Bartholomew's Notes

From BBC News:

A comedian who joked about the Liverpool parade crash has had an upcoming show cancelled following a social media backlash.

Andrew Lawrence said he would “drive through crowds of people” to get out of the city, in a post that has prompted more than 7,000 responses on X.

At least 65 people were injured in Monday’s incident, and Caddies in Southend has cancelled Lawrence’s upcoming gig, saying it did not “condone or support” the comment.

The 37-year-old responded he was disappointed the venue had “lost their courage after being bombarded with abuse and threats of violence from online trolls”.

A comedian saying something socially transgressive for a laugh is hardly a new phenomenon, but as a form of clowning it can fall flat: back in 2004 Billy Connelly was heckled after reportedly saying at a gig that he wished that jihadists who were threatening to execute the British hostage Ken Bigley in Baghdad should “get on with it” – the incident was reported in the Sun under the headline “The Sick Yin”.

The difference, though, was that nobody seriously thought that Connelly actually meant it; and although his quip caused offence and perhaps also distress, he wasn’t commenting about Bigley personally. Lawrence, in contrast, took direct aim at the affected community with an expression of contempt; and given his association with the populist right  – in 2014 he was praised by Nigel Farage after denouncing what he called the “moronic, liberal back-slapping” of comedians who make it onto the BBC – it is reasonable to interpret his post not as transgressive clowning for its own sake but as an instance of ideologically driven performative callousness. It is worth noting that he did not post his joke until after it had been confirmed by the police that the suspect was a “white British man” (an annoucement to which Lawrence objected), meaning that the incident could not be weaponised by the movement.

Adding to the impression is his bullish follow-up statement, in which he referred to the incident as a “clown show of Scouse retards”. This ugly term “retard”, either as a noun or in its adjectival form, has recently become something of a populist-right shibboleth; last month, Joe Rogan declared in conversation with Douglas Murray that “the word retarded is back and it’s one of the great culture victories”.

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From the website of Merseyside Police, Monday night, after a car had ploughed into a crowd during Liverpool’s Premier League victory parade:

We would ask people not to speculate on the circumstances surrounding tonight’s incident on Water Street in Liverpool city centre.

We can confirm the man arrested is a 53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area.

Extensive enquiries are ongoing to establish the circumstances leading up to the collision.

“White British” here departs from the long-standing police practice of announcing only a suspect’s age and sex following an arrest: further details, including their name and perhaps also a photo, are ordinarily released only if and when a positive charging decision is made, and even then only if the suspect is an adult. (1)

This unusual decision to racialise an arrest announcement can be interpreted as a pragmatic concession to the reality that the British public can no longer be expected to wait for authoritative information to emerge following due process, or not to riot if the suspected perpetrator of a public outrage is thought to be from an ethnic minority. It can be seen as something of a slow-boiled victory for those who used disinformation to whip up public anger after after last year’s Southport killings: thus Nigel Farage  – who gave spurious validation to the false claim that the killer had been under monitoring by the security services – has declared that the police have “got it right this time”.

Other agitators, however, instead complain that the decision demonstrates the bias and bad faith of police forces, who will highlight the ethnicity of a white suspect but not otherwise. A useful round-up collected by The Bear comes with pertinent commentary:

They accused the police of “protecting the narrative” and essentially moved from demanding answers to demanding silence the moment those answers didn’t fit the script… The point of this all is that the far-right agitators don’t want transparency, they want control – control of the story, the outrage, the emotional temperature of the nation. And when reality refuses to cooperate, they rewrite the script.

Note

1. This does not mean that an adult suspect cannot be named by the media, based on their own sources or observations: in 2017, for instance, Darren Osborne was named by “family and neighbours” as the suspected Finsbury Park mosque attacker ahead of charging, and this was widely reported without controversy. However, accusatory headlines implying guilt based on an arrest have led to led to payouts, and civil privacy law now means that a media outlet may be sued if it reveals without a public interest defence that someone is the subject of a police investigation. Of course, police forces may also release extra identifying information about a suspect if it is someone whom they want to arrest but whose whereabouts are unknown.

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A new “free speech outrage” front-page splash from the Sunday Telegraph:

Retired police officer arrested over ‘thought crime’ tweet

Pensioner held after Palestinian march post on social media, with ‘Brexity’ books in his home scrutinised

A retired special constable was arrested and detained over a social media post warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain, The Telegraph can reveal.

Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from Kent Police – the force he had served for a decade – after challenging a supporter of pro-Palestinian marches on X.

As expected, the headline and lead-in have provoked much condemnatory comment on social media, although, also as usual, there has been little attention to detail.  What is not made clear until some way into the article is that the “social media post warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain” was misinterpreted by police as being itself an antisemitic threat.

Here’s what happened. At the end of October 2023, Home Secretary Suella Braverman expressed the view that marches in London against Israel’s actions in Gaza were “hate marches“. Nicholas Wilson – aka “Mr Ethical”, and known on Twitter/X for his campaigning against HSBC – fired a post in Braverman’s direction in response:

Dear @SuellaBraverman – as someone who was on one of the “hate marches”, if you call me an antisemite I will sue you. (1)

Foulkes replied with the following proposition (since deleted):

One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals…

This was an allusion to an incident on the same day in Dagestan, when a mob shouting antisemitic slogans rampaged through a local airport. However, it seems that Inspector Knacker thought that Foulkes’ intended meaning was “I’m one step away from…”. As he now tells the Telegraph:

In hindsight, he said, the tweet would have been clearer had it begun with the words: “What next? You are…”

But he said that even without the extra wording, it should have been clear to anyone reading it in context that his post was a warning about where anti-Semitic hate could lead.

In other words, he was not arrested for “warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain”; rather, it was for botching a supposed “warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain” in such a way that the police got the wrong end of the stick and acted against a perceived antisemitic threat. The “thought crime” framing thus collapses, and given that Foulkes’ extrapolation seems to have been made in support of Braverman’s call for a crackdown on protests (“We get our laws under review, and if there is a need to change the law … I will not hesitate to act”) the free-speech pose is less than convincing.

However, as with other recent cases where media framing has been misleading, the full context does not get the police off the hook: Foulkes was issued with a caution which has since been rescinded following a legal challenge, so clearly they got it wrong. According to the paper:

On Nov 1, without Mr Foulkes’s knowledge, the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command referred his post to Kent Police, citing “concerns around online content”… The X post had not been reported by the public, and why a specialist Met unit – usually focused on terrorism and extremism – flagged such an innocuous tweet remains unclear.

“Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command” here means “Met Intelligence”, known as MO2 and part of Met Operations. Were Kent Police in awe of a specialist Met unit, or under pressure to get a result? And what does it say about police methodology that the context and Foulkes’ explanation were disregarded in the push to build a case and issue a caution?

Note

1. Wilson posts as @nw_nicholas, although a screenshot published by the Telegraph which also appears in a derivative Mail write-up unaccountably has doctored his handle to @nw_nicols. He has complained about it. Might this odd change have something to do with the Telegraph‘s commercial interests as regards HSBC?

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