Last month the Home Office announced that police forces in England and Wales would stop recording so-called "non-crime hate incidents" against ordinary members of the public. The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood declared that "under these reforms, forces will no longer be policing perfectly legal tweets." Cue applause from the bits of the press that have spent five years complaining about exactly that. Read the small print and the picture is much darker: British police are still arresting twenty-two people a day for speech offences, and Labour has done nothing meaningful to stop them.

The Numbers Are A Scandal

Big Brother Watch's recent audit, covering 40 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales, found 16,108 arrests for online communication offences over the last two years. That is an average of 22 arrests every single day for something the citizen said, typed or posted. Cumbria police lead the league table with 7.7 arrests per 10,000 people. The Metropolitan Police is not far behind. None of these forces, you will notice, have ever cleared up a burglary in living memory.

Yet last weekend in London, marchers chanted for the destruction of Israel and were politely escorted home. Last week in Manchester, a pro-Hamas banner was carried through the city centre under police guard. Two-tier policing is not a slogan from the right. It is what Britain actually looks like in 2026, and the evidence is sitting in the Home Office's own data.

What Labour Actually Reformed

The Home Office change is real but narrow. It says forces should stop recording NCHIs unless there is "a credible risk of escalation." It does not repeal the underlying communications offences in the Communications Act 2003 or the Malicious Communications Act 1988, which remain the legal basis for most of those 16,108 arrests. It does not touch the Online Safety Act, under which Reform UK's own immigration content has been pulled by TikTok. It does not address the Public Order Act provisions that allow officers to arrest people for "causing alarm or distress."

The new guidance gives the appearance of action while leaving the entire arrest infrastructure in place. A police constable in Cumbria who arrested a pensioner for a Facebook post last week could repeat the same arrest tomorrow without breaking a single piece of guidance.

The Free Speech Union Is Right

The Free Speech Union has spent years documenting case after case. Pensioners questioned in front of their grandchildren over satirical posts. Teachers suspended for liking the wrong tweet. Journalists doorstepped over articles their employers had already published. This is not a free country in any meaningful sense if a citizen has to take legal advice before posting an opinion about immigration on Facebook. It is a managed democracy with British branding.

The government's defence — that some of these arrests do not result in charge — is precisely the problem. The point of an arrest is not just the eventual outcome in court. The point is the knock at the door. The point is the conversation with the boss. The point is the entry on the police computer that follows you for the rest of your life. The chilling effect is the punishment, and it works exactly as intended.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would repeal the Online Safety Act in its entirety. We would amend the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act to remove the catch-all offences that have been used as a charter for speech policing. We would abolish non-crime hate incidents in legislation rather than guidance, so a future Home Secretary cannot simply reinstate them. We would direct chief constables to deploy officers to deal with the burglaries, the muggings, the shoplifting and the violent crime that are wrecking our high streets, not the tweets that hurt a journalist's feelings.

Above all, we would restore a single standard of policing for every community. The British people have noticed that the law applies to them in one way and to certain favoured groups in quite another. That perception is corroding public consent for the police more dangerously than any tweet ever has. Labour will not fix it because the activist class that staffs the Home Office benefits from the status quo. Reform UK will, because we work for the public, not for the people the public is no longer allowed to criticise.