Britain is sleepwalking into a police state

A cancer patient has been harassed by police over an ‘offensive’ Facebook post. When will enough be enough?

At what point will something actually be done about the problem of police overreach in the UK? With disturbing regularity, viral clips are appearing online that show officers visiting people’s homes, or even arresting them, over social media posts that were deemed ‘offensive’. We all remember the case of army veteran Darren Brady, arrested for ‘causing anxiety’ by posting a meme about Pride Month. Or the footage of the autistic teenager who was dragged screaming into a police van because she remarked that one of the officers resembled her ‘lesbian nana’.

The latest viral clip features Deborah Anderson, an American citizen living in the UK (see footage posted below, shared online by the Free Speech Union). She’s an elderly cancer patient; hardly some kind of monstrous terrorist who poses an existential threat to society. A Thames Valley officer visited her home because she had supposedly written a Facebook post that ‘upset someone’. Anderson’s response was entirely reasonable: ‘Are there no houses that have been burgled recently? No rapes? No murders?’ Her point is incontestable. This scouring for wrongthink is a complete waste of police time and resources.

Most shocking of all, the officer told her that unless she apologised to the complainant, she would be taken to the police station for an interview. That is nothing less than coercive control. She had broken no law. Yet here was a police officer pressuring her to modify her speech, threatening her with further action if she did not comply. This is intimidation, plain and simple. And as with so many of these cases, the process is the punishment.

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