BORIS JOHNSON: It’s time for Starmer to wipe the mist from his sleaze-tainted spectacles – and inform the cops to police the streets, not the tweets

When I was growing up during the Cold War, we all knew the main reason why Britain was a particularly marvellous place to live. It was a ‘free country’, we used to tell each other, and we all knew roughly what that meant.

‘A free country’ meant that the people of Britain could live their lives more or less as they pleased. Which meant that, provided you did no harm to others, you could hold whatever opinions you liked, and you could blurt them out more or less as you wished.

We understood – because we could read it every day in the news – that it was a blessing to live here rather than a hundred less fortunate jurisdictions. We knew all about the countries that were less free, whether they were satellites of Moscow or Latin American dictatorships.

We observed countries where people lived in genuine fear of being reported on by their neighbours, for committing some unintelligible crime against the prevailing ideology; where people were simply too frightened to say what they really thought, and therefore kept their lips buttoned.

Whole populations were held in subjection, because they knew their lives could be suddenly ruined by anonymous malice. They knew that the police could come knocking at their door, at any hour of the day or night.

We used to read about these places with a thrill of horror, and also satisfaction, that things were so very different here, and so much better.

It never occurred to us, then, that one day the police in our own country would be doing the very same thing.

Last Sunday, the Essex police knocked unannounced on the door of The Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson (full disclosure, I have known her vaguely, and admired her work, for years).

They told her she was under investigation for a ‘non-crime hate incident’ or possibly the criminal act of inciting racial hatred – the police insist it was the latter – for a tweet she had allegedly posted more than a year previously.

They did not say what the tweet said, so she has no idea what she is supposed to have done wrong. Nor does she know who has been so offended by this defunct and long-since deleted tweet as to report it to the police.

In its eerie ambiguity, the whole thing is straight out of 1980s Romania, and the horrible curtain-twitching culture by which people reported on their friends – and even family members – for muttering views, in private, that were unacceptable to the crazed communist orthodoxy of the time.

Well, someone has now disinterred what seems to have been the mystery tweet – and harmless it is.

Allison Pearson seems to have been making a point about police handling of the sometimes anti-Semitic demonstrations that followed the October 7 massacre, but spoiled it by inadvertently using the wrong photo. So she immediately deleted it.

I can imagine that some people (Hamas supporters?) might have been ‘offended’, in the very brief period it was online, though I can also imagine that a lot of other people – including me – might well have approved of the essential message.

Whatever it was that she intended by the tweet, it has gone, vaporised into random subatomic particles.

The ex-tweet is hardly stirring up racial hatred now, since no one has been able to see it for more than a year.

It is utterly ludicrous, and shameful, that the police are wasting their time on this errant electronic effluvia. Indeed, the whole thing would be a complete joke, if it were not so serious for Allison Pearson – and for all of us living in Starmer’s Britain today.

As I write, the investigation has not been concluded. The sword of Damocles still hangs over the head of Allison Pearson. The Essex police may well decide that even if she is not guilty of inciting racial hatred, she has triggered a ‘non-crime hate incident’ – purely because someone has taken offence. What then?

No doubt Allison will get through it. Her case has become a cause célèbre, and she has many supporters. But for many other people, such an outcome would be a personal and professional disaster. Most people do not have the armoury of a national newspaper column.

For most people, to be held responsible – by the police – for a ‘non-crime hate incident’ would be a stain on their reputation from which they might never recover. Their family, their friendships, their job prospects – all of them might be permanently and badly affected.

And yet, they might never be found guilty of any actual offence; and – in the greatest cruelty of all – they might never be exactly sure what they are alleged to have done wrong, or who made the original allegation against them.

This is obviously wrong, and tyrannical, and redolent of the Soviet Union at its worst. The police should clearly abandon immediately their investigation into this deleted tweet.

For good measure, the Home Office should announce they are junking forthwith the whole Kafkaesque concept of ‘non-crime hate incidents’.

If this tweet was genuinely intended to provoke racial hatred – which it plainly and incontrovertibly was not – then there are plenty of grounds for prosecution under decades-old statute. If there was no such intent to provoke hatred, then the whole thing should be immediately forgotten.

Instead of making this elementary point, the Labour Government is lurching in the opposite direction. With his deathless skill in plonking himself on the wrong side of the argument, Keir Starmer has decided to double down.

