Buddhism.