Don’t blame the police for our sinister free speech laws

The shocking police doorstepping of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson last week has rightly sparked grave concern about the parlous state of freedom of speech in Britain. Sir Keir Starmer has now joined the leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch in arguing that police should be concentrating on the physical crime increasingly blighting our towns rather than things that are said online. ‘Police the streets, not the tweets’, has become a popular refrain overnight.

But why are the police trawling the internet for wrongthink in the first place? So far any discussion of this has been focused on non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). Badenoch has called for the laws around NCHIs to be reviewed. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp has also criticised police focus on NCHIs (with more than a little chutzpah, as Laura Kuenssberg pointed out to him on Sunday, given it was under a Tory government that NCHIs were brought in in the first place). Meanwhile, revelations in the Times have shown that more than 13,000 NCHIs had been recorded in the year to June, including against children as young as nine.