My visit from police on Remembrance Sunday is living proof of our two-tier justice system

A knock on the door to be accused of a non-crime hate incident from a year-old tweet is not what people fought and died for in the war

9.40am: All my things were laid out ready for Remembrance Sunday. Black dress, black opaque tights, coat, a new poppy to go with the vintage enamel one that glints in my jewellery box awaiting its annual outing. I was still not dressed when Himself called up to say that there were police at the door for me. I did vaguely wonder what on earth they were doing here – something to do with our road being closed for the parade? But I went downstairs to greet them at the door and apologised to the two young constables standing outside for still being in my dressing gown. I wasn’t sorry for long.
PC S, the one on the left, who did all the talking, told me that they were here to inform me that I had been accused of a non-crime hate incident (NCHI). 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.
Shocked. I was definitely shocked. Astonished. That too. Upset. How could I not be? It’s never nice having the police at the door if you’re a law-abiding person, because police at the door can mean only one of two things: tragedy or trouble. But to have them here on the saddest, most solemn date in the calendar with this kind of malevolent nonsense. It was surreal. (I have hundreds of black and Asian followers on X/Twitter; none of them ever suggested I’d said something bad or hateful. Besides, who decides where you set the bar for what’s offensive?) This is supposed to be 2024, not 1984, yet the police officers seemed to be operating according to the George Orwell operational manual.
All those fluttering feelings and thoughts were elbowed aside by a surge of instinctive anger. A non-crime – what the hell?
“Today,” I began, trying to compose myself and aware of people on the other side of the street stopping to stare at the woman in a dressing gown addressing two coppers, “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…”
I think that’s roughly what I said. It’s what I felt, anyway. And as I spoke, warming to my theme, which was freedom, I realised how truly appalling this was. How un-British in the most painful way, this unwarranted intrusion of the state into my private life, this humiliating public reprimand for some casual comment online that had done what, exactly? Hurt whom, exactly? Stirred up hatred how, exactly? It was bloody outrageous.
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.
I really don’t know what post they were referring to, although I do know that a year ago, I was consumed with the aftermath of the Oct 7 attacks by Hamas and the anti-Semitic slogans being brandished and chanted at pro-Palestine marches.
Standing there on the doorstep, I suddenly thought of my friend who earlier this year had reported domestic violence, coercive control and fraud by their partner to the same Essex police force that this pair before me belonged to. The lackadaisical response from a constable assigned to the case was that a) It was a first offence so the abusive person probably wouldn’t get charged so not worth bothering; b) The prisons were full so not worth bothering; and c) It was only my friend’s word against their partner.
I drafted an Exocet of a reply for my friend. It told the policeman concerned that he had a duty to investigate this serious crime and that there was abundant evidence from banks, credit card companies and family members. With some reluctance, the force eventually made an arrest after the constable whined in a letter to my friend about the excessive language I had used in the Exocet which I had targeted at his lazy rear end.
On Sunday morning, I suppose there was a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that, here I was, living proof that two-tier justice exists in the UK.
If I went to a supermarket and helped myself to £199 of groceries, the police would almost certainly do nothing. We know that for a fact. Retailers all over the country have been complaining for months about soaring incidents of theft. But the police prefer to go after middle-aged women like me. People who have said something someone on the internet didn’t like.
“Don’t you think you’re wasting police time?” I asked the two young coppers. The one with a beard on the right had shuffled sideways and was now some distance from the door after my stirring Remembrance Day peroration, perhaps hoping to stay away from the blast area should your columnist self-combust. A very real possibility given the provocation.
“If my Twitter post was a year ago, why has it taken 12 months for you to come here and accuse me? What have the police been doing all that time?”
Awkward silence. They were only doing their job, I knew that, and I almost felt sorry for them, but how sinister and odious that job has become. 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.
Look, I was lucky. I am reasonably well-informed, I have a wonderful platform here at The Telegraph and as a member of the Free Speech Union (FSU) I can get crucial advice about how to fight back against vexatious NCHIs solicited by grievancemongers who despise those of us who hold centre-Right views and who don’t agree that uncontrolled mass immigration has been an altogether unmitigated blessing. But a person who was more vulnerable and unsupported than I am would have been very scared by what I had just experienced. A visit from the police has a chilling effect on free speech, and that’s exactly what NCHIs are designed to do, I think. Not just to shut down “hate”, whatever that is, but to make thinking outside the new approved public morality a dangerous activity.
On Tuesday evening, Essex Police issued a statement to The Telegraph saying that they were investigating me under Section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986, relating to material allegedly “likely or intended to cause racial hatred”. In other words, my tweet was being treated as a criminal matter, rather than a non-crime hate incident, but that is not what I was told on Sunday.
Purely by chance, I was scheduled to interview Bernie Spofforth on Monday for this week’s Planet Normal podcast. After the Southport massacre, in which three little girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, Bernie, a successful Cheshire businesswoman, retweeted a post that misidentified the alleged attacker as an asylum seeker. (The police told her that using the phrase “asylum seeker” was “racist”. Bernie had added the caveat, “If this is true”.) Normally the most conscientious researcher, Bernie realised her mistake and deleted the retweet within an hour, but not fast enough to avoid being partly blamed for inciting the Southport riots. It was a preposterous insinuation, and cynics might suggest the authorities were grateful for a white, middle-class scapegoat (look how keen they are to throw up a smokescreen around a crime if there is any hint of Islamist involvement). Six police officers came to Bernie’s farmhouse in three vehicles, including a van for prisoners. Treated like a terrorist in front of her ashen husband and daughter, she was taken to the police station and held in a cell for 36 hours. Just for a social media post, please note; not for being in possession of a bioweapon.
