THE TELEGRAPH: The Allison Pearson witch-hunt lays bare this country’s despicable slide into authoritarianism
We must urgently speak out, or risk having to forever hold our peace. Free speech, the foundation of our liberties and democracy, is under threat like never before – yet much of the public remains blissfully unaware of the enormity of what is being taken from us.
The shocking treatment meted out to my colleague Allison Pearson, a brilliant columnist much beloved of Telegraph readers, must serve as the final wake-up call. She recounts how two police officers came knocking at her door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to inform her that she was being investigated over a post on X, formerly Twitter, published a year ago.
Still in her dressing gown, she was stunned. The officers refused to tell Pearson which of her many posts their visit related to. They wouldn’t remind her what she had written. They weren’t allowed to tell her who complained; so much for open justice. The officers weren’t to blame: they were following Kafkaesque procedures dictated by an out-of-control technocratic machine. » | Allister Heath | Wednesday, November 13, 2024
It was because I feared that we were losing our freedom of speech that I wrote this back in August, and temporarily stopped blogging. — Mark
