Policing: that arrest
By Richard North - September 27, 2025
The evil Starmer has been writing in the Telegraph, confessing that the Left “ignored immigration fears for too long.
His response is to offer a plan for “patriotic renewal” (whatever that is) which he asserts is the only thing that will counter “the rise of the populist Right”. But then, in a sinister turn of phrase towards the conclusion of his authored piece, he writes: “For Labour, we are clear that we must absolutely respond to the reasonable concerns about immigration”.
On the face of it, there might seem nothing untoward about this statement, but the hidden menace is in the use of the word “reasonable”. Implied by this qualifier is the premise that Labour will define what is reasonable, and it is only to this, now limited, set of concerns that the party will feel the need to respond.
Alternatively, where the Starmer regime confronts concerns which, in its view, are not “reasonable” then, at the very least, it will ignore them or – with increasing severity – cause those who are rash enough to articulate those non-permitted concerns to be arrested, prosecuted and punished.
This is the world in which we now live where, as the lawyer who helped me last night dealing with Pete’s arrest advised, anyone thinking of blogging, tweeting, or otherwise contributing to social media, should keep close to hand the telephone number of the law-firm’s 24/7 emergency call-out service.
It is that prevailing ethos which had Pete arrested last night by North Yorkshire Police. In their ignorance, the constabulary was on the shaky foundations of seeking to build a case that he had reposted a “meme” on X, which was “threatening, abusive or insulting” with the intention “thereby to stir up racial hatred”.
Since the meme refers, respectively, to Hamas, Palestine and Islam, there is no racial element to it. As Pete pointed out, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, Palestine is a Middle East region with ill-defined borders, and Islam is a religion. None of these can be construed as “threatening, abusive or insulting” to any specific race.
As an aside, one can see here why the all party parliamentary group on British Muslims is so keen to have its definition of Islamophobia adopted, which has Islamophobia “rooted in racism” and “a type of racism” that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.
Once they can get Islam officially linked to racism, the whole raft of race-orientated legislation can be leveraged, not least Public Order Act 1986, Section 19, where “racial hatred” can be applied to any criticism of, or insult to, Islam.
Interestingly, although North Yorkshire Police asserted that the meme at the centre of this case had been first published by Tommy Robinson, this is not the case. The original designer was @BlairIsInTheAir who lives in Spain. It was retweeted by Tommy Robinson in May last year, and by journalist David Atherton, both of whom were threatened with arrest.
Given that, in both cases, no further action was taken, one would have thought that the police might have given up by now, instead of trying it on with a meme that is now well over a year old, tweeted by thousands and viewed by millions – with no discernible link to any uptick in racial hatred.
However, a thought occurs here – that the police might be using the example of their failure to progress the cases as evidence for the support of a formal definition of Islamophobia, in order to strengthen that case currently under consideration by the government.
That may be too Machiavellian, or beyond the competence of the average plod to consider, and it would not explain why the police in Pete’s case, chose to arrest him and drag him off to Harrogate for an interview in the dead of night. That speaks of deliberate harassment and intimidation, when the alternative of a “voluntary” interview would have been perfectly adequate.
If there is some good to have come out of this affair, therefore, it is that this particular predatory behaviour of the police has been given the oxygen of publicity.
In particular, this was picked up by David Shipley in the Spectator, under the heading: “The disturbing arrest of Pete North”.
With the “hate crime snatch squad” coming to get Pete, Shipley recalls how Pete told him that he was “shocked”, believing that “normal practice is to turn up and invite someone in for an interview”. This has opened the police procedure to the charge that “the process is the punishment”, which is deliberately intended to intimidate’.
Shipley notes that Pete’s treatment stands in clear contrast to that of Charlotte Hayes, a left-wing TikToker who posted a video apparently calling for people to “kill them all” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Hayes said her words had been misconstrued and Kent police decided to take no further action.
Other responses have come from the likes of Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union, who says that “people are rightly shocked by episodes like this”, but adds that the reality is that the police are arresting over 30 people a day for social media posts. We know they’re being over-zealous, Young says, because only about 5 percent of those arrests result in prosecutions.’
There has also been input from Rupert Lowe, now the independent MP of Lowestoft. He declares that “Free speech does not exist in Britain – it has been systematically undermined by successive governments, often in the name of safety”.
Lowe continues: “Pete North’s ordeal is the latest in a long line of egregious violations of Britain’s free speech tradition by the Labour government, and I suspect things will continue to deteriorate – especially with the introduction of digital ID, which will doubtless make this kind of overreach easier and more frequent”.
Other coverage has included a lengthy piece in the Mail which, many hours after the news had been posted on X and this blog, came up with an “exclusive”, headlined: “Moment police arrest autistic man in middle of the night for posting ‘f*** Hamas’ on social media”.
This featured the video of his arrest that Pete had posted on X, which has at the time of writing attracted 2.7 million viewers, with 14K “likes”. This is a “reach” which North Yorkshire Police could hardly have imagined, although Pete did warn them that this could be the case.
The Mail report also deals at length with Pete’s health problems which he himself covers in a lengthy tweet, which makes the action by North Yorkshire Police all the more unconscionable.
It is a matter of public concern, he writes, that the police are completely ignorant in their understanding of autism and related conditions. That ignorance, he warns, will end up killing somebody more vulnerable than me, adding: “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen police completely oblivious in their treatment of autistic people. They barge in, in full fluorescent paramilitary gear, and they’re just itching to drag you away”.
Following the Mail, we had a lengthy report in the Telegraph, which has Pete saying that “police are ‘terrorising people like me’”, and even The Sun joined the fray. Then, of all things, we had The Jerusalem Post. with the headline: “English man arrested for ‘f*** Islam post’ claims investigating officer knew nothing of Hamas”.
A notable but not unexpected absence was any mention from the Left, with studied silence from the Guardian and the BBC, although the Searchlight magazine did manage to tie in the arrest of Steve Laws with that of Pete, running the headline: “Two leading fascist activists arrested”.
Spiked takes a different view, asking “Is it a crime to say ‘F*** Islam’?”, noting that: “The arrest of Pete North has exposed the tyranny of the speech police”. Hate-speech law is just censorship by another name, wielded by a state as clueless as it is authoritarian, writes Fraser Myers.
Pete himself finished off the medley with a post on Substack which completes the fairly intensive coverage of a dark corner of English policing, but for an additional piece in the Telegraph which accuses Labour of having turned our constables into commissars.
Writes Laurie Wastell, “The Prime Minister cannot distance himself from speech policing; this Government has encouraged these shocking arrests”, adding: “The public are right to draw a link between arrests over speech and ‘two-tier Keir’”. He is not wrong.
