The White House is right: freedom of speech is under threat in Britain like never before

Telegraph

01-04-2025

On reflection, I have decided we should just give up and cancel April Fools' Day. Pranks are an endangered species in the spring of 2025. There's far too much competition from real life.
Let's try a little test, folks. Which of these is an April Fool? Four-year-old suspended from nursery for 'abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity' at an age when most small boys still happily identify as a tractor. Highly respected professor denounced and cast out by her university for stating biological facts. A family on horseback allegedly menaced by two men and the wife later summoned to the police station for describing the pair who terrified them as ' effing pikeys '. A grandmother visited by plain-clothes policemen because she posted a private message criticising a Labour councillor. A builder in Bedfordshire who got a police record for racial hatred after whistling the Bob the Builder theme tune at his neighbours. OK, Bob's treatment of Wendy could be seen as a tad misogynist, perhaps, but how is it racist? Muck the Digger – is he a member of the traveller community?
Surely, I hear you wail, that last one can't be true? Amazing to report, but all of them happened. No wonder that when I woke up today, I sleepily assumed the story that Nestlé is renaming Quality Street 'E-Quality Street' to mark five years since George Floyd's death was yet another craven corporate capitulation to identity politics. Yes, I'd been had – more fool me – but it's easy to be deceived when so much of our national life has turned into a sinister joke.
Only it gets harder to laugh, I find, when you learn that our most valuable ally, the United States, is so 'concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom' that our Prime Minister's hopes of avoiding tariffs are said to have been kyboshed by the woke idiocy championed by our lower-sixth-form government. Soft authoritarianism and the infiltration of a warped, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-Christian, anti-democratic creed of 'protected characteristics' into British institutions may well end up costing this beleaguered nation billions of pounds. Literally billions – thanks, Labour!
Of course, this could yet prove to be Trump putting on a hard-man display for his domestic audience, but it's not difficult to understand why the current American administration views the spread of Orwellian non-crime crimes in the UK with such disbelief and hostility. I, too, despise what we have become. In particular, I despair of the betrayal of our wartime generation who sacrificed their lives; not for freedom, it turns out, but so that tabarded fools with lanyards can casually criminalise decent people for offensive thoughts and make themselves feel virtuous.
You don't have to search hard for the latest insane examples of police over-reach or Marxist social engineering. Maxie Allen, a producer for Times Radio, and his partner, Rosalind Levine, must have found it surreal when they opened the door of their Borehamwood home to find six police officers standing there. This quintessentially liberal, middle-class couple were arrested in front of their distraught young daughter and taken to the police station, where they were kept in separate cells for eight hours for… for what exactly? For upsetting the powers that be at their elder daughter's primary school by complaining when an interim head teacher was appointed without proper accountability. Maxie and Rosalind sent an awful lot of disgruntled emails and shared some spicy, aggrieved comments in a parents' WhatsApp group. Nothing you wouldn't find in any similar group around the country. They were banned from school premises, and were unable to supervise their epileptic daughter's medication.
Questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property, they had literally done nothing illegal. After a five-week investigation – into what exactly? – the police concluded there should be no further action. It should never have been a matter for the police at all, as Jonathan Ash-Edwards, the police and crime commissioner for Hertfordshire, acknowledged at the weekend, let alone the cue for a terrifying, drugs-raid-style operation by multiple officers
Ironically, Rosalind Levine had predicted her own fate after she and her partner were sent a warning letter. In a WhatsApp group, she quipped: 'Can you imagine what the 'action' is? Hello, 999, one of the school mums said something mean about me in a school mum WhatsApp group. Please can you arrest them? ' Humour, the traditional first line of defence for British people, can hardly keep pace with our new Stasi police state.
In an even more sinister development, a Hertfordshire county councillor, Michelle Vince, was warned by police that she could be investigated if she continued to help the parents. Cllr Vince rightly said the case raised 'serious questions about police taking away democratic rights' from elected representatives. How dare the police threaten a councillor speaking up for her voters; who do they think they are?
Invariably, these stories end up following the same depressing pattern. There is a squall of media indignation from people like me, a police force may admit things could have been handled better while insisting it was the correct procedure to arrest X (like hell it was). A few politicians will say the case raises serious questions about what the police are actually policing, adding that forces should focus on the things that really matter to voters. Given sufficient noise, a senior copper such as Andy Prophet will issue a blandly reassuring statement: 'As the new Chief Constable for Hertfordshire, my priorities are to fight crime, arrest criminals and build public trust and confidence. We will do this by tackling violent and sexual crime, street robbery, burglary, car and shop theft. I am equally focused on supporting my officers and staff in the difficult judgments they have to make on our behalf every day.'
