Last night, Pete North, a well-known political campaigner and veteran of the Brexit movement, was arrested by North Yorkshire Police, allegedly for posting on his Twitter account. A video released by Pete shows police arriving at his house around 9:30 p.m. On the video, an officer explained that he had ‘posted something on the internet’ which someone ‘didn’t appreciate’, that their ‘hate crime team’ had reviewed the post and as a result the police were arresting him on suspicion of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ under Section 19 of the Public Order Act.
Here is North Yorkshire Police's hate crime snatch squad taking me in for tweeting a "Fuck Hamas" meme. pic.twitter.com/V7adfBYCuM
— Northern variant (@FUDdaily) September 26, 2025
Pete told me this morning me that he was shocked, believing that ‘normal practice is to turn up and invite someone in for an interview. They didn’t do that though.’ He feels that ‘the process is the punishment, and this was meant to intimidate’. He said the police ‘locked [him] in a cage’ inside a van and drove him to Harrogate police station, 30 minutes away.
Once inside the station, officers divulged the reason for his arrest. He says they wanted to discuss a meme he had shared on Twitter which consisted of a Palestine flag with the words ‘Fuck Palestine, Fuck Hamas, Fuck Islam. Want to protest? Fuck off to Muslim country and protest.’
Pete is autistic and suffers from serious claustrophobia. He said that he was stressed and desperate to get home as quickly as possible. During the interview Pete said he had to ‘explain what Hamas is’, to his ‘shock and disgust’, as the police did not seem to understand that Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation. Meanwhile, he said, the officersasked repeated questions about Tommy Robinson, asking Pete ‘are you aware that he was the first person to post this meme?’
North Yorkshire Police eventually released Pete around 1:30 a.m., and he made his own way home. Pete is very clear in his conclusions. He says he ‘wholly endorses’ the meme he shared, that ‘Islam is not a race’, and he was not seeking to stir up racial hatred.
He says that, ‘the process is the punishment, and this was meant to intimidate – they see people like me as ringleaders online and they know my arrest will have a chilling effect.’
Pete’s treatment stands in clear contrast to that of Charlotte Hayes, a left-wing TikToker who posted a video apparently calling for people to ‘kill them all’ in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Hayes said her words had been misconstrued and Kent police decided to take no further action.
North’s arrest has sparked outrage. Lord Young, Director of the Free Speech Union, told me ‘people are rightly shocked by episodes like this, but the reality is that the police are arresting over 30 people a day for social media posts. We know they’re being over-zealous because only about 5 per cent of those arrests result in prosecutions.’
Rupert Lowe, the independent MP said ‘Free speech does not exist in Britain – it has been systematically undermined by successive governments, often in the name of safety. Pete North’s ordeal is the latest in a long line of egregious violations of Britain’s free speech tradition by the Labour government, and I suspect things will continue to deteriorate – especially with the introduction of digital ID, which will doubtless make this kind of overreach easier and more frequent.’
A spokesperson for North Yorkshire Police said: ‘Following receipt of a report, a man was arrested yesterday on suspicion of publishing or distributing written material intended to stir up racial hatred. He has been released on bail while enquiries continue.’
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