‘Brexity things’? This is a new low for the thoughtpolice

So what are we allowed to say in Britain that won’t get us arrested? In recent months, police have turned up at people’s homes for ‘speechcrimes’ as banal as criticising a local Labour councillor on Facebook or complaining about a school governor in a private WhatsApp chat.

Julian Foulkes, a retired police officer, is the latest ordinary citizen with entirely ordinary opinions to have roused the suspicions of the thoughtpolice. In November 2023, six officers from Kent Police turned up at his house in Gillingham and handcuffed him. They then carted him to a police cell, where he was held for eight hours. He was then interrogated on suspicion of sending a ‘malicious communication’.

The bodycam footage from the raid gives an alarming insight into what the police consider suspect. Officers rifled through Foulkes’s book collection, with one expressing alarm at some of the ‘very Brexity things’ on his shelf. Another leafed through a copy of Douglas Murray’s The War on the West, a polemic against wokeness. No doubt our politically captured police sees this as evidence of a potential extremist threat.

More bizarre still is what triggered Foulkes’s arrest in the first place. During his interrogation, he was shown a screenshot of a tweet in which he warned about a rise in anti-Semitism in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel. He was responding to a ‘pro-Palestine’ marcher who had denied there was a ‘hateful’ undercurrent to the anti-Israel marches in London. Foulkes referenced an incident in Dagestan, Russia a few days earlier, when a lynch mob stormed an airport in search of Jewish passengers disembarking from a flight from Tel Aviv. ‘One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals…’, he tweeted at the pro-Palestine activist. (Foulkes suspects the authorities interpreted the tweet as anti-Jewish, rather than as anti-racist, as he had clearly intended.)

This entirely innocuous tweet first caught the attention of a Metropolitan Police intelligence unit that normally deals with terrorism and extremism. Kent Police were then alerted about the post and promptly arrested Foulkes the next day. Fearing that police could escalate the matter and he might end up with a criminal conviction, he accepted a police caution.

Cases like this might sound shocking but they are in serious danger of becoming routine and mundane. Julian Foulkes is merely one of as many as 30 people who are arrested every day in England and Wales for expressing views the state considers ‘grossly offensive’. Perhaps the only unusual element to this story is that Kent Police have admitted they went too far and have apologised. This week, Foulkes’s caution was deleted from his record.

If a pensioner can be stuck in a police cell for warning about anti-Semitism, and if his ‘Brexity’, anti-woke books can be treated as potential evidence, then no one is safe from this speech-policing regime. Forces across the UK clearly see it as their guiding mission to monitor our tweets, interrogate our thoughts and correct our beliefs. Which means that just about anything you say, outside of a narrow band of niche, woke opinions, could potentially be criminalised.

Britain cannot call itself a free country as long as this carries on.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.