Blah, blah, blah… and then it's straight back to policing tweets and private behaviour, arresting journalists at a Just Stop Oil protest and throwing them in a cell (because they're the problem, obviously), and generally advancing a progressive 'social justice' agenda that no one voted for. Plod has catastrophically lost the plot, I'm afraid. As dire clear-up rates reveal, police have largely forgotten that their job is to enforce the law against crimes that have taken place. Not to persecute people for imaginary crimes which might take place.
How do I know this? Well, let's take a closer look at Hertfordshire's Andy Prophet, shall we? When he was Deputy Chief Constable of Essex, Prophet was one of the main officers banging the drum for the National Police Chiefs' Council's Police Race Action Plan. The plan's main theme is that the police must be 'actively anti-racist' to address so-called disparities in the criminal justice system. To be fair to Mr Prophet, he's not the only one. Every chief constable in the country is signed up to this divisive nonsense and is rolling out training courses for officers, who are told they do not have to treat ethnic minorities the same as other members of the public. Arrest rates should be 'equalised' between groups, even when one group is, for instance, committing considerably more machete crime or female genital mutilation than another. I can't think why, can you?
The College of Policing, a quango employing 600 people and costing the taxpayer £45 million a year, is responsible for this ideologically motivated, anti-British madness. The college drives hate law and thought policing into tactical operations through targets, training and indoctrination; a stated objective of its Leadership Programme is 'creating a culture of inclusion and diversity'. As one senior officer explained: 'Hate crime is a growth industry because it helps reinforce the College of Policing's diversity ideology. The more hate crime they record, the better they can show there is a problem in society, which justifies them ignoring traditional crime… and directing resources to policing opinions. What you have to understand, Allison, is they want people to be afraid of saying things.'
This is exactly the same arrogant mindset we find at the Sentencing Council, another powerful quango which just narrowly failed to destroy equality before the law with the introduction of special consideration by judges for certain 'protected characteristics'. The Government and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood have tried to take credit for getting the council to stand down with the threat of emergency legislation. Don't believe it, Labour loves that stuff. Full credit belongs to Robert Jenrick, whose promise of an injunction at the final hour saved the UK from this pernicious two-tier sentencing. The shadow justice secretary is doing his best to stick up for the majority of British people, but the police are marching to a different drummer. Increasingly, their values are not our values, their loyalty is not to us.
We cannot put up with this outrageous abuse of police power much longer, I think. Too many people like Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine have suffered unforgivable, shattering ordeals at the hands of their constabulary. Common sense must be restored to policing; complaints from people with hurt feelings need to be binned, as does the Leftist ideology which is underpinning this grotesque misuse of police time. The abolition of the College of Policing must wait for the next government, but, in the meantime, politicians should scrutinise their edicts and ask, 'How do they serve the public interest?' That will embolden constables and sergeants to start saying no to what many call 'this woke crap'; they are only following the orders of their deluded bosses. We used to respect and trust our police; increasingly we find them farcical or chilling. How sad.
I hear that there may be a misfeasance in public office claim brought against senior officers of Hertfordshire Police. Good. If Mr Allen and Ms Levine wish to pursue one, many of us would gladly help crowdfund them. (A huge thank-you to everyone who generously offered financial assistance in my own case against Essex Police.) I urge everyone to support the work of the Free Speech Union; they are helping thousands of scared individuals to fight back. Police must be shown that they are not above the law; officers who order the arrest of people who have clearly committed no crime should themselves be charged with an offence. Let them think twice in future before despatching six men to harass an innocent family.
'No free trade without free speech.' It should be a source of national shame that the United States is using that as a bargaining tool against this country. What on earth have we become? Understandably, many will complain about US interference in our democracy, but Keir Starmer was lying when he shot back at JD Vance in the Oval Office, 'We've had free speech for a very long time, it will last a long time, and we are very proud of that.' Free speech is under threat as never before in Starmer's Stasi Britain. If the Prime Minister is forced to tell police to lay off the thought crimes to save billions in tariffs, what a remarkable deal that would be.
I'm just looking forward to the time when, once again, sanity is restored, police solve crimes and every day is not April Fools' Day.