That at least was the experience of Julian Foulkes, a former Special Constable, whose home was raided by six Kent Police officers, who handcuffed him on his doorstep and wrongfully issued him with a caution over a tweet in November 2023, on the advice of the Met’s Intelligence Command.
Other highlights of the investigatory work of Kent’s finest included expressing concern about a shopping list featuring “bleach, foil, gloves” – quite reasonable purchases by his wife, who is a hairdresser. Apparently, nobody from the Intelligence Command had come along that day.
Mr Foulkes’s wrongful treatment gives rise to a number of considerations for a liberal, democratic society.
We have a well-developed human rights industry with lengthy legislation on the topic and court cases to match. There are charities, campaigners, lobbyists, lawyers, and other professionals aplenty. And yet free speech has declined on their watch. People are investigated, arrested and even prosecuted for expressing views well short of incitement, while many more self-censor as a result.
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It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the reason is that those whose freedoms are being infringed are simply the wrong sort of people, expressing the wrong sort of opinions. People on the right, people less well-off, older people, people derided (often by proud anti-racists) as “gammons”. People, in other words, whom the human rights establishment is more likely to think of as baddies than goodies.
Political dogma exacerbates this problem. If you genuinely believe (as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury suggested this week) that the left is the sole home of “love, compassion and community”, while the right is characterised only by “anger, division and blame”, then you may well be watchful of threats to civil liberties from the right, but you will struggle to imagine them from the left.
The recent Supreme Court case on the differences between sex and gender in equalities legislation is another example. That was at heart a human rights case – one, the court decided, with a great deal of merit – but those who brought it had to battle every step of the way, even to be heard, never mind to be treated with the respect that other causes would be granted automatically. The claimants had to set up their own organisations, because established institutions and lobby groups claiming to back human rights either shunned or actively opposed them. Amnesty International even intervened in the case on the other side.
The Foulkes case also highlights a further concern, one of practical policing. Bad enough that freedom of expression before the law has become so compromised, but the enforcers of the law now seem to be choosing to prioritise the violation of that liberty.
It isn’t as though the police are awash with manpower or time. Shoplifting is at an all-time high, and sexual offences go unpunished. The Metropolitan Police failed to solve 82 per cent of burglaries in 2022-23. In Kent, where the force felt it could spare six officers to act as auditors of an inoffensive bookcase, the failure rate was 77 per cent.
We make great play of the totemic status of human rights in our country. We have swathes of statute, backed by armies of advisers and lawyers, one of whom we even made Prime Minister. But when the police came knocking at Julian Foulkes’s door, they didn’t seem to count for very much at all.
Mark Wallace is the chief executive of the Total Politics Group
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