I love the police. I recognise, like the rest of society, there is good and bad among them, but my admiration grows when I see officers rushing to deal with an issue that I know most, including me, would run away from.
It’s that deep respect which makes me astonished at why an innocent tweet led to a perfectly respectable, law-abiding, pensioner being arrested, handcuffed and taken to a police station where he was locked up for eight hours. Totally wrong.
What caused any of this to happen? I think I’ve worked it out. The problem did not start with the six officers from Kent police who turned up outside the home in Gillingham of 71-year-old Julian Foulkes, a former special constable.
As has now been disclosed, thanks to The Telegraph, Mr Foulkes had gone on X to push back ever so gently against the thoughts of a Palestinian activist. So, who had first alerted Kent police to the possibility that there had been what they described as a malicious communication? For the record, it was not malicious in any way.
Well, it didn’t come from Maidstone, it came from the Met, who have an Intelligence Unit studying social media. They contacted Kent and said they should take a look.
Intending to challenge pro-Palestinian marches, Mr Foulkes posted: ‘’One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals.’’ Not a bad point, as in Moscow, Russians had been hunting Jews to beat up.
Could it be that the person who alerted Kent police was a supporter of Palestine? Could it be that the person was Muslim? In London, the number of Islamic followers is around 20 per cent, and police forces like the Met try to reflect the colour of the capital.
You do not know the full story about the police probe into pensioner's 'thought crime' - Kevin MacKenzie
Kent Police
I think we need to be told. We don’t need to know their name, their sex or their address, but it’s important, in this particular case, that we know their religion. After all, no Jew, Hindu or Christian Met employee would have taken offence. Or I don’t think so.
The next error was a Kent officer, probably at inspector level, saying that the tweet was worth investigating. Why? With violent crime off the scale in the county (ninth worst out of UK’s 54 counties) you would have thought they had better things to do.
Now, cast your mind back to 2023. Trump hadn’t been elected yet (it will be important in relation to this arrest), and therefore, when the police came knocking, there was no scrutiny of their actions. Mr Foulkes was so disturbed by the arrest, and with nobody fighting for him, agreed to accept a caution.
At the weekend, some two years later, The Telegraph hears about the caution and runs an extensive story about the scandal. The effect was dramatic. First, all Kent police put on the reverse cycle clips and said the caution was being withdrawn. Then the Chief Constable of Kent does the decent thing and calls Mr Foulkes to apologise.
Finally, the fantastic Free Speech Union says it will fund a legal action on behalf of Mr Foulkes against the police. I imagine decent compensation will be paid as they could without anymore bad publicity.
So, where does Trump come into this?
You can be absolutely sure that these kind of police actions have been going on quietly all over the country while they had cover from political partis have been going on quietly all over the country while they had cover from political parties, with the Tories being as bad as Labour.
That moment has been blown out of the water with the arrival of Trump and the explosive poll ratings of Nigel Farage and Reform. There is now somebody to fight for the Mr Foulkes of Gillingham.
I still love the police, but I want an assurance that it will be for the Chief Constable and the Chief Constable alone to seek arrests in cases like this.
Once they have made the arrests, Chief Constables should be forced to go on television and justify it. I assure you they will never do that, and therefore there will be no more cautions, no more arrests. This was a nightmare for Mr Foulkes, but with a little luck, the idiots at the Met and Kent police will have done us all a favour.
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