PC police: how Britain fell to the new censorship

The police turning up at someone’s door over a tweet has become alarmingly mundane in Britain. The slow corrosion of our rights, the steady stream of stories about arrests over memes and misgenderings, has numbed us to the authoritarianism of it all. But there is something about the Allison Pearson scandal that has made the slowly boiling frog realise just how hot it is.

Earlier this month, news broke that Pearson, a columnist for the centre-right Daily Telegraph, had been visited by Essex Police on Remembrance Sunday. Her crime? A year-old post on X. Two police officers knocked on her door and informed her she was being investigated for inciting racial hatred, and invited her to attend a voluntary interview. More chillingly, they didn’t disclose which tweet it was – or who her accuser was.

Thankfully, common sense has now, finally, prevailed. Essex Police announced late last week that they have closed the investigation, following advice from the Crown Prosecution Service. Still, Pearson’s brush with England’s poundshop Stasi has quite rightly made headlines not just in Britain, but also the world over.

The story goes roughly like this…

A year ago, just as anti-Israel demonstrations were roiling Britain’s streets – routinely spilling over into sulphurous anti-Semitism and even flagrant celebration of Hamas – Pearson tweeted the following:

‘How dare they’, she said, tagging London’s Metropolitan Police. ‘Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.’

She was commenting on a photo, tweeted by another account, depicting police officers posing with protesters who were holding up the flag of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf – the Pakistani political party founded by the cricketer turned prime minister turned Pakistan’s most famous inmate, Imran Khan.

Pearson deleted it soon after. The image, as it turns out, was taken months before all those post-7 October demonstrations began – and in Manchester, not London. They weren’t the hate marchers she thought they were. She seemingly didn’t look too closely at the flag, either, which alongside an Islamic crescent moon and star had ‘Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’ clearly printed on it.

It was, by any fair estimation, a clumsy mistake – made on a platform that encourages users to react first and ask questions later. You’d need to be a card-carrying mind-reader to confidently insist she was actually trying to say all Muslims or Pakistanis are anti-Semites, as some shamelessly have. But still it was enough to launch a hate-speech investigation, which occupied our supposedly over-worked bobbies for more than a year.

Someone – identified by the Guardian as a ‘former public servant with training in criminal law’ – reported it. The complaint then pinged around various police forces, as England’s finest tried to work out what speech law – if any – may have been broken here. Regrettably, there are a lot to choose from.

The tweet was first reported to the Metropolitan Police, reports the Telegraph, who investigated it as a potential breach of the Malicious Communications Act. It was then passed on to Sussex Police, for some reason, who considered marking it down as one of those ‘non-crime hate incidents’. (More on those later…)

Having finally worked out that Pearson lives in Essex, the cops then handed the case over to Essex Police, who decided the tweet represented a possible public-order offence. Namely, spreading material ‘likely or intended to cause racial hatred’ – a far more serious crime than had previously been considered. Carrying on like a Stalinist version of the Keystone Cops, Essex Police not only sent those two officers round on Remembrance Sunday, but they also set up a so-called gold group, typically used to coordinate a police response to major incidents like terror attacks. All this, over a year-old tweet, which had already been deleted.

Essex Police have been so thoroughly humiliated by all this that there is now going to be an independent review into their handling of the case, led by the ‘hate-crime lead’ of the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Roger Hirst, Essex’s police and crime commissioner, has also had to eat his words. Having, at first, defended the investigation to the hilt, he’s now put out a rueful statement, noting the ‘significant distress for Ms Pearson and a large amount of public concern’ caused by the case.

So ends a particularly embarrassing chapter in the story of Britain’s (literal) PC police. But will lessons be learned, to use that insufferable cliché? If recent experience is anything to go by, almost certainly not.

Indeed, for all the welcome shock that Pearson’s case has sparked in the anti-woke world, particularly among our American cousins (Elon Musk, natch, has been spitting feathers about it), it won’t have come as a surprise to those who have been paying attention.

Britain hasn’t been suddenly turned into a dictatorship by newly elected prime minister Keir Starmer, as some of the more wildeyed voices on X might have you believe. But we have been engaged in a decades-long, deeply illiberal experiment in policing ‘hate speech’ – which is now making us an international laughing stock.

