Britain’s Orwellian speech police door knocked a veteran journalist on Remembrance Sunday morning over allegedly “stirring up racial hatred” on social media.
Allison Pearson, a longtime conservative columnist for London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, said that two police officers came to her home on Sunday to inform her that she was under investigation over comments she posted on Elon Musk’s X social media platform a year ago.
When the writer asked the police to disclose the content of her supposed thought crime, the officer refused to answer.
Pearson speculates, however, that it may have had to do with her posts concerning the October 7th terror attacks on Israel by Islamist Hamas terrorists, as it was a hot topic online at this point last year with widespread anti-Israel protests erupting in Britain following the attack.
According to the columnist, the police also refused to reveal the name of her accuser and even said to her: “It’s not the accuser… They’re called the victim.’”
“It was surreal. (I have hundreds of black and Asian followers on X/Twitter; none of them ever suggested I’d said something bad or hateful. Besides, who decides where you set the bar for what’s offensive?) This is supposed to be 2024, not 1984, yet the police officers seemed to be operating according to the George Orwell operational manual,” Pearson wrote for The Telegraph.
Essex Police confirmed that it has opened up an investigation against a woman under section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986, which deals with content “likely or intended to cause racial hatred”.
“We’re investigating a report passed to us by another force. The report relates to a social media post which was subsequently removed. An investigation is now being carried out under section 17 of the Public Order Act,” a police spokesman said.
While there was some pushback against the proliferation of thought crimes under the previous Tory government, much of the hate speech legal infrastructure was left in place by the so-called Conservative Party, thereby enabling the left-wing Labour government to ramp up censorship in the country relatively easily.
Indeed, after being installed in office over the summer, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pushed to reverse the move to reduce the recording of “non-crime hate incidents” by police and to add more draconian hate speech restrictions, particularly surrounding antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Since being introduced in 2014, police in the United Kingdom have recorded over 120,000 non-crime hate incidents in criminal databases, despite the “incidents” not actually rising to the level of a crime. However, being placed in the criminal database can still have serious repercussions in the real world, with many prospective employers having access to such databases through the use of criminal background checks.
Given that non-crime hate incidents are not crimes, there is little that people can do to clear their names, as no trials are held to adjudicate what was said. Additionally, many people who have been logged in police databases for alleged offensive posts online were never informed.
Critics of the system, such as the Free Speech Union (FSU), have noted that despite hundreds of thousands of non-crime hate incidents being recorded, there is no evidence that the practice prevented any actual crimes.
Commenting on the case against Pearson, former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who led efforts to stop the recording of so-called non-crime hate incidents, said: “We need to stop policing words on social media [and] tackle actual crimes. My message to Labour: protect freedom of speech, stop the overreach and focus on keeping our streets safe.”
Free Speech Union director Toby Young added: “It’s little wonder that 93 per cent of car-related crimes went unsolved in Essex last year. The local officers are too busy policing journalists’ tweets to police their streets.
“I’m sure they’d prefer to be investigating actual crimes rather than ‘non-crimes’, but their politically correct bosses are more concerned with punishing wrongthink.”
