Free Speech Union (FSU) member and award-winning Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson is facing a police investigation over an X post from last year — a member of the public complained, and officers initially logged it as an Orwellian ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI).
Needless to say, we’re providing our member with support.
In an article for the Telegraph, Allison describes how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago. Here’s an extract:
9.40am: All my things were laid out ready for Remembrance Sunday. Black dress, black opaque tights, coat, a new poppy to go with the vintage enamel one that glints in my jewellery box awaiting its annual outing. I was still not dressed when Himself called up to say that there were police at the door for me. I did vaguely wonder what on earth they were doing here – something to do with our road being closed for the parade? But I went downstairs to greet them at the door and apologised to the two young constables standing outside for still being in my dressing gown. I wasn’t sorry for long.
PC S, the one on the left, who did all the talking, told me that they were here to inform me that I had been accused of a non-crime hate incident (NCHI). It was to do with something I had posted on X (formerly Twitter) a year ago. A YEAR ago? Yes. Stirring up racial hatred, apparently.
WHAT? I stood there in my slippered feet trying to take in what the police officer had said; our market town was filled with the sounds of preparation for the forthcoming parade – a distant drummer, the metallic clang of barriers going up. Life going on as normal, but this wasn’t normal; it was far from normal.
“What did this post I wrote that offended someone say?” I asked. The constable said he wasn’t allowed to tell me that.
“So what’s the name of the person who made the complaint against me?”
He wasn’t allowed to tell me that either, he said.
“You can’t give me my accuser’s name?”
“It’s not ‘the accuser’,” the PC said, looking down at his notes. “They’re called ‘the victim’.”
Ah, right. “OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”
The two policemen exchanged glances. Clearly, the Kafkaesque situation made no sense to them, either. I think, even by then, they dimly surmised they had picked on the wrong lady.
We are living through an epidemic of stabbings, burglaries and violent crime – not the non-crime variety – which is not being adequately investigated by the police, yet they had somehow found time to come to my house and intimidate me.
I really don’t know what post they were referring to, although I do know that a year ago, I was consumed with the aftermath of the Oct 7 attacks by Hamas and the anti-Semitic slogans being brandished and chanted at pro-Palestine marches.
On Sunday morning, I suppose there was a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that, here I was, living proof that two-tier justice exists in the UK.
If I went to a supermarket and helped myself to £199 of groceries, the police would almost certainly do nothing. We know that for a fact. Retailers all over the country have been complaining for months about soaring incidents of theft. But the police prefer to go after middle-aged women like me. People who have said something someone on the internet didn’t like.
Awkward silence. They were only doing their job, I knew that, and I almost felt sorry for them, but how sinister and odious that job has become. PC S asked for my phone number and email address in case they needed to call me in for an interview; I gave him my email only. What did those young officers feel as they left my home? Any tingle of shame for defiling Remembrance Sunday with authoritarian behaviour that would not have been out of place in the regime Britain gave her treasure and the flower of her youth to defeat? More likely, they went to Costa round the corner to grab a coffee and have a laugh at the crazy woman in the dressing gown who had ranted some stupid stuff about living in a free country: the unthinking commissars of wokery and censorship.
Look, I was lucky. I am reasonably well-informed, I have a wonderful platform here at The Telegraph and as a member of the Free Speech Union I can get crucial advice about how to fight back against vexatious NCHIs solicited by grievance mongers who despise those of us who hold centre-Right views and who don’t agree that uncontrolled mass immigration has been an altogether unmitigated blessing. But a person who was more vulnerable and unsupported than I am would have been very scared by what I had just experienced. A visit from the police has a chilling effect on free speech, and that’s exactly what NCHIs are designed to do, I think. Not just to shut down “hate”, whatever that is, but to make thinking outside the new approved public morality a dangerous activity.
Worth reading in full.