The offence of inciting racial hatred, of which Pearson was accused, was first created in Britain in 1965, with the passage of the Race Relations Act. This notion that it was the role of the state to define and police hatred – that, in essence, censorship was our path to racial harmony – was enshrined in law and elite culture.

This sits in stark contrast to the United States. It was in the 1960s – amid the civil-rights revolution, the bottom-up demand from black Americans for their rights – that the expansive free-speech protections Americans now enjoy were won. Until then, the First Amendment had essentially been a dead letter – gifted by the Founders but never enforced in practice.

The project of speech policing and thought control was embraced enthusiastically by Tony Blair’s government. In 2006, the then New Labour government passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, introducing the offence of ‘incitement to religious hatred’. Were it not for a successful campaign to rein in that legislation, led by comedian Rowan Atkinson, it would have criminalised ‘abusive or insulting’ language about religion, too.

But arguably Blair’s more consequential contribution to ‘hate speech’ legislation came with the Communications Act of 2003. Under Section 127 of this law, it is illegal to send ‘by means of a public electronic-communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive’. While this was an update on a pre-existing telecoms offence, it made it match fit for the digital age.

Indeed, the combination of Britain’s already-repressive speech laws and the dawn of the social-media era proved to be a disastrous mix – particularly for the nation’s more obnoxious young people. In the early 2010s, there were a slew of cases in which teenagers and university students were sent to prison for saying stupid, outrageous and often downright despicable things on social media. Often while drunk.

In 2012, Swansea student Liam Stacey was convicted of a racially aggravated public-order offence over racist tweets he posted after Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed from a heart attack during a match. Stacey was sentenced to 56 days in prison.

That same year, teenager Matthew Woods was jailed for three months for a string of ‘grossly offensive’ Facebook posts about missing young girls April Jones and Madeleine McCann. While inebriated, at a friend’s house, Woods began his tirade by copying, pasting and sharing sick jokes from the website ‘Sickipedia’.

There was also Jake Newsome, given six weeks in prison in 2014 for saying on Facebook that he was ‘glad’ that a Leeds teacher had been murdered by a pupil. And there was 20-year-old Azhar Ahmed, fined £300 and ordered to do community service for posting, again on Facebook, that ‘all soldiers should die and go to hell’.

The investigations, arrests and even convictions for online speech reached well beyond genuine bigots and trolls. Telling jokes became a risky business. Famously, Paul Chambers was found guilty in 2010 of sending a ‘menacing electronic communication’ for an obvious joke on Twitter, threatening to blow Robin Hood Airport ‘sky high’, after he was infuriated to find out it was closed.

As the trans issue came into view, it became clear that even mainstream opinions – such as not believing that men can become women – could also be rebranded as ‘hateful’ by our increasingly identitarian authorities.

Gender-critical feminist Kate Scottow was arrested in 2018 for causing ‘needless anxiety’ after she persistently called a man ‘he’ on social media. It was overturned on appeal. Christian preacher David McConnell similarly had to be tried and convicted before the courts realised ‘misgendering’ isn’t actually a crime. Not yet, at least.

Not only did those supposedly freedom-loving Conservatives do nothing during their 14 years in power to repeal any of this censorious legislation, they actually made things worse. They passed the Online Safety Act, which incentivises Big Tech firms to censor speech and introduced new and updated communications offences.

Following the horrifying race riots that exploded across England this past summer, there were a string of convictions for inciting hatred and posting ‘grossly offensive’ material. A Romanian man was also convicted of a ‘false communication’ offence – under the new Online Safety Act, no less – for posting a video of himself pretending to flee from a far-right mob.

Those riots, if nothing else, reminded us that censorship has not made racism magically disappear. Arguably, it has helped to fuel a bigoted, conspiratorial fringe. But censorship does encroach upon all of our freedoms – affecting not only those who spew undoubted bigotry, but also those whose only real crime is to say something that someone, somewhere, has decided is offensive.

Britain may not be the GDR-style tyranny some American anti-woke warriors now imagine it to be. But we should not downplay what is going on, either. We in Britain are almost certainly arresting more people for speech today than at any point in modern history.

An investigation by The Times in 2017 indicates that at least nine people a day were being arrested for ‘offensive’ speech under Section 127 of the Communications Act alone. Greg Lukianoff, president of the US-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has calculated that, on the basis of those incomplete numbers alone, Britain is already, comfortably, arresting more people for speech crimes today than America did during the first Red Scare.

