Allison through the looking glass

Media Notebook #2: Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson gets a knock at the door — and silence from her fellow journalists.

When I read that police had turned up on Allison Pearson’s doorstep to discuss a ‘non-crime hate incident’, my first thought was: Well, it’s about time they arrested Anthony Lane for his review of In Bruges.

But Essex Police were in fact there to interrogate his wife, a prominent columnist for the Daily Telegraph who is regarded as a voice of grassroots conservatism in Britain and is credited with shaping the outcome of the recent Conservative Party leadership election. The officers told Pearson she had been accused of a non-crime hate incident (NCHI), a term introduced by the UK’s College of Policing and used to investigate people who have said or written things which are not unlawful but which someone — anyone — considers hateful and reports to the police.

Per Pearson’s account, the officers explained that a complaint had been received about a tweet she posted a year ago. She asked which tweet. They said they weren’t allowed to tell her. Well, she persevered, who had filed the complaint? They weren’t allowed to tell her that, either. What’s more, one of the officers corrected the columnist when she referred to this mystery individual as her ‘accuser’. ‘It’s not the accuser,’ the constable told her. ‘They’re called the victim.’

Here was one of Britain’s most widely-read journalists, confronted on her doorstep by police officers and told she was under investigation not for committing any crime but for expressing unspecified views which an unspecified person considered hateful. The irony was not lost on Pearson that this happened on Remembrance Sunday, when the UK commemorates its veterans and those who fell in war and which Britons associate with the freedoms and democracy that past generations secured for them.

Worse, however, was to come. Essex Police told Pearson’s newspaper that, in fact, it would be investigating the tweet as a criminal matter, citing Section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986, which criminalises material ‘likely or intended to cause racial hatred’. While the police wouldn’t specify the offending tweet, Pearson’s accuser — sorry, the victim — allegedly told The Guardian that it related to a quote tweet the columnist had posted in the wake of October 7, amid a series of virulently anti-Israel marches through the streets of London. Reposting an image of police officers posing with flag-waving South Asian people she thought were anti-Israel marchers, Pearson stated: ‘Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.’ She deleted the post when informed that those depicted were not pro-Palestinian demonstrators and were actually flying a flag associated with Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, an Islamic party founded by Imran Khan. The image had nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was from a different timeframe, and the people featured were not expressing any views about Israel, Jews, or anything related. To label them ‘Jew haters’, and to do so without confirming the provenance of the image or the nature of the cause they were espousing, was a severe error of judgement on Pearson’s part.

But is it a matter for the police? People make mistakes on Twitter every day, including and perhaps especially those who are in the opinion journalism business, and we do not expect law enforcement to appear on their doorstep. The appropriate course of action would surely have been for Pearson to apologise to those depicted in the image and, if requested, make some form of restitution. (In fact, according to The Guardian, the complainer wasn’t any of the people in the image but a former public servant.)

Late on Thursday afternoon, it was reported that Essex Police had decided not to pursue its investigation. Pearson is a member of the Free Speech Union, a sort of NATO for writers, campaigners, and others who care about free expression, and the organisation retained a leading criminal barrister to represent her. Pearson’s ten-day ordeal is thankfully now over but that should not be the end of the matter. This episode should prompt not only a rethink of non-crime hate incidents but of the scope of stirring up offences in English criminal law, especially those related to online material and communications.

I take a very libertarian view: individuals should be free to express themselves, including in the most obnoxious and offensive manner, provided their words are not intended to incite violence or cause an immediate breach of the peace.¹ However, you needn’t take an expansive view to agree that the current law is too broad, easily weaponised by the aggrieved, prompts criminal investigations into trivial matters, involves the criminal justice system in core political and philosophical speech, imposes a chilling effect on expression, and undermines public confidence in the police and their neutrality. Policing by consent is a delicate endeavour and officers should not be at risk of losing that consent because parliamentarians are overly fond of passing Bills to send signals rather than legislating wisely, modestly and rarely.

Parliament should greatly narrow the scope of the criminal law’s involvement in speech affairs but there are villains in this story other than myopic MPs and overzealous chief constables. I speak of the many progressive and liberal journalists who have been noticeably quiet about Allison Pearson’s brush with the law. Were the boys in blue to show up at the home of one of their own, following up on a tweet about genocidal Zionists or the wickedness of white people, these fearless speakers of truth to power would thunder in a chorus of ‘police intimidation’ and ‘politicisation’. (Then again, as anyone familiar with Britain’s growing antisemitism problem will tell you, getting the police interested in Jew-hatred is no mean feat.)

Little has changed since Thomas Paine wrote: ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’ When you have no philosophy beyond the passing fashions and priorities of your tribe, it’s easy to convince yourself that hypocrisy is just a deeper understanding of dissimilar sets of facts. Fair enough. You can gloat or sneer or dismiss Pearson’s experience from your tweet or your column or your podcast, and long may you be free to do so, but all I ask is this: please don’t call yourself a liberal. You’re not a liberal. You do not believe in liberalism. You have a transactional relationship with some of its precepts but nothing more.

As it happens, I disagree with Allison Pearson on rather a lot. It is because of — not despite — these disagreements that I regard her treatment at the hands of the police as abhorrent. I don’t want anyone visited by the law for expressing their political or social views, least of all those with whom I am at odds in those regards. If we are to have a liberal society, it requires the free and open exchange of ideas and perspectives, and that means more speech and fewer restrictions. I appreciate that if you approach politics as a struggle between good and evil, rather than a disagreement over aims and approaches, you might deem debate a concession to the bogeymen that you’ve convinced yourself your opponents are. All I can tell you is that your mindset is inimical to liberalism and, no matter how many policy issues we might agree on, I’d rather a thousand Allison Pearsons than just one of you.

Journalists are not and should not be above the law. That isn’t why the treatment dealt out to Pearson is intolerable. It’s intolerable because sending officers of the Crown to the home of a journalist to level secret charges from unnamed figures is not how we do things in this country. It’s intolerable because no one, be they a Daily Telegraph columnist or the man in the street, should answer the doorbell to be interrogated by police for expressing their views. And if they’re willing to go after Allison Pearson, who has a public platform from which to fight back, they won’t hesitate to go after you.

If you were hitherto unaware of the rising threats to free expression, let this educate you. If you thought the problem was exaggerated or beginning to ebb, let this correct you. If you regarded it as someone else’s fight or a dispute you did not wish to involve yourself in, let this recruit you. If you believed that Parliament, the Home Office, and chief constables between them would reach a sensible position on speech and its policing, let this radicalise you. If your commitment to expressive freedom had grown conditional, guided by partisanship rather than principle, let this awaken you to just how fragile this freedom has become and to the virtues of a partisanship higher than party or ideology. Liberty is under assault from all sides but it is still the only tribe worth belonging to.

1. There are other reasonable exceptions, such as libel, defamation, perjury, threats, obscenity, or speech central to the commission of a crime, such as espionage, treason, or instructing a hitman or arsonist.