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The Allison Pearson witch-hunt lays bare this country’s despicable slide into authoritarianism
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We must urgently speak out, or risk having to forever hold our peace. Free speech, the foundation of our liberties and democracy, is under threat like never before – yet much of the public remains blissfully unaware of the enormity of what is being taken from us.
The shocking treatment meted out to my colleague Allison Pearson, a brilliant columnist much beloved of Telegraph readers, must serve as the final wake-up call. She recounts how two police officers came knocking at her door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to inform her that she was being investigated over a post on X, formerly Twitter, published a year ago.
Still in her dressing gown, she was stunned. The officers refused to tell Pearson which of her many posts their visit related to. They wouldn’t remind her what she had written. They weren’t allowed to tell her who complained; so much for open justice. The officers weren’t to blame: they were following Kafkaesque procedures dictated by an out-of-control technocratic machine.
Pearson notes that the period during which her supposedly offending post was published appears to coincide with the aftermath of the Hamas pogroms, a time during which she made a heroic stand against anti-Semitism.
Given the intensifying culture wars, and the collapsing trust in our institutions, the fact that one of Britain’s leading conservative commentators is being investigated in this way will unnerve many voters. Two-tier justice is real, in one fundamental way at least: Pearson is in trouble for an ancient tweet while the police rarely bother to track down stolen cars or mobile phones, even when presented with real-time geolocations or webcam evidence.
The BBC’s Huw Edwards walked free. Violence and disorder is rife and shoplifting has effectively been decriminalised, leading to the routine pillaging of supermarkets. Yet the state seems more interested in intimidating those accused of wrongthink. Even when real criminals are jailed, they are usually released early.
At best, it smacks of grossly misplaced priorities, of gigantic displacement activity, of laziness; at worst, it indicates a sinister power grab by an authoritarian elite that dismisses property theft as mere freelance redistribution and to whom free speech is synonymous with micro-aggression and oppression. What is certain is that this madness infuriates the right-thinking, silent majority like little else.
The basic rule ought to be that the authorities should not come for journalists in free societies. When they do, what hope is there for ordinary citizens? This isn’t just about those of us paid to opine: it is about the right of everybody in Britain to speak our minds without fear of arrest or cancellation. Free speech isn’t just about laws; it requires a culture of tolerance, the idea that we can agree to disagree while remaining civil.
Donald Trump’s election, combined with Elon Musk’s purchase of X, is ushering in a new era in America. The woke establishment is about to be annihilated, and much of the censorship of the past few years – surrounding Covid, the Hunter Biden scandal, the routine banning of counter-elites and even the president-elect himself from social media – is being overturned.
Yet the UK is going backwards. The rule should be, as Voltaire didn’t quite say: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Even in the USA, land of the First Amendment, there are numerous constraints to free speech, and rightly so.
In Britain, we have contempt laws. It is rightly illegal to express support for a banned terror organisation. But by and large, speech should be as free as possible, and even disgusting falsehoods should be allowed. Nobody should have a right not to be offended. The current online rules are not fit for purpose. Offline, business-owners should not be told to police the speech of their customers; there should be no “banter police” in pubs or shops.
The Left-wing human rights project so beloved of Tony Blair and Keir Starmer has failed to prevent outrages such as the probe into Pearson, and our membership of the The European Convention on Human Rights has gone hand in hand with the collapse of our ancient liberties. We live in a country where thousands are now routinely deemed guilty in the most opaque of manners of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), an extraordinary, controversial concept originally formalised by the Blob, not by MPs through legislation.
The police are told not to scrutinise claims; feelings, it seems, have greater authority than facts. Having a NCHI recorded against one’s name can show up on enhanced criminal records checks, making it harder to get a job, and yet not everybody who has been blacklisted in this way is even aware of it. How can this Orwellian dystopia be compatible with “human rights”? One should either be convicted of a crime, or be entirely innocent. NCHIs should be abolished.
The old legal order is being undermined in other ways. Pearson was corrected by the police when she asked who her accuser was – he or she is the “victim”, they said. Yet such terminology implicitly breaches the presumption of innocence. We need to wait until a fair and proper process has determined whether or not the accused is guilty under the law before being able to determine whether there is a victim, and who that person might be.
It is true that actual victims of certain heinous crimes have seen their complaints wrongly dismissed, or treated with a lack of seriousness, by some authorities. Such failings are unacceptable. However, this doesn’t justify veering to the other extreme and to assume that all claims, all accusations, are always true.
“Justice deferred is justice denied” is another fundamental principle – yet Pearson is being pursued for a year-old tweet under public order legislation relating to material allegedly “likely or intended to cause racial hatred”. We appear to be in the grip instead of a culture of anonymous denunciation of a variety once only found in tyrannies.
What has happened to our wonderful country? We used to be freedom-lovers, but we now apparently acquiesce meekly to the rise of authoritarianism and the normalisation of censorship. We need to speak out fearlessly, or else the Britain we knew and loved will soon cease to exist.
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