By LifeSiteNews (Politics) | Created at 2024-11-14 16:09:26 | Updated at 2024-11-14 22:15:48
6 hours ago
Thu Nov 14, 2024 - 11:09 am EST
(LifeSiteNews) — In a visit perhaps times for its irony, award-winning journalist Allison Pearson of the UK Telegraph received a visit from two police officers… at 9:40 a.m. on Remembrance Day. The purpose of the visit was a post she had made on X, which had been reported to law enforcement by an anonymous member of the public. This snitch complaint resulted in Pearson’s offending post being logged as a “non-crime hate incident.” That is, Pearson hadn’t broken any laws, but she did merit a rebuke from officers of the law.
Pearson described her shock as the officers knocked on her door while she was preparing to attend a Remembrance Day ceremony in a column for the Telegraph:
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.
Pearson noted the insanity of police officers showing up at her house on one of the most sacred days in the calendar year to accuse her of a non-crime on behalf of a faceless accuser. “Today,” she told them. “We we are commemorating hundreds of thousands of British men, most of them roughly the age you two are now, who gave their lives so that we could live in a free country, not under the jackboot of tyranny. And you, YOU come here on this sacred day… You know, those soldiers, they could never have imagined that their country, our country, the country they died for, would ever become a place where the police would turn up at the door of a person who has done nothing wrong…”
Pearson does not even remember the post the police had shown up about—she writes that it was probably one of her posts condemning the Hamas protests last year. But the fact that friends had called the police in various genuinely desperate situations and had received a lackadaisical response while two officers arrived at her house over an X post was truly stunning. “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,” she wrote.
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.
As the Free Speech Union pointed out, “non-crime hate incidents” are a real, non-fictious, Orwellian category speech in the UK that frequently attracts police attention. In 2022, I interviewed former police officer and Humberside docker Harry Miller for LSN—he described getting a visit from the police over posting a limerick to social media that had offended a trans activist. That experience radicalized him, and Miller has turned from a blue collar worker into a free speech activist dedicated to tormenting the Orwellian two-tier policing system. One UK woman was threatened with arrest for committing a hate crime after condemning gender ideology at a rally.
It gets worse. Two years ago, a veteran was actually arrested for a post disagreeing with the LGBT movement because he was guilty of “causing anxiety” to trans activists. The category of “non-crime hate incidents” essentially permits the establishment to use law enforcement as a tool to crack down on speech that isn’t technically illegal, but is frowned upon. For most people, a visit from the police is very intimidating. Every so often, they pick the wrong victim—a Harry Miller or an Allison Pearson—but overall, it is a very effective tactic. And “non-crime hate incidents” can show up on a criminal record check, even thought they’re not technically criminal. The Free Speech Union estimates that 250,000 “NCHIs” have been recorded in England and Wales—an average of 66 a day.
The FSU provided a few examples of these police investigations:
In June 2022, Wiltshire Police opened a file when an 11-year-old boy was called ‘shorty’ and ‘leprechaun’ in the street by another boy.
Hampshire Police dispatched five officers to arrest army veteran Darren Brady following a complaint that he’d reposted a meme created by Laurence Fox depicting the Pride flag as a swastika in an unsubtle attempt to highlight the authoritarian way in which the LGBTQ+ agenda is sometimes promoted.
Last year, the FSU wrote to West Yorkshire Police, urging them to delete the NCHIs from the records of four pupils at a school in Wakefield who were suspended over minor, accidental damage caused to a copy of the Quran. For this, the four students were suspended, and the police were called in. At a meeting with irate ‘community leaders’ at a local Mosque, Chief Inspector Andy Thornton – who was leading the investigation into this dreadful crime — said the students’ treatment of the holy book has been recorded as an NCHI.
In August 2023, the then Welsh Secretary, David TC Davies, faced a police investigation over an allegedly ‘racist’ campaign leaflet about a proposed new traveller site in his constituency.
Following a court ruling that the recording of NCHIs on the scale it was taking place was an unlawful interference in freedom of speech and a breach of Article 10 of the ECHR, in 2023 the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman raised the threshold for police recording of NCHIs. Under this guidance, officers are now only supposed to record a NCHI if the incident is “clearly motivated by intentional hostility”.
It may not be illegal to oppose the transgender community or to speak one’s mind on a wide range of issues in the UK. But with “NCHIs,” the establishment has created a tool for enforcing social conformity and chilling speech without passing any laws at all.
Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.
His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
He is the author of The Culture War, Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.
Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.
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