Some humble thoughts:
- The UK has a conservative government, and had one for some time.
- The current Scotland Yard commissioner was appointed by Boris Johnson, a staunch conservative, when he was Mayor of London.
- The legislative background of this supposed initiative is the so called Malicious Communications Act, which at least in its most recent incarnations is again a brainchild of a conservative government.
- According to the narrative you suggest, the liberal media would be conspiring to cover up the presumed misdeeds of a conservative appointed commissioner, under a conservative government, trying to (mis)use a law squarely backed by conservatives.
- That does not honestly appear to make much sense, especially in the current UK political climate.
- The "next article" on the page you link as reference has the following headline (copy pasta) : "I could do that: Woman who thinks she's faster than Usain Bolt claims she could sprint 100 metres in just SEVEN seconds." You know, that's the Daily Mail, that's what they do. So really take anything they write with more than one grain of salt.
- The Independent article you mention is available in the google cache: http://webcache.googleusercont...
- The Independent traditionally has mixed views, but in the most recent occasion they endorsed a conservative-led coalition: "For all its faults, another Lib-Con Coalition would both prolong recovery and give our kingdom a better chance of continued existence.". Hardly a fortress of the "left".
- The UK Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron appears in this case to be quite reasonable. (For our American friends: In UK 'liberal' has a different meaning than in the US, but liberals are still considered on the "left" of the conservatives, for the ones that are especially attached to those labels). So, Farron is on the record as saying about this initiative: “Online bullying is an increasingly serious problem but police should not be proactively seeking cases like these and turning themselves into chatroom moderators. With such measures, even if well-intentioned, there is a real danger of undermining our very precious freedom of speech.”
- I don't know why the article from the Independent appears to have been removed since publication. But I very much doubt, given what above, that one should think of a grand liberal conspiracy as the likely explanation. Unless liberals are conspiring against themselves, using a conservative-endorsing newspaper as their outlet.
- For that matter, I equally very much doubt there is any ongoing grand conspiracy of conservatives (and I am not too convinced with this grand conspiracy of cats either). Maybe I am hopelessly naif, but in general, I like to start with the simplest possible explanations and move from there. In this case the Independent suddenly realizing after publication that they "like the idea of a leftist Thought Police", is NOT the simplest explanation - it's rather at the "WTF" end of the spectrum.
In general, a very friendly advice that I try to regularly also give to myself: try to focus on the issues, avoiding to rely too much on precooked but fuzzy categories like "the ruling class" "people on the left" "people on the right" "the liberal media", "conservative something" etc.
If you want to voice your concerns about the dangers of governmental overreach on digital media, I'm happy to join my concerns to yours. But you lose me fast if you throw around, in support to your concerns, suggestions of conspiracies and labels like "leftist Thought Police" recycled from a page on the Daily Mail.