News of the handcuffing and cautioning of the retired police officer Julian Foulkes over a sarcastic tweet has rightly inspired alarm and outrage towards the dramatic, if by no means unprecedented, state censoriousness that it illustrates.
Fewer people have commented on what it also illustrates: rank stupidity and humourlessness.
In 2023, amid an argument about whether pro-Palestine demonstrations were “hate marches”, Mr Foulkes tweeted, “One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals…” This was in reference to a mob in Dagestan raiding an airport looking for Jews.
Next, the Free Speech Union report:
Someone complained about Julian’s tweet to the Met and Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command – a specialist unit set up to deal with terrorism and extremism – referred it to Kent Police, citing “concerns around online content”. The following day, six police officers turned up at his home, ransacked the premises, arrested him, detained him for eight hours and gave him a caution.
Nowhere, it seems, either in the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command — some intelligence command, by the way — or Kent Police did someone ask, “Was he really being serious?” Was this ageing ex-copper really saying that he wanted to launch an anti-Semitic hunt through Heathrow? Or was he being sarcastic?
Rifling through Mr Foulkes’ home, the police uncovered David G. Green’s The Demise of the Free State, a book about the European Union. “That’s a bit odd,” a police officer said. What was “odd” about owning a book on the world’s largest supranational body, which a majority of British voters chose to leave, somehow went unsaid. The police also commented on Mr Foulkes owning “very Brexity things”. Again, 52 per cent of British voters chose to leave the European Union. What was meant to be suspicious and noteworthy about this?
As Chris Bayliss wrote yesterday for The Critic, in multicultural Britain the police are being taught that “social harmony and cohesion are the priorities”. At Pimlico Journal, a former cop observes that the police are being hamstrung when it comes to dealing with serious crimes (“basic police functions, such as staking out a house, [have become] like swimming through treacle”). As we at The Critic have observed time and again, though, “speech crimes” are being treated harshly and humourlessly, with the police perhaps benefiting from the fact that gender-critical commentators and pro-life activists are easier to deal with than hardened thugs.
Policing speech is a minefield however it is done — because policing, say, incitement to commit a crime is so liable to spill over into prosecuting people based on personal opinions. It is worth adding, though, that it is even more of a minefield when a lot of men and women in the police forces are humourless, otherwise literal-minded, self-important, and hypersensitive.
Don’t get me wrong: a lot of people in the police forces are smart, brave and principled. They keep a lot of dangerous men and women off the streets (at least for as long as the courts will actually keep them there). But we also have police officers who grovel before self-appointed Muslim representatives over the scuffing of a Quran and arrest an autistic teenager for saying that an officer looked like a lesbian.
When the police are told to act over things like “non-crime hate incidents”, it demands, even in the best possible world, that they have an understanding of context, irony and various subtle factors related to race, religion and sexual orientation. Even if police officers met these standards, “non-crime hate incidents” would be a bad thing. But when a lot of them — granted, like a lot of people in all professions, including opinion commentary — are unimaginative, mirthless and culturally barren, they become even more problematic.
Again, this does not describe a lot of coppers — many of whom, I’m sure, have absolutely no desire to investigate random tweets. But the dim-witted officers end up doing the damage, and should absolutely not be tasked with implementing expansive censoriousness along fairly arbitrary lines. It’s the authorities that are to blame. As the ex-detective writing for Pimlico Journal observes, the police have been “left deeply unsuited to the challenges of an increasingly balkanised society”. But we can’t appreciate the scale of the dangers of making the police the guardians of “social cohesion” in British discourse without appreciating their limits.
As Mr Foulkes — who is understandably suing the police — commented, seeing officers “investigate” his wife’s underwear drawer was invasive in a manner that has left scars. The police even rummaged through his collection of newspaper cuttings about the premature death of his daughter.
Someone with the vaguest fluency in sarcasm should have made sure that these traumatic events did not occur. But our politicians should make law on the assumption that such an officer might not be there to have a word.
