The Politics of Calling the Police on Your Opponents

How the Farage–Polanski row illustrates the corrosive spread of victimhood culture across British politics.

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

On Sunday, the leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, shared a set of photos from a Green Party event from another account on Instagram. Among them was an image of a man wearing a tee-shirt that quoted the song lyrics “We’re only making plans for Nigel” and below that was an image of a guillotine. Mr. Polanski later removed the image, with a spokesperson for the Green Party saying he had not been aware of the image on the tee-shirt.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform, immediately reported this on social media, sharing a screencap of the image, cropping out the part which revealed it to be a share from another account. He wrote, “If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.” Mr. Farage then reported this to the Met Police asking for them to investigate Polanski for incitement to murder and also made a complaint to the Greater London Authority, on which Polanski sits, asking them to investigate whether he had breached their codes of conduct.

For some people, mostly Reform party members, the issue here is that there have been threats of violence against significant Reform party figures and one of its spokespeople, the MP Ann Widdecombe, was recently brutally murdered. In such an environment, they argue, posting such imagery, even if unserious and citing a song lyric, is dangerously irresponsible and puts Reform MPs at risk. Polanski responded to this by saying that he had received a death threat that day and that Farage’s hyperbolic language alleging incitement to murder was, in fact, putting him in danger.

This is all very silly. While sincere threats of violence against politicians (or anybody) must always be taken seriously, we cannot encourage a mentality where people, especially grown adults leading political parties, accuse each other of rendering them unsafe and endangering their lives for sharing tasteless jokes or using hyperbolic language. Nor does it provide much assurance of their competence to cope within positions of political responsibility when they feel the need to immediately report such things to third party authorities.

The Met Police have now responded to Farage’s report with,"We received a third-party report relating to an image shared on social media. We take reports of this nature extremely seriously, and officers are conducting enquiries into the matter." I would suggest that we’d do better not to encourage the police to take social media posts extremely seriously and conduct inquiries into them unless they are clearly and directly inciting violence. Their recent activities in this regard have indicated a distinct lack of proportion, reasonableness and respect for free speech.

Many people have pointed out what they see as Mr. Farage’s hypocrisy here, given that he staunchly defended Lucy Connolly who was convicted and imprisoned for a Twitter post expressing positive views towards setting fire to both immigrants and politicians,

He even went as far as to say that millions of mothers were fantasising about burning down buildings with human beings inside. British mothers, including me, took to social media to refute this accusation. I would also hope that there are not millions of left-wing activists fantasising about the kind of violent revolution and mass execution of ruling elites indicated by the symbol of the guillotine and am fairly confident there are not.

These are expressions of political anger. One may argue that they are irresponsible in situations where there are violent protests (in Connolly’s case) or tasteless in the aftermath of an MP’s murder (in Farage’s) and that we should not respect people who give vent to them. It can be reasonable for police to investigate that those uttering them are not directly inciting violence, which is plausible in Connolly’s case given that people did attempt to burn down migrant hostels with people inside, or part of hard-left factions which do exist and genuinely conspire to violent revolution. Nevertheless, we must not lose a sense of perspective or encourage politicians or activists to ramp up this form of ‘victimhood culture’ mentality for the purposes of political point scoring. It feels particularly important right now that we try to restore the benefits of dignity culture to our political discourse.

By @WaitButWhy

Meanwhile, defenders of Mr. Polanski are arguing that he did not know that one of the images he shared included a tee-shirt bearing a guillotine and a reference to Nigel Farage, that he simply shared a collection of 20 photographs and such oversights are honest mistakes and that Mr. Farage was being dishonest to crop out the information that revealed this. Others are, not unreasonably, pointing out that identitarian left-wing (woke) activists who tend to congregate around the Green Party have never shown such charity to anybody making an honest mistake, an off-colour joke or expressing anger intemperately at some aspect of contemporary politics.

This is all true but it fatally misses the key points that defenders of both mature and serious political discourse and freedom of speech should care about. These kinds of childish, hyperbolic and ethically inconsistent political dramas should be beneath the individuals we rely upon to lead political parties. There are serious and important issues of public policy to deal with and we need to be able to trust them to behave like sober and sensible adults with a sense of proportion and respectworthy priorities.

Equally importantly, tit-for-tat attempts to capitalise on our growing problem with freedom of speech for political point-scoring can only further intensify that very serious problem which presents a threat to us all.

Reform party members and others on the right currently supporting Farage in his endeavour to have Polanski investigated by police and professional bodies with arguments that amount to, “Well, they started it” should spend some time reflecting on whether this is a sound, ethical basis for politics.

Green Party members and others on the left currently objecting that this is all deeply unreasonable and uncharitable should remember that they did, in fact, start it and spend some time reflecting on the censorious, self-victimising culture they have normalised and how they can reform left-wing parties and politics to address this problem.

Until our political leaders recover the concepts of dignity culture—proportion, resilience, charity and a principled defence of free expression— along with the faintest semblance of ethical consistency, we should expect these endless, performative rows to continue at the expense of serious politics. Quite simply, we need our politicians to grow the hell up.

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