As the Metropolitan Police announce the demise of non-crime hate incidents, the Telegraph has run a feature on the Free Speech Union, crediting its years of campaigning against NCHIs and support for cancel culture victims. Here’s an excerpt.
Sir Mark’s decision may well signal a wider turning of the tide on police investigations into “hate crime”. But the force’s decision to backtrack on Linehan’s case, and others like it, got only a lukewarm welcome from Linehan himself, who said he planned to continue his legal action against the Met.
That, however, is not because he has limitless pockets – cancel culture, he says, has cost him much of his lucrative writing gigs. Instead, his lawyers come courtesy of the Free Speech Union (FSU), the British campaign group set up to defend freedom of expression – be it from armed police, an overzealous student campus or HR managers intent on enforcing diversity policies.
Set up five years ago by the former journalist, Toby Young – now Lord Young, having been nominated for a life peerage by Kemi Badenoch last December – the organisation has handled more than 4,500 cases, from members of the public arrested over tweets deemed to be politically incorrect, to office workers disciplined for querying seminars on critical race theory.
For some clients, the FSU has simply won a written apology. But for others, it has secured a £500,000 payout at industrial tribunal.
If there’s one thing most cases have in common, according to Young, it is that they shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Linehan’s arrest, in which the Met acted “like the Stasi”, being a case in point.
“I think this statement from the Met shows that they have got fed up with this stuff – they recognise that the public want them to prioritise serious crimes like burglary, car theft and mugging,” says Young, who has called for all police forces in the country to follow Scotland Yard’s lead.
“I also think that in Linehan’s case, the police realised they’d been manipulated by a trans-rights activist who understood exactly how to weaponise the police guidance on investigating hate crime incidents, and to turn the police into an enforcement wing for their own agendas.”
Young is referring to Lynsey Watson, a transgender ex-police officer who is understood to have reported Linehan to the police over his social media posts, one of which read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Linehan has always maintained that specific post was a play on the height difference between men and women. Watson, meanwhile, has a history of urging police forces to investigate complaints about gender-critical online postings.
Such cases are far from isolated, according to the FSU. In April, Ministry of Justice figures disclosed that police were making around 12,000 arrests a year nationwide for allegedly offensive posts on the internet. While most would result in a caution or no further action, that is still almost twice the 6,923 arrested per year for county-lines drug dealing – a much higher priority for the average citizen.
True, many of the arrests involve posts made while drunk, or in anger – as per that of Lucy Connolly, jailed for 31 months for urging people to “set fire” to asylum seekers’ hotels. But Young says the majority of the FSU’s 4,500 cases are brought on behalf of people whose only ‘crime’ has been to stand up for what they believe in.
“About 40% of them are women who’ve been reported to the police, or reported to their employers or their university, for saying they don’t want to share toilets with non-biological women,” he says. “That, right now, is the frontline of the free speech crisis.”
Nonetheless, he speaks from bitter personal experience. The son of Labour activist, Michael Young, who helped found the Open University, Oxford-educated Young is best known for his 2001 memoir, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a wry account of his time in New York high society while working at the magazine Vanity Fair. While highlighting the absurdities of the US celebrity circuit, the book also documented the rather more earnest world of America’s elite Ivy League universities, where ‘political correctness’ already had a grip.
At the time, Young thought it was little more than a passing trend. But with the advent of social media, it returned in the form of ‘cancel culture’. Young himself fell victim in 2018, when the former Tory government announced him as a non-executive board member of the Office for Students. The appointment was in recognition of his work in setting up a Free School in west London, but when critics of his appointment dug for dirt in his social media history, they found a rich seam, with breezy references to “hardcore dykes”, “queer as a coot” celebrities and female MPs’ cleavages.
What might have passed for laddish, 90s male banter was a treasure trove to the “offence archaeologists”, as Young describes them. After a chorus of “performative outrage” about his [supposed] homophobia and misogyny, he was forced to step down.
“Because I’d been a fairly provocative journalist most of my career, they found a Tutankhamun’s tomb of offensive material, and I ended up having to step down from several other positions too,” he says. “I remember I desperately wanted to reach out to an organisation that could give proper professional advice about how to cope with these cancellation storms.”
Hence the creation of the FSU, which mainly relies on supporter donations, and which now employs 28 staff, operating under the motto “Audi alteram artem” (“Dare to listen to the other side”), from its Great Portland Street office. Today, its advisory council includes the novelist Lionel Shriver, political commentator Remi Adekoya, historian Nigel Biggar, and the feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A review of the police’s recording of NCHIs by the College of Policing will recommend to the Government that all forces should scrap the practice, the Times reports.
