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Police have become embroiled in a free speech row after officers told a cancer patient to apologise for a social media post.
Deborah Anderson, an American citizen living in Slough, was confronted by an officer from Thames Valley Police after someone complained about an offensive Facebook post.
The police did not divulge which post had been the subject of the complaint.
The mother of two, who is undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer, was told that if she did not apologise for the comments she could be interviewed at the police station.
Ms Anderson, a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and a member of the Free Speech Union (FSU), refused and said the officer’s time would be better spent investigating serious crimes such as burglary.
Thames Valley Police later dropped the case after the FSU instructed lawyers.
However, the incident has reignited the debate over how far the police should intervene in social media spats.
The issue came into focus earlier this month when Graham Linehan, the Irish comedy writer, was arrested by five armed officers at Heathrow Airport over comments he had posted on X about a transgender activist.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has since said the police were in an impossible position when it came to such matters and called on the Government to provide greater clarity within legislation.
[…]
Ms Anderson was visited at home by a single officer in June and informed that Thames Valley Police had received a complaint about her.
In a video shared by the FSU, the officer said: “Something we believe you have written on Facebook has upset someone.”
Ms Anderson then asked: “You’re here because someone got upset? Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”
The officer confirmed that she was not being arrested and explained: “My plan was that if it was you who wrote the comment, you could just make an apology to the person.”
Ms Anderson replied: “I am not apologising to anybody, I can tell you that.”
The officer told her: “The alternative would be that I would have to call you in for interview.”
Ms Anderson then asked the officer: “Are there no houses that have been burgled recently, no rapes, no murders? … Then why aren’t you out there investigating those?”
Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the FSU, said: “Watching this video, it’s as if the police have become schoolteachers, intervening in petty squabbles. Since when has it been their job to ask people to apologise?
“Except instead of threatening you with detention if you don’t, they’re threatening you with arrest. It’s both comical and deeply sinister – carry on 1984.
A spokesman for Thames Valley Police said: “In June, we received a report from a person who felt threatened by comments directed at them online.
“Following engagement with both parties, no arrests were made and no further action was taken.”
If Plod the Prefect comes round to “engage” with you, do what Ms Anderson did and stand your ground. The chances are good that they will back off. Even if they don’t, you will have kept your self-respect.* This is the alternative.
*Another way to preserve your self-respect in these times is not to join the police. No officer should have to endure this type of deliberately humiliating hazing ritual.
Jeremy Corbyn has just released an “urgent message” claiming today’s membership launch for ‘Your Party’ routed to an unauthorised domain and “legal advice” is now being taken. Which is odd, because Comrade Sultana told everyone to sign up using that very domain this morning…
“URGENT MESSAGE TO ALL YOURPARTY.UK SUPPORTERS
This morning, an unauthorised email was sent to all yourparty.uk supporters with details of a supposed membership portal hosted in a new domain name. Legal advice is being taken. That email should be ignored by all supporters. If any direct debits have been set up, they should be immediately cancelled.”
It appears that Sultana and Corbyn have now split.
“Whatever happened to the Popular Front?”
“She’s over there.”
The Bank lacks tools and legitimacy to tackle inflation. Labour should transfer that role to a new Inflation Control Office, which could use taxes, price controls and even rationing to lower inflation. Then Reeves should change the Bank’s mandate, radically: to support the economic policy of the government, not the City.
As a means to “save” Keir Starmer’s government, I am not convinced by the rationing bit. True, price controls are nearly always popular – until tried. But the people’s cry of “We want an Inflation Control Office to stop us buying things!” is heard only in Ann Pettifor’s dreams. I would advise less rich food late at night.
With this in mind, we may understand Reform better through considering the political thought of the party’s court historian, Sir David Starkey, than we do by mocking Dame Andrea Jenkyns’ sequinned conference sing-along. As summarised by Nicholas Harris in the New Statesman: David Starkey at conference “lectured on the Blairite coup of 1997, which he compared to a ‘slow burn French Revolution’… condemning ‘the catastrophe of human rights’, the Supreme Court and the ECHR… while musing on historical analogies for the coming Reform takeover: the 1832 Reform Act, the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Restoration”. This is not conservatism as we have come to understand it, but counter-revolution: a swift and total toppling, through packing the Lords with sympathetic new peers, and a bonfire of Blairite legislation, of New Labour’s unloved and malignant constitutional order, the “theoretick dogmas” of our own revolutionary lawyers.
This has been the subject of some debate. Tommy Robinson says 3 million. The police say 150,000. That’s quite the discrepancy.
Oddly enough, I am in a rather good position to judge. I was there. Did I count them all? No, I didn’t. What I did do, however, was skulk around the back. Oh, and do some maths.
