When hyper-liberal identity politics went into overdrive in that year of madness, 2020, one of the greatest casualties in this country was to be our police forces. This wasn’t obvious at the time, although officers ‘taking the knee’ at the foot of Black Lives Matters protestors hinted at things to come, as did their growing inclination to attend Pride events and adorn their vehicles in LGBT+ colours. Only in recent months, however, has there emerged the extent to which our police have become contaminated and compromised by this ideology.
As today’s Sunday Telegraph reveals, in November 2023 officers from Kent Police arrested and detained an old man for a social media post he made warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain. Julian Foulkes, 71, a retired special constable from Gillingham, had challenged a pro-Palestinian supporter on X. The consequent exchange ultimately resulted in the police arriving at Foulkes’s house, seizing his electronic devices and locking him in a police cell for eight hours. Following interrogation on suspicion of malicious communication, he accepted a caution, despite having committed no offence.
In a rational country, a pensioner and a former policeman should rank low among those likely to pose a threat. But we don’t live in a country governed by reason, or, it would seem, have policemen who take seriously the principle of impartiality. Police body-worn camera footage of the event showed officers rifling through Foulkes’s books and magazines, including works by Douglas Murray and copies of the Spectator, pointing to what they described as ‘very Brexity things’.
This is but the most egregious example in what is turning into a long and alarming rollcall of police overreach, one that betrays a deep and wide capture by woke ideology, a mindset that is unduly preoccupied with matters of gender and race and a related desire to reprimand and censor those who might cause offence or hurt the feelings of others.
This capture was on show in March, when it emerged that Hertfordshire Police sent six uniformed officers to arrest a couple after their child’s school objected to their emails and ‘disparaging’ comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group. In November last year, Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was visited by Essex Police for alleged incitement to racial hatred.
We used to talk of ‘bad apples’ in the police, in reference to racism or financial corruption within its ranks. These days the term might better apply to chief constables who are infatuated by woke ‘anti-racism’ and who have been morally corrupted by it. Yet even the term ‘bad apples’ no longer seems sufficient when beholding this nationwide contagion. It’s a whole rotten, festering orchard.
While the Macpherson Inquiry of 1999 had an ultimately baleful effect, in which by overstating the prevalence of ‘institutional racism’ in the police, they reacted in turn with overcompensation, the influence of the ‘Great Awokening‘ of 2015-16 cannot be underestimated.
We are witnessing the perversion of the judiciary and the creeping ideological capture of the police
Suspicions were first aroused to its knock-on effect in matters related to law in January 2019 when Harry Miller, also a former police officer, was investigated by Humberside Police for poems he had posted on Twitter mocking the trans movement. A ‘cohesion officer’ from the force telephoned Miller telling him that while his tweets had not broken any laws, he should not engage in public political debate ‘because some people don’t like it’. The feminist writer Julie Bindel was also visited by police in 2019 after a ‘transgender man’ in the Netherlands reported one of her tweets to the police.
In concluding the Miller affair in December, the judge at the court of appeal ruled that Humberside’s actions were ‘disproportionate interference’ with the man’s right to freedom of expression. But that was not the end of matters. It merely marked the beginning of a new era, one in which many police forces had started to become enforcement officers of an emergent and unforgiving ideology, officers whose presumed remit was now to ask people if they’d had too much to think.
This activism in the police is disturbing in itself, but that it should be taking place now in tandem with the endless reports regarding the lenient verdicts of activist judges, particularly on asylum-seekers of dubious merit, makes this development doubly-concerning. We are witnessing the simultaneous perversion of the judiciary and the creeping ideological capture of the police, both arms of the state which now seem intent in enforcing a worldview sanctioned by the last Conservative government and endorsed by our Labour politicians today.
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