See Related Article Below
The Met’s U-turn on ‘hate crimes’ is welcome, but our police are still in thrall to Leftist forces
Despite this week’s victory too many officers continue to behave like East Germany’s Stasi
An announcement by the Metropolitan Police that it will no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents (while continuing to record them) is a welcome step towards restoring common sense. While I have campaigned for exactly this for almost 12 months, I won’t be cracking open the champagne just yet. The Leftist, progressive forces – which use Orwellian hate laws to try and control what we can and cannot say – will not lay down their Pride and pro-Pal flags without a fight.
And I should know. It is very nearly a year since two police officers turned up at my door on Remembrance Sunday to tell me I’d offended someone on social media. What I’d said to cause offence, let alone stir up racial hatred, they couldn’t possibly say. Nor were they able to give me the name of my accuser, although, as one officer quickly pointed out, “It’s not the accuser, it’s called the victim.” Er, excuse me, victim of what?
Now, now, Madam, no point asking sensible questions – that’ll get you nowhere. I had fallen down a rabbit hole – Allison in Blunderland – and entered the Mad-Hattered, nonsensical world of “hate crimes”.
Anyone (literally a complete stranger) could report you, or me, or a cheeky child in a playground, or even an actual home secretary at an actual Conservative Party conference (Amber Rudd in 2016) for causing them alarm or distress.
If the offence was “perceived to be motivated by hate” towards people with certain characteristics, such as race or transgender identity, the police would take it seriously, although officers would not be required to question the motives of the accuser. Sorry, victim. I still find this unbelievable.
That visit by Essex Police left me shaken and in tears – the reaction, I imagine, of most of the 30 generally law-abiding people who are arrested every single day in the UK for “offensive” online communications.
Because it was a sacred day in the national calendar, a day when we pin on our poppies and fall silent to remember the millions who gave their lives so we could take freedom for granted, I was also angry. What had our country become, that police officers could betray the wartime generation with behaviour that mimicked the tyranny they had sacrificed so much to defeat?
Looking back, and despite everything, I am glad that it happened to me. Yes, it was scary – and the reputational harm was immense – but at least I had the platform and the support to fight back, and could help others who had neither. The Telegraph’s superb News team swung into action and we were soon publishing jaw-dropping statistics that revealed how very bad Essex Police were at solving crime crimes.
Disgusted members of the public came forward with stories of multiple burglaries and car and bike thefts captured on CCTV; the police weren’t interested. They’d text you a crime number for the insurance if you were lucky. “Why not post a few hurty words on Twitter and the police will soon be round?”, people quipped bitterly.
Despairing Essex police officers got in touch with me to complain about the “woke” priorities of their Chief Constable who had hosted an event, “Pride In Our (trans) Kids”, at Police HQ in Chelmsford, which featured a drag queen and an organisation promoting gender-neutral toilets in the county’s schools. Such are the priorities of the contemporary police service; pride in our country has been eclipsed by pride in our Pride.
The story of a British journalist accosted by police for a tweet posted 12 months earlier made headlines around the world. It lent weight to the deeply damaging view that Britain, home of Magna Carta, had become a free-speech pariah. Elon Musk’s excoriating comment about my case was shared several million times. Even our gutless Prime Minister, that prissy authoritarian Stasi Starmer, was forced through gritted teeth to utter the mantra, “Police our streets not tweets”.
Thank God for the Free Speech Union. Founded with remarkable foresight by Toby Young (now Lord Young of Acton) in 2020, the FSU was able to assist me and thousands of other victims of grotesque police over-reach.
Many of the non-crime hate incidents the FSU came across sounded like a bad joke. Dirty pants on a washing line were solemnly recorded as offensive by one constabulary. Parents were arrested for bitching about their child’s school in a private WhatsApp group. A nine-year-old boy got an NCHI for saying another child in the playground smelt of fish. (By that weedy-wet standard, my entire class at Welland Park School in 1972 would have been banged up.) In Bedfordshire, a man was landed with a police record for racial hatred for whistling the Bob the Builder theme tune at his neighbour.
It does feel like poetic justice that, in the end, it was a bad joke that finished off NCHIs. The well-loved Irish comic writer Graham Linehan was arrested in September by five armed officers at Heathrow over a few tweets about trans issues, including one where he advised women faced with a bloke in the Ladies to “punch them in the balls”. (It was meant as a quip about male-female height discrepancy, although Graham admits it wasn’t his best.)
The Telegraph: continue reading
Leave a Reply