Nothing Left to Conserve

A Man Convicted for Praying Silently. The Rule Book Looks Neutral. The Referees Aren’t.

In October 2024, a British court convicted a man of praying silently. Not out loud. In his head. Three minutes of it, on a public street, standing behind a tree with his back to an abortion clinic, thinking about the son he’d lost to abortion twenty-two years earlier.

The police questioned him about the nature of his prayers. The local council — then being warned it was heading for bankruptcy — spent more than £90,000 of public money to secure the conviction. They made him pay another £9,000 in costs.

It was the first conviction for silent prayer in British history.

Here’s the thing you need to understand before anything else: that’s not the worst case. It’s one of the mild ones. I’m starting with the mild ones on purpose, because the strength of the pattern isn’t in the outrages — it’s in how ordinary the targets are.

Four people who broke no reasonable rule

A charity worker in Birmingham, December 2022. She’d spent twenty years volunteering with women in crisis pregnancies. Police arrested her on a public street after she said she “might” be silently praying. Acquitted February 2023. Arrested *again* in March. Paid £13,000 in compensation by West Midlands Police in August 2024. Charged a third time in December 2025 under new buffer-zone law. For standing on a footpath, possibly thinking.

Jordan Peterson, August 2023. Ontario’s Divisional Court ruled that the College of Psychologists could order him into mandatory social-media re-education — at his own expense — or lose his licence. The trigger was tweets about contested political topics. The Court of Appeal refused to hear it. The Supreme Court of Canada refused the final appeal.

Dr My Le Trinh, a Sydney GP of twenty-seven years with not one prior complaint. Suspended in September 2021 on the basis of an anonymous “John Smith” complaint whose email bounced, whose phone was disconnected, whose address was blank — and which the regulators wouldn’t confirm was real. The evidence attached was a prescription she’d left at her local pharmacy, which the pharmacy says was collected directly by the regulator’s own agents. “John Smith” had no lawful way to get that document. Which means the complainant was inside the regulator. The case went ahead anyway.

None of these people said or did anything a reasonable person would call threatening, harassing, violent, or dangerous. None had any criminal history. And every power used against them — the protection orders, the licensing boards, the buffer-zone laws — was sold to the public on a promise. The promise was that these powers would be aimed at genuine threats. Real harm. Public order.

The architecture was sold as protection against serious harm. It is being used against silent prayer, social-media posts, and people expressing religious belief on a street corner. The gap between what it was sold as and what it actually does — that’s the thing to be explained.

It’s not four cases. It’s the whole machine.

If it were four cases, you could call it bad luck. It isn’t four cases.

Australia’s Section 18C bans speech that “offends” or “insults” on racial grounds. Thirty years on, its biggest scalps are a conservative columnist (Andrew Bolt), some university students who objected to being told to leave a computer lab because of their race, and a cartoonist (Bill Leak) for a drawing about parental responsibility. It has never been turned on an academic department hostile to Anglo students, Islamic extremists, or on any left-wing publication’s editorial line.

Britain’s Public Order Act and Communications Act now generate around thirty arrests a day for things people said — roughly twelve thousand a year, up from 7,734 in 2019. A parallel system of “non-crime hate incidents” has logged over 133,000 citizens in police files since 2014, including children too young to be charged with anything. These same laws have not come down with equal weight on marchers openly chanting for the death of Jews, or clerics preaching execution for leaving Islam, or academics calling to dismantle “whiteness.”

Canada’s old Section 13 tribunal, before it was repealed in 2013, became an instrument used almost entirely against right-wing speech — with a near-perfect conviction rate.

Australia’s ABC operates under a legal charter requiring impartiality. Review after review has found systemic editorial drift on climate, immigration, Indigenous policy, Israel-Palestine. The charter isn’t enforced. It’s interpreted — by an institution staffed almost entirely from one side.

And it keeps going: charity commissions, registration boards, university discipline panels, platform moderation, immigration discretion, the curriculum authority in every English-speaking country. Same direction, every time.

Two things are happening at once

Most people who notice this reach for one of two explanations. Either “they’re operating in bad faith, and we’re playing fair” — the moral story. Or “vague rules always get captured by whoever staffs the enforcement” — the structural story. Both have something to them. Neither, on its own, is enough.

What’s actually happening is two separate asymmetries running at the same time, and feeding each other.

The first is about motivation, and you can see it just by reading the news. One coalition treats getting and using institutional power as the whole point. The other — for reasons of temperament, internal disagreement, fear of the press, or genuine principle — mostly doesn’t. So even when conservatives hold the offices, they don’t drive them the way their opponents do.

The second runs underneath, and it’s the one almost nobody talks about. Vague rules have to be interpreted. Interpretation needs interpreters. And the people who fill those interpretive jobs — the tribunal members, the ombudsmen, the commissioners, the senior officials — come out of credentialing pipelines that have leaned one way for two generations, into an information world that leans the same way across journalism, the universities, the professional bodies, and the NGOs. So even the sincere ones, the genuinely fair-minded ones, produce one-directional results. Their whole sense of what counts as fair, neutral, harmful, or legitimate was shaped by an environment that filtered out one set of starting assumptions before they ever sat down to decide.

These two don’t pull against each other. They compound. The motivational gap means nobody pushes back. The structural gap means the baseline output is already tilted before anyone would push. Fix one and leave the other, and the machine keeps producing exactly what it produces now.

The rule book looks neutral. The referees are not.

That’s the whole problem in one line, and it’s why writing another column about hypocrisy changes nothing. Hypocrisy isn’t the mechanism. Structure is.

So the real question isn’t “why are they so brazen?” It’s two questions, and they have different answers. Why does one side never use the power it holds? And why does the machine tilt even when the person operating it is honest?

Part 2 takes the first one: why conservatives, handed the same levers, keep declining to pull them — and why the rare moments they do (Florida under DeSantis, Washington under Trump) get treated as the end of democracy rather than as someone finally playing by the established rules.

This is Part 1 of a four-part series adapted from the Prothean Institute brief “Nothing Left to Conserve.”