The plan was for everybody to assemble in Stamford St which, for those who don’t know, is a street in South London between Blackfriars and Waterloo Stations. Stamford St was packed and there was an overflow into Southwark Road, Blackfriars Road and Blackfriars Bridge. I was right at the back of the overflow into Southward Road. I would say that extended for – if I am being generous – 100m. (My apologies for using Nazi units but I can’t be arsed to do the conversion.)
Whitehall is 700m long. Stamford St is about the same length. So with the overflows we get 1000m of march. Stamford St is maybe 30m wide. So we get the whole march – I didn’t see many late comers – in 30,000m².
So how many people per metre? I understand the rule of thumb is 4. For comparison, Wembley manages to 90,000 people sat down in 90,000m². Four standing in the same space as one seated? Bit of a squeeze but possible.
It has been interesting to see the predictably alarmed reactions to the huge march in London organised by Tommy Robinson et al.
One remark I heard on a video was “The most alarming aspect of the event was just how normal the vast majority of the marchers were… the sort of people you’d meet in a country pub, or at a half-time queue for the loo or a concert.”
At first, my reaction to hearing that was “surely the normality of the crowd should have made the march less alarming”… but then I realised the marchers not being stereotypical bovver boys makes plausibly labelling the demonstration as “far-right” vastly harder.
Yes, I can see how that might alarm some people as the magic words racist, fascist, and far-right lose their power from years of overuse and the fact there were reggae bands and alarmingly black faces in the crowd.
“Unfortunately, the current Labour government, like every unpopular administration before it, has reached for the oldest trick in the book, persecuting the law-abiding. Sunak did it with smoking bans and talk of national service, Starmer is doing it with the motorist. The plan includes mandatory eye tests for older drivers, stripping pensioners of their independence and dumping the cost onto the already-buckling adult social care system when Dad now needs a taxi just to get to the shops. It lowers the drink-drive limit from 35 to 22 micrograms, despite Britain already having the second-lowest drink-driving deaths in Europe. There is even talk of slashing the national speed limit in the countryside to 50 mph — a direct attack on rural life, where the car is not a luxury but a necessity.”
One of the problems with certain types of new regulation is getting them enforced. If the cops are too busy going around pinching people for saying mean things on social media, how are they going to enforce some of this nonsense?
Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer, who is not exactly loved in the rural parts of the UK, is still in thrall, as far as I can tell, to a form of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to risk and safety. And he may think that he might as well stick it to rural people who need to use a car as they will be very unlikely to vote for him. There may be a sort of “damn you bastards” reflex here. I recall that he was a fan of lockdowns, and while he remains in power, there is a risk that he’d impose them if international organisations demand it. The authoritarian itch is powerful in “Capt. Hindsight”.
Less negatively, there may be a warped kind of mistaken desire to improve humanity going on here (shades of the old “nudge” issue I wrote about a few days ago, although we are now in open coercion territory.) According to this way of thinking, it is better to pile on costs and inconvenience to everyone if it saves a single life, whether that means cutting rural speed limits, making granddad check his eyes regularly (I have some sympathy for this, after all, pilots are regularly checked out) and reducing alcohol. There is a sort of cost-benefit analysis that can be done to figure out what the unintended consequences of certain measures are. Unfortunately, fatal/near-fatal car accidents make for horrible headlines (and they are horrible, period), while the increasing drudgery and cost of living in a heavily regulated country does not translate so well into news stories. That is a factor that explains the rise of Big Government more generally: the whole issue of “what is seen and what is unseen”, as Bastiat described it.
All this heavy-handedness is is a reason, I think, why we need more of the pro-safety elements at work to come from insurance. If an elderly person does not get their eyes tested and they are involved in a crash, or they don’t have tyres with a minimum grip, or they haven’t had an MOT test, then that means an insurance policy does not pay out, etc. Let those who make a living out of correct risk assessment drive such things (pardon the pun) and not a political class that seems to crave this sort of micro-management of our waking hours.
But then as long as we have “our NHS” socialist model of healthcare, it will always be argued, by those of a communitarian bent, that those who fail to minimise risks to others impose unwanted costs on innocent third parties, and to “save” the NHS, such regulations, however far-reaching, must be enforced. But this, in my view, is an argument against socialised medicine, not for increasing regulation.
Labour bigwigs have spent so long portraying themselves as morally superior that they have come to believe their own hype. They really do seem to think they are, as a group, almost beyond reproach. That they are the good guys, the virtuous ones. What they lack in any substantial political vision for Britain, they make up for in skyscraping self-righteousness. Which blinds them to their own hypocrisy.
Our now former Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, had a long history of denouncing Conservative politicians for tax avoidance. Yesterday she had to resign for not paying enough Stamp Duty. This was not because she accidentally wrote the wrong figure on the cheque – showing my age, there – it was because she engaged in a complicated tax avoidance scheme uncovered by the Daily Telegraph:
Angela Rayner saved £40,000 in stamp duty on her new seaside flat after telling tax authorities it was her main home, The Telegraph can disclose.
