It's no longer hyperbolic to ask if Britain is still a free country
'Very Brexity.' These were the words police officers breathlessly uttered as they rifled through Julian Foulkes' book collection, looking for evidence of thoughtcrime. The bodycam footage from the 2023 arrest of Foulkes – a retired special constable from Kent, who was cautioned for sending 'malicious communications' – sent a chill down my spine, as I'm sure it did for many Telegraph readers. If not liking the European Union is enough to raise the eyebrows of England's poundshop Stasi, then I guess I'll see you all in the gulag.
Foulkes' horrendous treatment was as absurd as it was illiberal. The offending tweet that led six police officers to his door was actually condemning anti-Semitism. He accused London's 'pro-Palestine' hate-marchers of being 'one step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals' – a reference to a recent anti-Semitic riot at an airport in Dagestan.
The subtlety was apparently lost on Kent's finest, who cuffed Foulkes, held him for eight hours and began ransacking his house as if he were a drug kingpin.
Last week, Kent Police apologised and wiped the caution from Foulkes' record. But to chalk this up as some kind of hapless error risks normalising this new breed of authoritarianism – even more so than it already has been.
Being slammed in a cell for hate speech is really not nothing. Foulkes feared he'd never be able to visit his daughter abroad again. He feared his neighbours would think he was a paedophile, as cops hauled out laptops in evidence bags. No free nation can allow this state-led harassment of innocent people, merely for expressing their opinions on the internet, to become routine.
But it has. A recent Times investigation found that at least 30 people a day are being arrested for saying 'grossly offensive' things on the internet. According to Greg Lukianoff – president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in the US – this means that Dear Old Blighty is already, easily, arresting more people for speech crimes today than America did during the first Red Scare. It's no longer hyperbolic to ask if Britain in 2025 still qualifies as a free country.
Were we just going after genuine hate-speakers, that would be bad enough. No one should be arrested for an opinion, no matter how odious. But it's obviously gone far beyond that now.
As two parents from Borehamwood found out recently, even criticising your daughter's school too vigorously can lead to a knock at the door. YouTube comics have been convicted for off-colour jokes. Lying social-media attention-seekers have been convicted for being lying social-media attention-seekers. This really isn't normal. Or at least, it shouldn't be.
The establishment appears to have imbibed the paternalistic notion that censorship begets harmony. That involving the police in even the most minor social-media squabbles is essential, lest widespread unrest ensue.
This oozes contempt for the public, of all backgrounds – as if white Brits are only ever a few spicy tweets away from a pogrom and minorities would rather be protected from offence than violence and burglary.
Well, the treatment of Foulkes and many more reveals that censorship only begets more censorship. Our decades-long experiment in policing 'hate' has ended up with pensioners being handcuffed for criticising anti-Semites. Yet more proof that we cannot trust the state to decide what is right, good and true – and that speech codes, however tightly drawn, can balloon to include totally innocent, even righteous, speech.
So it's time for a people's revolt against our supposed betters – against a distant establishment that thinks it has the right to dictate what we can say, think and do. Very Brexity, I know. But they surely can't arrest all of us.
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