The Allison Pearson scandal is more sinister than you think

The police genuinely believe it’s their job to police our tweets, thoughts and feelings.

Source - Spiked 07/03/25

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When the police knocked on Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson’s door last year, it prompted a justified national outcry. She was told by two officers on Remembrance Sunday that she was being investigated for ‘stirring up racial hatred’ – all because of a nearly year-old tweet, in which she mistook some British Pakistani protesters for pro-Hamas protesters and railed against ‘Jew haters’. That Pearson promptly deleted it soon after apparently made no difference.

When the police knocked on Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson’s door last year, it prompted a justified national outcry. She was told by two officers on Remembrance Sunday that she was being investigated for ‘stirring up racial hatred’ – all because of a nearly year-old tweet, in which she mistook some British Pakistani protesters for pro-Hamas protesters and railed against ‘Jew haters’. That Pearson promptly deleted it soon after apparently made no difference.

To any sane observer, officers turning up at the house of a British newspaper columnist, over nothing more than a clumsy tweet, was an outrageous assault on free speech. More outrageous still was the fact that, at first, the police refused to inform her of which tweet it was. For once, the clichés ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Orwellian’ were appropriate. That the investigation was dropped, following a public backlash, made it no less sinister.

The police watchdog, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), doesn’t see it this way. This week, it published the findings of its investigation into Essex Police’s handling of the case. Astonishingly, the NPCC’s hate-crime lead, Mark Hobrough, has concluded that the officers ‘acted responsibly’. More than that, Hobrough praised the two officers who doorstepped Pearson for their ‘polite’ and ‘exemplary’ approach. He also heaped praise on Essex Police’s higher-ups, for defending their behaviour in a ‘valiant attempt to maintain public confidence’. More chilling still, the NPPC has said that, although the case against Pearson was never taken up by the Crown Prosecution Service, ‘We do not take the view that a crime did not take place’.

When the police knocked on Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson’s door last year, it prompted a justified national outcry. She was told by two officers on Remembrance Sunday that she was being investigated for ‘stirring up racial hatred’ – all because of a nearly year-old tweet, in which she mistook some British Pakistani protesters for pro-Hamas protesters and railed against ‘Jew haters’. That Pearson promptly deleted it soon after apparently made no difference.

To any sane observer, officers turning up at the house of a British newspaper columnist, over nothing more than a clumsy tweet, was an outrageous assault on free speech. More outrageous still was the fact that, at first, the police refused to inform her of which tweet it was. For once, the clichés ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Orwellian’ were appropriate. That the investigation was dropped, following a public backlash, made it no less sinister.

The police watchdog, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), doesn’t see it this way. This week, it published the findings of its investigation into Essex Police’s handling of the case. Astonishingly, the NPCC’s hate-crime lead, Mark Hobrough, has concluded that the officers ‘acted responsibly’. More than that, Hobrough praised the two officers who doorstepped Pearson for their ‘polite’ and ‘exemplary’ approach. He also heaped praise on Essex Police’s higher-ups, for defending their behaviour in a ‘valiant attempt to maintain public confidence’. More chilling still, the NPPC has said that, although the case against Pearson was never taken up by the Crown Prosecution Service, ‘We do not take the view that a crime did not take place’.

The NPCC’s response is shocking, but sadly not surprising. In recent years, the police have come to relish their new role as Stasi-lite enforcers of correct-think. They are certainly keener on this than on the old-fashioned business of catching thieves and violent criminals. Indeed, despite the vast array of hate-speech laws available to them, the police are often caught going above and beyond what the law demands. This is how we end up with such absurdities as police officers visiting a pensioner because she called for the resignation of a local councillor on Facebook. It’s how we end up with so-called non-crime hate incidents being recorded against school children for playground insults, or against a hairdresser for giving an ‘aggressive haircut’. (It should probably go without saying, but there is nothing in the statute book that compels officers to investigate or record non-crimes.)

In Pearson’s case, it would be an understatement to say that the police went above and beyond what they are legally required to do. The tweet in question was in response to a picture of police officers posing with some men holding up the flag of a Pakistani political party. Pearson mistook the flag for an Islamist, perhaps pro-Hamas, symbol, hence her ‘Jew haters’ remark. This was, after all, at the height of London’s Hamas-sympathising hate marches. Pearson deleted it as soon as she was alerted to her mistake. The likelihood of it ‘stirring up racial hatred’, as the cops allege, was precisely nil. And yet still they went after her for it.

The amount of police time and resources this one tweet has taken up is staggering. Pearson was first reported to London’s Metropolitan Police, who considered treating her tweet as a breach of the Communications Act. It was then passed on to Sussex Police, who thought about recording it as a non-crime hate incident, before the cops worked out that she actually lives in Essex. When it finally landed on Essex Police’s desk, they not only decided it might constitute racist incitement, they also set up a ‘gold group’ – a type of unit that is usually reserved for major incidents, such as terror attacks.

That the police would go to such lengths over nothing more than a tweet, and that the police watchdog thinks this is all perfectly normal, suggests that police forces in Britain inhabit an entirely parallel moral universe to the citizens they are charged with protecting. There is no rational, acceptable reason for a police officer to investigate a supposedly offensive tweet. Ever. That three police forces, and even a terror-style ‘gold group’, were enlisted for the task is batshit beyond belief.

To put this in words politicians and police bureaucrats might understand: Britain’s thought police are not fit for purpose. Time to disband them once and for all.