Free speech is under serious threat in the UK - and Christians should be concerned

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Despite the good news that Essex Police have dropped their Stasi-like investigation into Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson, orthodox Christians should still expect trouble from the woke police.

The police action against Pearson centred on a year-old tweet that had described a group of demonstrators from a Pakistani political party at an anti-Israel demonstration as "Jew-haters".

Pearson deleted the tweet as soon as she found out that the officers photographed with the demonstrators were not from the Metropolitan Police, as she had tagged the post, but from Greater Manchester Police.

Two police officers confronted Pearson at her Essex home on Remembrance Sunday just before she had planned to go to a church service. After Pearson publicised her ordeal in The Telegraph, the behaviour of Essex Police sparked an international outcry with X owner and the world's richest man, Elon Musk, weighing in behind her.

He posted on his X account where he has 205 million followers: "This needs to stop."

The day before the news about Essex Police's climb-down over Pearson came through on November 21, the Times and Jewish Chronicle columnist Melanie Phillips wrote a piece on her Substack headed 'The policing of wrongspeak - Hate crime is the expression of a totalitarian mindset'.

Phillips observed that the treatment of Pearson "was even more grotesque because the offending tweet was actually protesting against racial hatred".

She added acidly: "Ah, but it was hatred of Jews; and hatred of Jews seems to be a non-hate thing altogether."

She described how for more than a year since the October 7 atrocities in Israel, huge demonstrations have taken place in the streets of London and other cities aimed at intimidating Jews, chanting for their mass murder and the destruction of the world's one Jewish state and inciting murderous hatred by accusing Israelis of "genocide".

"These demonstrations - and countless smaller but similar incidents - have left many British Jews too frightened to go into central London or use public transport," she wrote.

Phillips brilliantly analysed the neo-Marxist ideology behind the behaviour of the woke police: "Most of the protests against hate crime and non-crime hate have concentrated on the threat to free speech. That, though, doesn't get to the nub of this lurch into oppressiveness. It's not that speech is being suppressed. It's only some types of speech - those that don't conform to a culture-wide power grab by certain protected groups."

She argued that "this entirely subjective criterion of hate has opened the way for utterly vexatious claims that can ruin the reputation and life of their unjustly denounced target.

"People who are in fact the objects of real hatred are either ignored or find themselves accused of promoting hatred when they protest or seek to defend themselves against the hatred being expressed against them. This is the kind of abuse of power associated with a totalitarian police state."

It is that neo-Marxist mindset which has captured particularly the upper echelons of the British police and created a culture in which Christian freedom of expression is becoming increasingly restricted. Orthodox Christian opinions on matters such as sexual morality and gender identity are undoubtedly offensive to some people, especially among Millennials and Generation Z.

So, when Merseyside Police in 2021 displayed the message "Being offensive is an offence" on a billboard on the side of a van in the Wirral, that encapsulated the threat to Christian freedom of expression. The message sparked an outcry because under UK law it is not a crime to offend someone, so Merseyside Police issued a political apology with a spokesman saying that the message had been "incorrect" but "well-intentioned".

Phillips observed in her Substack piece: "Britain's Labour government is uneasily shuffling its feet over the policing of hate incidents. But since so many Labour party members and 'progressives' in general are fanatical supporters of victim culture and fanatical haters of Israel, the chances of ministers doing anything to arrest this slide into cultural darkness are nil."

She pointed out that "the Sovietisation of Britain may have started under Labour, but it was given rocket fuel on the Tories' watch".

She concluded: "It's not enough for the Tories now to protest. If they really want to turn this round, they must first own it - and show us all what they now understand they got so badly wrong for so long."

The reality now for orthodox Christian freedom of expression is that neo-Marxist authoritarianism is so deeply entrenched in UK police forces that a pro-free-speech government, if one got elected, would have to battle relentlessly for every inch of territory to push the evil back.

Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.