Universal condemnation of the arrival on my doorstep of @EssexPoliceUK  over a year-old tweet. They wouldn’t tell me what the post said nor name the person who said I’d stirred up hatred.
  This should not happen in a Free Society.

https://x.com/AllisonPearson/status/1856946282637484491

The shocking treatment meted out to my colleague Allison Pearson, a brilliant columnist much beloved of Telegraph readers, must serve as the final wake-up call. She recounts how two police officers came knocking at her door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to inform her that she was being investigated over a post on X, formerly Twitter, published a year ago.

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Still in her dressing gown, she was stunned. The officers refused to tell Pearson which of her many posts their visit related to. They wouldn’t remind her what she had written. They weren’t allowed to tell her who complained; so much for open justice. The officers weren’t to blame: they were following Kafkaesque procedures dictated by an out-of-control technocratic machine.

Pearson notes that the period during which her supposedly offending post was published appears to coincide with the aftermath of the Hamas pogroms, a time during which she made a heroic stand against anti-Semitism.

Given the intensifying culture wars, and the collapsing trust in our institutions, the fact that one of Britain’s leading conservative commentators is being investigated in this way will unnerve many voters. Two-tier justice is real, in one fundamental way at least: Pearson is in trouble for an ancient tweet while the police rarely bother to track down stolen cars or mobile phones, even when presented with real-time geolocations or webcam evidence.

The BBC’s Huw Edwards walked free. Violence and disorder is rife and shoplifting has effectively been decriminalised, leading to the routine pillaging of supermarkets. Yet the state seems more interested in intimidating those accused of wrongthink. Even when real criminals are jailed, they are usually released early.

At best, it smacks of grossly misplaced priorities, of gigantic displacement activity, of laziness; at worst, it indicates a sinister power grab by an authoritarian elite that dismisses property theft as mere freelance redistribution and to whom free speech is synonymous with micro-aggression and oppression. What is certain is that this madness infuriates the right-thinking, silent majority like little else.

Pearson was corrected by the police when she asked who her accuser was – he or she is the “victim”, they said. Yet such terminology implicitly breaches the presumption of innocence
...
“Justice deferred is justice denied” is another fundamental principle – yet Pearson is being pursued for a year-old tweet under public order legislation relating to material allegedly “likely or intended to cause racial hatred”. We appear to be in the grip instead of a culture of anonymous denunciation of a variety once only found in tyrannies.

What has happened to our wonderful country? We used to be freedom-lovers, but we now apparently acquiesce meekly to the rise of authoritarianism and the normalisation of censorship. We need to speak out fearlessly, or else the Britain [ and Australia] we knew and loved will soon cease to exist.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/13/britain-risks-becoming-police-state-...

Hanson has a good heart for Australians, but politically, she is a twit.

Frank wrote on Nov 14^th, 2024 at 4:46pm:

Normally, the police at your front door aren't the judge sentencing you to 7 years jail. Police aren't the prosecution lawyer. She's still free which strongly indicates they didn't jail her.

If there's a summons on the way, yes I'd appreciate a personal call. It's probably 'Police Community Relations'. Those cops probably knew nothing about it and were told to pass the message that a charge was made.
(I get lots of phone calls about Tax and police and pay at the Post office now to a Nigerian elephant hunter but that's different)

Hanson on Rogan