Bernie’s harrowing ordeal was followed by an NFA (No Further Action) ruling, because police evidence came nowhere near reaching the necessary threshold. Nonetheless, an emotional Bernie told me that, formerly a brave campaigner for truth in public life, she had been “destroyed” by what the police had done to her and the resulting damage to her reputation and career. Although my own brush with the law on Remembrance Sunday was a mere midge bite compared with what Spofforth endured I found myself getting tearful as I talked to her. For crying out loud, what has our country become? Big Brother really is watching us.
I asked Toby Young, the founder and general secretary of the FSU, to explain NCHIs to me. The idea, Toby says, is if you nip hateful behaviour in the bud while it is still non-crime, the person won’t go on to commit an actual crime. The trouble is, there is not a shred of evidence that it does anything of the sort.
In January 2020, an ex-police officer called Harry Miller was shocked to be interviewed by a Humberside police constable after the force had received a complaint over tweets he had made in which he questioned whether transgender women were real women. It was recorded on a national database as a non-crime hate incident. “Even though I had committed no crime the constable said he needed to check my thinking,” recalled Miller, who said it made him frightened for his country’s future. Me too.
Harry Miller went on to win an important case in the Court of Appeal (Miller v The College of Policing) which concluded that the recording of an NCHI interferes with the right to freedom of expression. Additional safeguards were necessary. Such interference, the court said, is lawful only if it can be justified as seeking to achieve a legitimate aim – namely the prevention of crime or disorder or the protection of the rights of others – and if the recording is made in accordance with a common-sense approach.
I’m afraid that commodity has been in perilously short supply. The FSU found that a quarter of a million NCHIs have been recorded since 2014 in England and Wales alone – an average of more than 65 a day. So it seems I am in good – or bad – company as a non-criminal. Young points out that the FSU managed to get an NCHI removed from no less a person than a vice-chair of the Conservative Party last year. And even Amber Rudd, when she was home secretary, had an NCHI recorded against her after an Oxford professor complained about a speech she had made at – wait for it – the Tory party conference.
If a senior politician can get slapped with a non-crime hate notice for making the not entirely controversial or repugnant suggestion that British job applicants should be prioritised over foreign workers, you know we really are in bonkers Alice in Wonderland, sentence-before-the-verdict territory.
When Suella Braverman became the secretary of state, she saw, quite rightly, how NCHIs are in direct conflict with free speech, which she considers to be “a cornerstone of our democracy”. She wanted to get rid of them altogether but, not for the last time, Rishi Sunak was too timid to do the right and the Conservative thing. Instead, Braverman (assisted by the FSU lobbying in the Lords) introduced legislation that made the recording and retention of NCHIs subject to a statutory Code of Practice. That forced the College of Policing to issue new guidance telling officers to record an event as a non-crime hate incident only when the subject was motivated by “intentional hostility towards a person based on a particular characteristic (disability, race, transgender etc)”. In theory, the evidence bar was now set very high and would prevent police hanging on to personal data like mine, which might come up on a search and cause problems in the future. Forces were on notice to take decisions that were sensible and in the public interest. In practice, police continued to do what most people regard as a complete waste of time and the number of NCHIs actually increased.
I am told by a senior Home Office source that chief constables like NCHIs because they win them Brownie points from various pressure groups. “Good news, we recorded 15 NCHIs for Islamophobia this month!”
I’m afraid I don’t share their enthusiasm for those blunt instruments of censorship and social control. Was it really in the public interest to send two police officers to my house on Sunday morning? What proof did Essex Police have that I was “motivated by intentional hostility” in a tweet 12 months ago whose contents they refuse to disclose? What threat of actual crime or disorder do I pose to anyone with a protected characteristic – if any? How much common sense informed the police’s approach?
Most people would think this was stark staring mad, I reckon, yet it seems that Yvette Cooper, the new Home Secretary, may want to repeal Suella Braverman’s statutory instrument and unleash ever more spurious NCHIs, presumably to encourage the British people to keep their traps shut. That does not suggest a happy, confident country or a political class that believes it governs with popular support. As the writer Charles Bukowski observed, “Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.”
Let’s hope Yvette Cooper changes her mind and police stop bothering people who have done nothing wrong and stick to the bad guys. “There is zero evidence that recording non-hate crimes reduces hate crimes,” insists Young, “It’s just a smokescreen. The real reason is to punish people who don’t comply with the gospel as promulgated by the church of woke.”
I didn’t go to the Remembrance service after all that, the vintage poppy brooch went back in its box. I felt this terrible sadness. (What about my civil liberties – do I have any?) I want to be proud of our country on that most solemn day, not ashamed and fearful of what we have become. Surely, if we know anything it’s that those who laid down their lives died for us to be free. Their astonishing sacrifice should be honoured, not traduced by stupid authoritarian measures like NCHIs. That really would be a crime.
You can listen to Allison’s Planet Normal interview with Bernie Spofforth from Thursday Nov 14 at telegraph.co.uk/planet-normal or wherever you get your podcasts