A British police officer has been criminally charged over a George Floyd meme he allegedly shared with his colleagues in a WhatsApp group.

“Sergeant Geraint Jones, aged 47, is charged with sending the image on 30 May last year by means of a public electronic communications network, an offence contrary to section 127 of the Communications Act 2003,” a watchdog from the Independent Office for Police Conduct announced. “An altered image of George Floyd’s arrest in Minneapolis was shared within a WhatsApp group that included a number of other police officers and staff.”

“Our investigation began in June 2020 following a referral from the force,” the watchdog continued. “At its conclusion in October we sent our investigation report to the Crown Prosecution Service, which has authorized the charge.”

Sergeant Jones is scheduled to appear in court on January 28. He has been suspended from duty since June.

It’s no secret that free speech is all but dead in the United Kingdom. British elites stand out in particular for their fervent belief in neoliberal globalism and veneration of its secular saints. Their society encourages people to snitch and tattle on their fellow citizens to a higher degree than most any other Western nation.

George Floyd is also one of the neoliberal order’s foremost secular saints. Anything you say about him that isn’t equivalent to hero-worship will get you put on notice. Criticizing the intensity of his veneration and the Black Lives Matter movement itself are sufficient to get you labeled as a depraved racist and fired from your job—even in the United States.

Don’t think that hate speech laws aren’t possible in America either. If a majority of Americans and legal scholars in a decade or two come to believe that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “hate speech,” who’s to say that the laws won’t be changed to reflect that?