Here’s a tip. If you’re having trouble getting the police to promptly attend after a burglary, tell them the scumbag tweeted something mean about you as he made his escape. If the outrageous experience of Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson is anything to go by, this is sure to shoot you right to the top of plod’s priority list.
The British experiment in policing ‘hate’ has become as farcical as it is authoritarian
Yesterday, Pearson revealed that she was visited by Essex police on Remembrance Sunday – not because she had been burgled, but because of a tweet she had posted a year ago. In a farcical exchange, she alleges that two officers refused to tell her which tweet, or who had accused her of this speech-crime. We can sometimes overuse ‘Orwellian’ or ‘Kafkaesque’, but if Pearson’s account is accurate this exchange surely qualifies.
There’s some confusion as to what crime, if any, Pearson is alleged to have committed here. She says the officers told her she had been reported for a ‘non-crime hate incident’ – referring to the controversial police practice under which speech, even if it isn’t illegal, has been logged as ‘hateful’ on the basis of accusation alone. Essex Police, meanwhile, claimed last night that they have opened an investigation relating to material ‘likely or intended to cause racial hatred’, which is criminalised under the Public Order Act 1986. They say it relates to a post that has since been removed, and that they asked Pearson to attend a voluntary interview.
The cops would do well to explain what is going on here – and fast. Most people will struggle to believe that Pearson, a popular author and columnist, suddenly – 12 months ago – began spewing racist bile. If she had, we surely would have heard about it. Given the alarming expansion of speech policing in recent years, many will suspect that this is another outrageous example of censorious over-reach.
After all, we now live in a country in which people are arrested, prosecuted, even convicted, after misgendering people. Or after making offensive skits on YouTube. And this has long threatened to catch up with the more right-wing or just un-PC sections of alternative and mainstream media, given that the woke left seems to dictate what is and isn’t considered offensive these days. Back in 2020, historian David Starkey and pundit Darren Grimes were investigated over potential public-order offences, because of ill-judged comments Starkey had made about slavery on Grimes’s YouTube channel.
Enough is enough. No opinion is so offensive that it should be a police matter. Even the most genuinely hateful ideas should be met with more speech, not censorship. But as anyone who has been paying attention will know, the pretence that our speech laws are purely there to criminalise fascists and racists fell away a long time ago. We have allowed censorship to go so unchecked that even newspaper columnists are now bearing the brunt of it, all while police waste their own time and allow actual crime to go unpunished.
The British experiment in policing ‘hate’ has become as farcical as it is authoritarian. It makes you long for the days when ‘PC police’ was a tongue-in-cheek tabloid zinger, not a literal description. Oh how far we’ve fallen.
Comments
Comment section temporarily unavailable for maintenance.