Sitting in the GB News greenroom on Sunday evening, I watched the two guests on air before me – one from Reform, one from the Greens – debate whether Nigel Farage should have reported Zack Polanski to the police for potentially inciting violence against him. Was it a challenge to free speech?
The timing was almost too neat. Only last week, I learned the outcome of the Green Party’s own attempt to silence me, after police were sent to my home and I was threatened with arrest for opposing the party’s antisemitism.
As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive
Everything was set for my first interview of the day – lights on, cameras ready, my guest a professor of architecture – when the doorbell rang. A petite blonde woman said, with theatrical concern, that she was a police officer, and perhaps should come inside in case the neighbours saw. She wasn’t in uniform. She had come alone. She wore no body camera. Yet I knew immediately what was happening.
As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive and allege some sort of thought crime, particularly if one writes about anti-Jewish racism and violence, free speech, the Middle East, Islam or trans issues. I write about all of them.