On Thursday he urged the police to continue to collate all ‘non-crime hate incidents’, whether on X/Twitter, in the pub, or overheard on the bus. The Government is encouraging our hard-pressed constabulary to evolve ever further into a kind of woke Securitate, scanning the internet in search of off-colour remarks, and then rapping on your door if someone happens to take offence.

The problem is getting worse and worse, because more and more people are discovering the joy of taking offence.

Woe betide anyone caught saying something on the internet about the politics of the Middle East, or transsexual football players, that either triggers someone else, or else gives them an excuse for pretending to be triggered.

If someone doesn’t like what you have said, you can be done for a non-crime hate incident, or worse, and be damned for ever.

Isn’t it a nightmare? It’s certainly a disaster for policing, because good officers are having to waste their time on this nonsense, so they can’t attend burglaries; and every hour they spend scanning the ether for ‘offensive’ tweets is an hour they can’t spend on the beat, deterring the criminal gangs who swipe your mobile phone.

It is also a disaster for this country’s global reputation. How can we criticise other countries for restricting free speech, when British journalists can be interrogated out of the blue, on a Sunday morning, about innocuous old tweets?

This stuff is a total gift to Vladimir Putin, and his legions of Russian internet trolls. They can use the hoo-ha to accuse us of hypocrisy and double standards – and indeed they do. Any such comparison, between Britain and Russia, is odious and false. There is still a vast gulf between the way we do things in this country, and Putin’s Russia, where journalists are shot and opponents are poisoned or jailed.

In Putin’s Russia, after 25 years of autocracy, the entire media is under his thumb. No one could say the same of the media in Britain – and yet, inch by inch, we are losing our place on the moral high ground.

Our enemies can detect this erosion of old British freedoms, and they will unhesitatingly exploit it. That is because the assault on free speech is not just a moral and political disaster – it is also a serious cultural and economic mistake.

For decades we have had one of the most innovative economies in the world, with huge numbers of patents, and original academic and scientific papers.

We have some of the world’s best universities: two of the top three; 26 of the top 200. But the sad truth is that some of these universities are now slipping down the world league tables. Is that any surprise when British academics and British students are living in ever-growing fear about what they may or may not say on campus?

Suppose you were a brilliant Jewish professor of English or physics or maths – or any field in which Jewish academics have so massively expanded the boundaries of human understanding. Would you feel safe, today, in the Senior Common Room – let alone the lecture hall – to espouse views that were even vaguely sympathetic to Israel?

Suppose you are an Oxford or Cambridge don, and you find yourself basically agreeing with JK Rowling on the question of gender. Would you dare go to a dinner party and say so, without knowing exactly who else was going to be there?

Not on your nelly, not in either case. And there are plenty of other areas where cancel culture is now imposing a terrifying uniformity of opinion. Academic freedom depends on intellectual freedom: the freedom to follow, honestly, a chain of thought wherever it leads – and then to speak the conclusion freely.

Can we say, hand on heart, that Britain’s universities have a reputation today for encouraging that kind of fearless self-expression? We most certainly can’t.

We are seeing a relentless and sometimes brutal drowning-out of those who dare to dissent. That is a disaster, for the simple reason that the minority view may turn out to be right – just as Galileo was right when he continued to insist, in defiance of the Inquisition and all polite opinion, that the Earth went around the Sun.

That is why freedom of thought and expression is so absolutely crucial – and if we lose it, we will make this country less attractive to genuinely creative minds.

If we keep going with this climate of fear, we will stifle innovation in the very heart of our 21st century economy. The Government should be fighting this madness – as Kemi Badenoch is – instead of feebly playing along.

Look at what’s happened in the week it emerged that three police forces – the Met, Sussex and Essex – have been pursuing the vanished tweet of Allison Pearson.

A boat crossed the Channel with a record 98 illegal immigrants – and no wonder, when the Government has cancelled the Rwanda project and put nothing in its place.

The economy has stalled, with growth shrinking – and no wonder, when the whole of UK PLC has been waiting to be clobbered by Rachel Reeves’s pointlessly larcenous budget.

At the same time, the millionaires and wealth creators continue to flee the UK, not just because of the hostile tax environment, but also because of the failure of Sadiq Khan and the Labour Party to grip street crime in London.

It’s time for Starmer to wipe the mist from his sleaze-tainted spectacles and look at the reality of what is going on. He should tell the cops to police the streets, not the tweets, because it is the most important function of government to make this country safe.

And, unless we make it safe for British people to think and speak in freedom, we risk destroying the very originality that is one of the most precious features of our society – and our economy itself.