A much-discussed front-page splash from the Mail on Sunday:
In a chilling clampdown on free speech, two police officers pay a visit to a grandmother – simply for criticising Labour politicians on Facebook.
Detectives were last night accused of acting like East Germany’s feared Stasi secret police for quizzing Helen Jones over her calls for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday.
Police conceded that the 54-year-old had committed no crime – yet Mrs Jones says she has effectively been silenced by the officers, as she was intimidated by them calling at her door and is too terrified to post on social media again.
But not too terrified to give her account to a newspaper and make subsequent media appearances (inevitably, on GB News). The MoS framing in the above invites readers to draw broad inferences, and there has been much discussion online about how the incident is symptomatic of how “Starmer’s Britain” is comparable to East Germany. The article references “a string of incidents in which police have investigated people for social media posts, including newspaper columnist Allison Pearson, feminist writer Julie Bindel, and former policeman Harry Miller, whose name was added to a database for his ‘non-crime hate incident'”; I discussed the Pearson case here.
The police force’s own explanation doesn’t appear until late in the article, following condemnatory comments from the likes of Tony Young and Iain Duncan Smith:
Greater Manchester Police said last night: ‘We spoke to the woman for six minutes to advise she was the subject of a complaint of harassment and to answer any questions she may have.
‘No further action is necessary as no crime has been committed.
‘We are under a duty to inform her that she is the subject of a complaint. The genuine threats that have been made to local councillors recently have meant it has been more necessary to ensure all reports are looked at…’
According to Jones’s account, the officers said they were not allowed to tell her who had made the complaint, but then confirmed that her “thought process is correct” when she “asked if Cllr Sedgwick or his partner had made the complaint”. Jones had used social media to call on Councillor David Sedgwick to resign after it came out that he had shared a letter from a pensioner about bin collectons to a WhatsApp group where the local Labour MP, Andrew Gwynne, had responded with malicious and mocking comments about the sender. That story had been broken by the same newspaper earlier this month – Sedgwick was quoted as repudiating Gwynne’s comments, but there is no evidence that he had done so before being asked about the matter by the paper.
The Mail on Sunday‘s initial framing of the police visit to Jones was clearly overwrought and misleading, and one suspects the editors were hoping to catch the eye of Elon Musk or JD Vance as grist for their polemics about free speech in Europe. There was no “investigation”; the police action was not a “clampdown” on people criticising “Labour politicians”; and disparate police decision-making is not made meaningfully comparable just because “social media posts” are a common feature.
However, that does not mean that there is “nothing to see here”, despite a tendency by some to disregard a story just because it has come via a Mail title. It is not clear why police “duty” cannot be tempered by discretion and common sense in cases where a complaint has no merit, or why such a “duty” must override other things they could be getting on with. It is also nonsensical that the “duty to inform” doesn’t extend to naming the complainant – how can someone be on their guard about how their actions or public statements might be weaponised against them if they don’t know who exactly is saying that they feel harassed?
What the incident actually shows is how easy it is for the police to be gamed by harassment complaints – but that has been the case for years. There are several reasons why police overzealousness when it comes to such complaints is undesirable: it’s a waste of time for all concerned; it may be intimidatory, especially when someone doesn’t know their rights, or senses that the police have invested in a false narrative; and malicious complainants will crow that there is no smoke without fire, and that someone being spoken to by the police about harassment is evidence of criminality rather than of mindless police box-ticking. The police may for the most part have given up their perniciously pseudo-legal “Police Information Notices”, but the underlying problem remains.
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