Boris Johnson says UK police arrest over 10,000 people a year for online comments.

 

"The UK police are now making over 10,000 arrests every year for online comments, more than the police in Russia itself, and this judgement is yet another propaganda gift for Vladimir Putin." (Boris Johnson - The Daily Telegraph, 21 May 2025). Johnson warned that Britain is becoming a 'police state' under Sir Keir Starmer.

I don't know where Boris Johnson got these statistics from, but if these figures are correct, then it does suggest that the British police like the East German Stasi, are spending a great deal of time monitoring the views that British citizens make on social media.

This seems to be clear in the case of Graham Linehan, the co-writer of the comedy series 'Father Ted'. He was arrested by British police when he flew from America to Heathrow Airport. The police told Linehan that he was being arrested for tweets that he'd made on the social media site X.

The Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, says that we have free speech in Britain, but this hardly seems to bear scrutiny. Even the Trump administration in the U.S. have expressed concerns about the crackdown on free speech in Britain.

When expressing moral concerns about genocide in Gaza is considered ‘intent’ and can get you arrested and imprisoned by the British thought police, then we ought to be seriously worried. Are British citizens going stand for being treated like "thought criminals" who are arrested for "thought crime"? As George Orwell said, "If  liberty  means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear."