SShould I be nervous about the contents of my bookshelves? It seems they might be something the police believe to be of legitimate investigatory interest.
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.
In body camera footage, the officers review the books on his shelves, passing verdict on those they consider “very odd” (a book on the Common Market) and “very Brexity”.
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.
If “Brexity” books are now a focus of legitimate investigation, then the study where I am writing this column may have its door kicked in at any moment. My bookshelves also include a wide range of other views, but who knows if that will be sufficient to commute my sentence from exile to hard labour?
Mr Foulkes’s wrongful treatment gives rise to a number of considerations for a liberal, democratic society.
The first is the curious blindness of the human rights sector to the erosion of freedom of speech and freedom of thought before the law.
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.
The slippery slope argument for watchfulness is well known, and routinely intoned from the pulpit, the despatch box and the judicial bench. But we are slipping down it nonetheless.
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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.
This – don’t forget – is meant to be the whole point of fundamental and universal rights. Everyone is meant to have them. They belong to people you might not like, and their defence is at its most valuable when deployed on behalf of those with whom one disagrees.
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.
Given that parts of the self-described progressive movement have become enthusiastically censorious, that is a risky set of assumptions on which to operate.
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.
Those are issues of principle and politics.
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.
Six police officers were sent to arrest their 71-year-old former colleague and to search his home. Six! When did you last see six coppers in the same place, aside from a football match or the King’s coronation?
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.
Why, then, do commanders believe non-crimes like Mr Foulkes’s merit attention? And why do the officers sent out on such time-wasting missions think for a second that it’s appropriate to start judging a man’s reading material? The fact that they were even comfortable doing so on body cam suggests they feel assured that their employer is on board with the whole thing.
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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