The cops took his phone, his freedom, and nearly his right to be annoying on Facebook.
CAM WAKEFIELD
There are worse ways to wake up than with the police on your doorstep. But not many.
For Robert Moss, it wasn’t just the shock of a dawn raid that unsettled him. It was the absurdity of what followed. At 7 a.m. one morning in July, Staffordshire Police entered his home, seized his electronic devices, and arrested him. Not for theft or violence. But for saying something critical online about his former employer.
Moss, 56, spent nearly three decades in the fire service. His career ended in 2021 with a dismissal that was later ruled unfair by a tribunal.
Since then, he has continued to speak his mind, particularly in a closed Facebook group where he has voiced concerns about how the service is run.
These posts, according to police, were serious enough to justify arrest and a set of bail conditions that barred him from discussing the fire service, its leadership, or even the fact that he had been arrested at all.
There were no charges.
“I was a critic of Staffordshire fire service, and I had been gagged from saying anything about individuals there, the service itself, and my arrest. That is a breach of my human rights,” Moss said to the Telegraph after finally winning the right to speak freely again.
Until last week, those bail conditions stayed in place under threat of further arrest. It was only when magistrates in Newcastle-Under-Lyme reviewed the case that they concluded what should have been obvious from the start: the restrictions were excessive.
The court sided with Moss and the Free Speech Union, which supported his challenge. Its barrister, Tom Beardsworth, told the court, “These allow the police to arrest and detain someone and then, when they are released, prevent them from telling others what had happened with the threat of further arrest if they do not comply. We do not live in a police state, and Mr Moss should have every right to speak about his arrest.”
That ought to be self-evident.
Staffordshire Police argued that the restrictions were necessary to maintain public safety and order. But what kind of disorder, exactly, is caused by a man posting critical remarks in a private online group?
The arresting officer, DC Isobel Holliday, described the posts as malicious and reckless. In court, however, no one could convincingly explain what real-world harm had been done. The magistrates seemed to agree that there was none.
What remains is a narrower set of restrictions that prevents Moss from contacting certain officials directly. That is one thing. But preventing a man from speaking about his own arrest in the name of order? That is something else entirely.
Sam Armstrong of the Free Speech Union called the case one of the worst examples of state overreach they have seen. “In the more than 4,000 cases the Free Speech Union has handled, this is amongst the most egregious abuses of state power we have encountered,” he said. “Robert’s comments were not crimes, his arrest was not lawful, and the police have been acting like the Stasi, not a constabulary.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time British police have treated criticism as a public safety risk, and the way things are going, it won’t be the last.
Increasingly, the concept of “order” is being used not to protect citizens but to protect institutions from public scrutiny. That is a dangerous shift.
Moss’s posts were blunt. They may have been irritating to those in charge. But they were not criminal.
In a democracy, people are allowed to criticize their leaders. They are allowed to be wrong, rude, and persistent. They are allowed to be a nuisance. What they should not be is arrested and silenced for it.
This time, the courts got it right. But the fact that it needed to go this far is troubling.
Former Staffordshire firefighter Robert Moss was slapped with an “Orwellian” gag order by police after criticising his bosses online, but, with help from the Free Speech Union, a court has struck it down. In the Telegraph, Toby, our Editor-in-Chief and the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, warns of a growing trend of police overreacting online:
On the face of it, Staffordshire Police’s efforts to gag a critic of the Staffordshire fire and rescue service are quite shocking. Robert Moss, a former firefighter and Labour councillor, was arrested last month under suspicion of having committed an offence under the Malicious Communications Act. That in itself was quite heavy-handed, given that his alleged “crime” was to have criticised the fire service’s management in a private Facebook chat.
But the really sinister thing – which Mr Moss’s barrister describes as “Orwellian” – was that his bail conditions included a gagging order, stopping him from saying anything more about his former employer, either online or offline.
Thankfully, with the help of the Free Speech Union (FSU), the organisation I run, he managed to get this order removed and he’s now free to say what he thinks about his former employer. He is still under investigation, but I’d be amazed if he’s charged with a criminal offence, given that it’s not against the law in this country to criticise someone in authority. Not yet, anyway.
The reason I’m not shocked by this case is because it fits a pattern of the police over-reacting to social media posts, often at the behest of people who feel they’ve been unfairly criticised.
Earlier this year, the FSU helped Julian Foulkes, a retired special constable who had his home in Kent raided by six police officers after he got into a spat with a pro-Palestinian activist on X. After commenting on the 71 year-old’s ‘Brexity’ books, the officers arrested him, confiscated his electronic devices, took him to the station in handcuffs, locked him in a cell for eight hours, then interviewed him under suspicion of having committed a Malicious Communications Act offence, only releasing him after he agreed to accept a caution.
With the FSU’s help, Mr Foulkes managed to secure a pay-out of £20,000 from Kent Police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment, as well as an apology from the Chief Constable.
Julian Foulkes got a pay-out of £20,000 from Kent Police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment
We are trying to get comparable compensation from Hertfordshire Police for the arrest of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, two parents whose home was raided by six officers from Hertfordshire Police following ‘disparaging’ comments in a WhatsApp group about the management of their child’s school, as well as critical emails they’d sent to the headteacher. They were detained in front of their young daughter before being fingerprinted, searched and left in a police cell for eight hours. Like Robert Moss, they were interviewed under suspicion of having committed a Malicious Communications Act offence.
According to custody data obtained by the Times, the police are currently arresting more than 30 people a day over ‘offensive’ posts on social media and other platforms. In total, police are detaining around 12,000 people a year under suspicion of committing just two speech offences, up from about 5,500 in 2017.
At the FSU, we received a surge in requests for help following the investigation into Allison Pearson for a year-old tweet and the imprisonment of Lucy Connolly, who wrongly blamed the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport on an illegal immigrant in an intemperate social media post. Several dozen people have been prosecuted for various speech offences in connection with the Southport attacks, including one man who spent eight weeks in jail for sharing a meme suggesting a link between migrants and knife crime, a case that was singled out in the US State Department’s recent report on the erosion of free speech in Britain.
Of the people who are arrested for speech offences, only a fraction end up being convicted. For instance, in 2023 fewer people were convicted for breaching section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act and section 127 of the Communications Act than in 2017, when the number of arrests was much lower. This suggests the police are being over-zealous in their pursuit of thought criminals, with the data revealing that only about one in 20 of those arrested under suspicion of committing these two offences end up being sentenced.
But that‘s scant comfort to those who find themselves under police investigation, particularly when the bail conditions interfere with their right to freedom of expression. In many cases, when the police decide to take no further action the nightmare isn’t over since the episode is then logged as a “non-crime hate incident”, with the FSU estimating that more than a quarter of a million of these have been recorded since 2014. These can show up on enhanced criminal record checks, preventing people getting jobs as teachers or carers or securing a firearms licence.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the police need a “reset” when it comes to online speech offences. They should stop policing our tweets and focus on policing our streets.
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Starmer is a Fabian. So too his cabinet. Fabians and Stasi destroy things. It is not British.