The journalist investigated for a tweet

The police investigation of Allison Pearson should be a watershed moment.

Franz Kafka’s The Trial opens with the novel’s protagonist, Josef K., being arrested early in the morning by two officers of the law. When he asks them to explain their reasons, one of the men tells him: “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.” He never finds out, of course. Even after the story’s abrupt and chilling end, the reader is none the wiser as to why any of this has occurred.

And so it is hardly surprising that Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson described it as “Kafkaesque” that she was visited by two police officers on the morning of Remembrance Sunday. She was informed that she had been accused of “stirring up racial hatred” by means of an unspecified social media post from a year ago. Anyone who is familiar with Allison’s writing will understand just how improbable this is. Her account of the discussion that followed could have been lifted directly from The Trial itself:

“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 term “Kafkaesque”, like “Orwellian”, has become something of a cliché, precisely the kind of writing that Orwell continually urged us to avoid. But what else are we to call it? I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’s account of his visit to Prague in 1988 to report on the Communist regime. He had decided in advance that he would be “the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka”. As it transpired, this resolution was impossible to fulfil. During one of Václav Havel’s “Charter 77” committee meetings, police burst into the building, threw Hitchens against a wall, and arrested him. When he asked for the details of the charge, he was told that he “had no need to know the reason”. How else could he describe this other than “Kafkaesque”? As he was later to say at a lecture at the University of Western Ontario: “They make you do it”.

This is all very well for the Státní bezpečnost, but I’m not sure even Hitchens could have imagined that such behaviour would become routine in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century. I have written previously on my Substack about the phenomenon of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), but it’s worth repeating here the key points. Estimates suggest that the police in England and Wales have recorded over a quarter of a million NCHIs since the practice began in 2014. Those who are so branded are often not informed, and these can show up on DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks, thereby impeding their employment prospects. According to the Times, three thousand people are arrested each year in the UK for offensive comments posted online, even in cases where a joke had clearly been intended. This is because Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 criminalises online speech that can be deemed “grossly offensive”. Whatever that means.

Although Allison Pearson was initially informed that she had been accused of a “non-crime hate incident”, she was later told that she was being investigated for criminal activity under Section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986. This surely makes it even more sinister that she has not been given any details of the alleged crime. Note also the menacing correction of the officer who insisted that the “accuser” should be referred to as the “victim”. This is a legacy of Keir Starmer’s time as Director of Public Prosecutions and his determination that all accusers ought to be automatically believed. Perhaps he hasn’t heard of Salem.

I have written and spoken endlessly about the problem of police overreach and the need for greater vigilance when it comes to state authoritarianism. My book Free Speech and Why It Matters opens with an account of a man being investigated for retweeting a poem (the infamous Harry Miller case). I even spoke about this very topic to Allison Pearson herself on her podcast a few weeks ago. You can listen to that here:

And so it seems as though there is little I can add here other than to renew my plea for politicians to actually step up and do something about this dire situation. It is utterly exasperating that no politician, either from the Conservative or the Labour Party, will have the courage to make the case in parliament that hate speech laws ought to be entirely abolished. They have bought in to a long-discredited myth that online posts cause real-world harm. Why is all the research into this area being flagrantly ignored in favour of a faith-based insistence that the state has a duty to control the speech of its citizens? Why will no senior politician make a serious effort to defend liberty?

I suppose we should put this down to cowardice. No one in power wishes to alienate potential voters by supporting the right of people to say unpleasant things, mostly out of fear that such a gesture will be interpreted as supporting the content of the speech itself. Yet the case of Allison Pearson shows that the current system can be weaponised even when someone hasn’t said anything objectionable at all.

When accusers are called victims, and police are trained to think it is their duty to monitor the thoughts of citizens, this kind of authoritarian outcome is inevitable. It’s about time our elected representatives stood up for free speech rather than worrying about how this might be misinterpreted. Those in public service have a duty to uphold our most fundamental values. With no champions for liberty in parliament, matters will only get worse.

---