This is not simply a problem of authoritarian politicians passing censorious laws, or their unprincipled successors failing to repeal them. The police leadership class deserves its share of the blame, too. Top cops have come to see policing speech as a moral mission, with absurd and authoritarian consequences.

Police forces have even taken to ostentatiously encouraging members of the public to report so-called hate speech. In 2021, Merseyside Police parked an electronic billboard outside an Asda, declaring, in all-caps, that ‘Being offensive is an offence’. Sadly, they weren’t far wrong. Similarly, back in 2018, South Yorkshire Police – again, totally of their own volition – launched a ‘Hate Hurts’ campaign, to tackle the apparent scourge of ‘offensive’ comments.

Then there is the rise of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs), a deeply sinister practice that policing bodies developed largely by themselves. For decades, police have been investigating and recording supposedly ‘hateful’ incidents even if they do not rise to the threshold of a criminal offence. Until a few years ago, police guidance instructed officers to record any reported ‘hate incident’ as a ‘hate incident’ on the basis of accusation and perception alone. Even things that were clearly trivial, or complaints that were clearly malicious, would be immediately recorded. Some classics of the genre include a man who believed he was getting funny looks on the bus, and another who felt he received an ‘aggressive’ haircut because he speaks Russian.

This isn’t just harmless, victimless intelligence-gathering, either. If an NCHI is recorded against someone’s name it can show up in advanced background checks, meaning it can potentially haunt the job prospects of the supposed hate-monger in question for years.

NCHIs have their roots in the 1999 Macpherson Report, the inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and the police’s botched investigation into it. One of Sir William Macpherson’s recommendations was a ‘comprehensive system of reporting and recording of all racist incidents and crimes’. Racist incidents should be defined, Macpherson added, as ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’.

But crucially, NCHIs weren’t ushered in by laws debated and passed in parliament. Police bodies developed hate-crime guidance – uncritically absorbing Macpherson’s recommendations, while also applying them to other forms of ‘hate’. A shared approach slowly gestated across the criminal-justice system, all with essentially zero public scrutiny or awareness. In 2014, the College of Policing published its ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’, which told police to automatically record reported hate incidents, ‘irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element’.

That guidance was eventually declared unlawful by the Court of Appeal in 2021. Campaigner and former police officer Harry Miller – who had an NCHI recorded against him for his trans-sceptical tweets – successfully argued that the guidance represented a ‘disproportionate interference’ in freedom of speech. The Home Office later issued new statutory guidance in 2023, aimed at reining in the collection of NCHIs – to weed out ‘trivial’, ‘irrational’ and ‘malicious’ complaints, and to ban the practice entirely in relation to incidents in schools.

Tellingly, none of this has made the blindest bit of difference. For one thing, a recent investigation by The Times found that non-crime hate incidents are still being recorded against schoolchildren, often for little more than playground taunts. One case involved two secondary-school girls who said that another pupil smelt ‘like fish’.

Here we see that the new censorship regime is not something that has simply been foisted upon the police, but actively, if often cackhandedly, embraced by the police. Since the Macpherson Report, which declared the police ‘institutionally racist’, police leaders have bizarrely come to see obsessing over speech as essential to improving their forces’ standing among minority communities. Indeed, whenever a free-speech controversy arises now, higher-ups defend themselves in therapeutic, identitarian terms. Following the College of Policing’s defeat in the Miller case, assistant chief constable Iain Raphael insisted they were only trying to ‘protect vulnerable people and communities from harm’.

Despite their less-than-progressive reputation, the police have proven themselves no more impervious to the great awokening, to the rise of identity politics, than any other wing of the state. If anything, this ideology has proven particularly irresistible to an institution that is desperate to be seen to atone for its past wrongs.

In truth, it has only replaced the old racial animus with the new racial paternalism. Police leaders today seem to think that black and brown Brits want to be protected from being offended, as opposed to being robbed or stabbed. That the police’s failure to properly investigate the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence is now being used to justify this crusade against hurtful words is perverse when you think about it for five seconds.

Our liberties, then, aren’t being trampled on by some would-be strongman. They are being trampled on by a self-loathing establishment, censoring in pursuit of purpose, moral authority, redemption. But when you have journalists being visited by police, because of what they have written, you see that the new authoritarianism can be alarmingly like the old, if you allow it to take root.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater