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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