Just when you thought British speech policing had reached the bottom of the absurdity barrel, they bring a jackhammer.
In June, Thames Valley Police managed to dispatch one of their elite to investigate a grave national threat: an American cancer patient who may have written something a bit spicy on social media.
Yes. That’s not a joke. That is, in fact, the plot of a low-budget dystopian sitcom that the real world seems hell-bent on adapting in full.
Deborah Anderson, a mother of two, a member of the Free Speech Union, a cancer patient, and, as she put it herself, “an elderly woman,” was enjoying the blissful serenity of not being in prison when a Thames Valley Police officer showed up at her front door.
Why? Because “something that we believe you’ve written on Facebook has upset someone.”
Let’s pause here.
We are no longer talking about crime. We are no longer talking about justice. We are now fully submerged in the soggy underworld of “upset someone.”
This is what policing has become in Britain; knocking on doors to gently scold the sick and the elderly because someone got their feelings hurt.
“I’m a member of the Free Speech Union, and I’m an American citizen. I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” Anderson told the officer, who probably realized at that exact moment that his day’s mission had veered into Monty Python territory.
The officer, in all his taxpayer-funded wisdom, suggested that Deborah Anderson could simply apologize and make the whole thing go away, as if groveling before the offended masses had suddenly become a formal step in police procedure.
It was less “serve and protect” and more “say sorry and maybe we won’t waste more of your time.”
Anderson refused to apologize. Refused to be cowed. Refused, in short, to play along with a theater production in which “feeling offended” is now a criminal category.
“Are there no houses that have been burgled recently? No rapes, no murders?” she asked.
To which the officer replied, and I swear I’m not making this up, “Yeah, that’s all going on as well.”
The case of Deborah Anderson is not an isolated one. Earlier this month, Father Ted creator and Irish citizen Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow by five armed officers over three tweets about transgender issues.
He was returning from Arizona, not plotting a coup.
