Allison Pearson - Get The Nanoviolin

This week, the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph has been in maximum pearl clutching mode after Essex Police paid a visit to their increasingly batshit pundit Allison Pearson. There has been much howling, and indeed gnashing of teeth, on the subject of FREEZE PEACH. But the Tel has not, for some reason, put the reason for the visit front and centre.

Most of what has been served up tells us that Ms Pearson is a victim. Thus the asymmetric world in which the likes of Ms Pearson get to threaten legal action and try to have their critics’ livelihoods ruined, but play the victim when it comes the other way. She has even been backed by the loathsome Toby Young and his so-called Free Speech Union. But here a problem enters.

No-one has circumscribed Ms Pearson’s free speech. Nor have all too many of those speaking in support of her bothered to find out what this is all about. One might have thought that all those so-called journalists would have made that their first priority, but that thought would have been misplaced: that’s not how our free and fearless press operates these days.

So what did happen to cause Essex Police to rock up on Ms Pearson’s doorstep? Ah well. It was left to the Guardian to lay out some of those inconvenient things called facts. “Daily Telegraph readers have woken up this week to successive front-page headlines alleging a grave threat to free speech, triggered by a star columnist’s ‘Kafkaesque’ encounter with police”.

Do go on. “The rightwing broadsheet described how Essex police had told Allison Pearson on her doorstep last weekend that she was under investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a tweet last year. The Telegraph and Pearson say they are unaware which post caused two officers to knock on her door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday”.

They’re aware now. “It is an alleged retweet by Pearson of a photograph posted several months ago amid heightened tensions over the policing of Gaza protests. It shows a group of people of colour posing with a flag on a British street, flanked by three police officers”. There is more.

“The photograph angered Pearson, who allegedly wrote a tweet condemning the Metropolitan police: ‘How dare they … Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters’. In fact, the picture is from Manchester, sources confirm, and thus the officers pictured are from Greater Manchester police and not the London force”. Telegraph journalism at its finest.

And yet more. “The implication that the Muslims pictured are antisemitic and supporting Hamas is undermined by the green and maroon flag they are holding. The flag is used by supporters of the Pakistani political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). It also, rather clearly, has the word ‘Pakistan’ written on it”. Ms Pearson eventually deleted the Tweet.

So let’s summarise. She claimed it was the Met. She was wrong. She claimed that those depicted were “Jew Haters”. She was wrong. Moreover, as the complainant pointed out, “Each time an influential person makes negative comments about people of colour I, as a person of colour, see an uptick in racist abuse towards me and the days after that tweet are no different”.

But, as the Guardian points out, “The Telegraph and Pearson castigated police and said the visit was an affront to free speech and freedom of the press. Their disbelief was shared by senior lawyers, the former Telegraph journalist Boris Johnson and other leading Conservatives, as well as Elon Musk”. Bozo and Muskrat. Who can’t bother checking their facts first.

At no time has Allison Pearson had her right to free speech curtailed or otherwise restricted. What she and her pals at the Tel have now discovered is that actions can have consequences, even in the asymmetric world of the media elite, who are all too used to shitting on the little people and getting away with it. This time they got a nasty shock. A shock called reality.

Ms Pearson might just think twice next time. So might her supporters.

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