The Kafkaesque thoughtpolicing of Allison Pearson

 Now even newspaper columnists are being investigated for their tweets.

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13th November 2024

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As she was getting ready for a Remembrance Sunday memorial last weekend, Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson heard a knock at her door. Two policemen had turned up, she claims in an article published last night, to accuse her of a ‘non-crime hate incident’ – a tool used by police to record accusations of ‘hateful’ speech, even when no law has been broken. When she asked what tweet this was regarding, and who had made the complaint against her, she was rebuffed by the officers, according to her account.

A newspaper columnist being visited by the police, over tweets? It sounds like the stuff of dystopian fiction. And yet it is all too real. Following Pearson’s revelations last night, Essex Police have confirmed that they are investigating her under the Public Order Act, which criminalises material ‘likely or intended to cause racial hatred’. It seems that this is being treated as a criminal matter, rather than just a non-crime hate incident. Essex Police are still yet to reveal what the offending post was, but have said it was deleted shortly after it was posted. Pearson has been invited to a voluntary police interview.

This is all outrageously Kafkaesque. A newspaper columnist is being investigated over a ‘hateful’ tweet, without even being told which ‘hateful’ tweet is being investigated. And while we await more information, it’s hard to imagine that Pearson was actually ginning up ‘racial hatred’ as the allegation might suggest. Not only is she a mainstream newspaper columnist, with no history of going on racist tirades, but the British police have also shown, time after time, in recent years that their own definition of ‘hate’ is far broader than that of any reasonable person. Which is why they’ve harassed so many feminists for ‘misgendering’ and other gender-related ‘hate crimes’ in recent years.

What a staggering waste of police resources. The pursuit of Allison Pearson surely reflects the comically skewed priorities of policing today, which seems obsessed with speech crime and increasingly nonchalant about actual crime. (As Pearson points out, if she had, instead of tweeting, stolen £199 worth of goods from a supermarket, the police would have left her be, given they are advised not to attend thefts below £200.) But more than that, what a terrifying sign of the times. When you allow the state to define and police ‘hate’, this is the absurd, authoritarian world you end up in.

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