Britain’s police are out-of-control two-tier tyrants
The arrest of Vanessa Brown, a 50-year-old history teacher who confiscated her daughters’ iPads, is just the latest example of capricious misuse of powers by the police.
From the moment in 2020 when an officer from Humberside Police told Harry Miller, himself a former policeman, “I need to check your thinking”, all the alarm bells should have sounded and all the pre-emptive processes been activated to prevent Britain becoming a police state.
That statement, a clear assertion of dystopian, Orwellian assumptions, should have alerted the whole country to the serious malaise affecting our police forces and prompted immediate action.
The officer concerned should have been sacked and, if his harassment of an ordinary citizen was proved to be part of the policy and “culture” of Humberside Police, the chief constable of that force should have joined him in the queue at the job centre. But, although Harry Miller was vindicated in court and went on to found the admirable advocacy group Fair Cop (its website will reward study), nothing was done by the then Conservative government or its Labour successor to curb the increasingly extravagant excesses of our feral police.
Almost daily now, some invasion of personal freedom by police is reported. It began, as police states invariably do, as an officious enforcement of ideological orthodoxy: Harry Miller was accused of having retweeted a “gender critical” verse. Then thought crime was enlarged to embrace private mental prayer, as the cases of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, Adam Smith-Connor and, most recently, Livia Tossici-Bolt demonstrated. The last named was arrested for holding an innocuous sign reading “Here to talk if you want to”, outside the censorship zone of an abortion clinic about 150 metres away, out of sight and sound.
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