The Deputy Prime Minister is understood to have removed her name from the deeds of her house in Greater Manchester a few weeks before buying an £800,000 seaside flat in Hove, East Sussex.
The changes enabled Ms Rayner to avoid paying £70,000 in stamp duty, which would have been applicable if Hove was her second home. Instead, she is thought to have paid £30,000 in stamp duty, saving her £40,000 in the process.
But she has also told Tameside council in Manchester that her constituency house remains her primary residence and informed Brighton and Hove council that her apartment there was a second home for council tax purposes.
There were some other financial shenanigans to do with a trust fund for her disabled son going on as well, but they are secondary to the main point.
I am always saying “incentives matter”. All human history demonstrates that in the long run, they do. But all human history also demonstrates that in the short run, they frequently don’t. Angela Rayner was a left-wing Housing Minister whose public speeches often denounced other MPs for legally avoiding – let alone illegally evading – tax. One would have thought that she would have foreseen that unfriendly eyes were going to scrutinise her own payment of a property tax, and would have arranged her affairs accordingly.
Yesterday the Green Party announced that Zack Polanski (who used to say he could enlarge women’s breasts by the power of his mind) had been elected as its new leader. The party also announced that “two high-profile local councillors had been elected as co-deputy leaders. One of these deputies is Mr Mothin Ali, formerly a local councillor in Leeds. If he is a dab hand at the mental embiggening of ladies’ boobs, he has not mentioned it, but he has said other things that might prove equally controversial.
The video to which I link was posted by “Howli! Now” in May 2024, with the title “Leeds city council member Mothin Ali shares thoughts on events of October 7th” and the caption, “Mothin Ali is the Green Party councilor who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ as he was elected to the Leeds city council. This is what he had to say on October 7th:”
The video includes an automatically generated transcript. I “cleaned up” some obvious errors in that transcript to produce what follows:
So, right at this very minute Israel has launched one of the biggest attacks against the civilian population that we’ve seen for many years. Now they’re going to use the pretext of the fightback by Hamas fighters – or supposedly Hamas fighters – this morning.
Now, remember the situation in Palestine and especially the situation in Gaza: it’s an open-air prison, it’s the biggest concentration camp the world has ever seen, millions of people have been rounded up into a tiny area. They’re living on top of each other, they’ve been – they’ve been forced to live off scraps that the international community sometimes donates to them.
Now, the dignity of a indigenous population we haven’t seen being stripped away in this way, just like the Europeans did to the Native Americans, or, um, how the Europeans did throughout the colonies. Remember Israel is a colonial, settler-colonial, occupier. It’s been trying to erase the history and trying to erase the legitimacy of a native population – every single person, every single people have a right to fight back, every single people have a right to live free of occupiers.
That includes people who are brown, that includes people who are Muslim, that includes people who are Arab. Just because they’re brown and Arab doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to fight back. You saw the Western support for Ukraine when they fought back against Russia. Palestinians have equal right if not more. They’ve been under occupation for over 70 years, they’ve literally been wiped off the map. They talk about wiping Israel off the map, they’ve wiped Palestine off the map, they’ve put millions of people into refugee camps. They use the pretext of rockets and they use the pretext of people resisting an occupier to further destroy a civilian population and any prospect of a Palestinian home state. They talk about a land free for the Israelis – what about the land for the Palestinians? You’ve taken it all. You’ll see the Western media support Israel, you’ll see Western propagandists on the media presenting some kind of victim narrative. They’re not victims they’re occupiers, the colonialists, they’re European colonialists, it’s one of the last European colonies in the world and that’s why they, the European people, don’t want to let it go.
They use the weapon of anti-Semitism so effectively that anyone who criticizes Israel is labelled an anti-semitic. We see through those lies, we see through that propaganda. People of the world stay strong: support Palestine, support the right of indigenous people to have freedom and to fight back against occupiers.
Edit: I got so involved in doing the transcript that I forgot the whole point of the post. It is this: I support Mr Ali’s right to justify terrorism, not least because I want to know what people like him are saying. But given that Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2021, meaning that, in the words of the gov.uk website, “members of Hamas or those who invite support for the group could be jailed for up to 14 years”, when can we expect Mothin Ali to be treated as Graham Linehan was?
Second edit: On a different tack, these lines from Mothin Ali’s speech jumped out at me this morning:
It’s been trying to erase the history and trying to erase the legitimacy of a native population – every single person, every single people have a right to fight back, every single people have a right to live free of occupiers.
Leaving aside the question of whether Jews or Arabs have the better claim to be regarded as “the native population” of Israel, has it never occurred to Mothin Ali that the arguments he uses above to justify Palestinians violently attacking Israelis could also be used to justify White British people violently attacking British Muslims?
Five, apparently. That’s five armed police officers, of course. Heaven knows how many unarmed officers it would take to bring down a mighty warrior like Graham Linehan.
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