Repeal Section 127

Greg Hadfield writes:

I have been acquitted today. But only after being accused under a deeply-flawed piece of legislation that is being used and abused by Sussex Police, along with many other police forces across the country.

I was prosecuted for my journalism. For my campaign to expose Labour Party hypocrisy about Ivor Caplin, currently under police investigation for child sex offences.

A key question is why Sussex Police even thought it proportionate and in the public interest in the first place to prosecute me for posting a single screenshot of the reply that Caplin posted in response to an indecent and/or obscene image published on X by Dominic Fikis, a pornographic OnlyFans model.

Neither Caplin nor Fikis has been charged for the original posts.

Because of police abuse of Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, the Orwellian nightmare of the Thought Police has become a reality.

Elon Musk is right. In Britain, we now have the Twitter Police, whose officers intimidate individuals, stifle free speech, and suppress opinions that are clearly lawful.

The impact of Section 127 on the lives, careers, and well-being of innocent citizens is Kafkaesque.

The Twitter Police use it to arrest and charge huge numbers of people and strong-arm them into accepting a “mere” caution — still a criminal record — for saying things that the police simply find “unacceptable”. That’s a direct quote from a hand-delivered letter I received from Sussex Police only last month (October 9 2025), because I described one of their witnesses as “evil” and “a Zionist extremist”.

In this tsunami of arrests, a vast proportion — 90% or more — result in no charge.

And nobody knows what the verdicts are in the cases that do make it to court. It is, however, certain that the number of guilty verdicts has declined significantly, while the number of arrests has soared.

The Twitter Police waste time and money that could instead be spent tackling genuine crimes that plague communities and damage society. Police officers — arresting more than 12,000 people a year, an average of 30 arrests a day — spend tens of thousands of hours investigating trivial non-crimes.

The number of arrests in 2023 represented an almost 58% increase since before the Covid pandemic; in 2019 police forces had recorded 7,734 arrests.

It is difficult to be precise, because Section 127 offences are not notifiable to the Home Office; there are no national statistics. Data I have collected using freedom of information requests reveals that Sussex Police is one of the biggest culprits. In 2023–4, there were 379 arrests, resulting in just 30 charges (7.9%); in 2014–15, there were just 76 arrests and 21 charges (27.6%).

Peter Kyle, Caplin’s best friend and Labour MP for Hove, had the opportunity to remove Section 127 from the statute book when — as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology last year — he introduced into law the Online Safety Act.

He chose not to. Instead — weeks before the arrest of Caplin, a former defence minister and chair of the Jewish Labour Movement — Kyle wrote an article in The Guardian (December 16 2024) headlined: “We have allowed British children to be groomed by predators on social media. That ends now”.

Ten years ago, Big Brother Watch, the highly-respected civil liberties campaign group, published its “Careless Whispers” report that traced how Section 127 was the successor to a litany of legislation started by the Post Office (Amendment) Act 1930. Which focused on stopping abuse towards telephone operators!

It was followed by the Telecommunications Act 1984, which contains very similar wording to Section 127. This legislation enables a court to convict you based on whether it deems a message to be “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.

It also makes it an offence if a message causes “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”; Peter Kyle is currently taking advantage of this to persecute a 54-year-old constituent of his who emailed him about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Six police officers were tasked to arrest the single woman, living alone in a basement flat in Hove, at 4am.

Section 127 belongs to an era of “one-to-one” communication: telephone calls, letters in the post, even email. It has no place in the “one-to-many” era of social media. X/Twitter is the “digital town square” of the world, the Speakers’ Corner of the 21st century.

In a foreword to the Big Brother Watch report, John Cooper KC — the barrister representing me — wrote: “It is incredible to reflect that Facebook only burst onto the scene in 2004, closely followed by Twitter in 2006. What this means is that the vast majority of legislation now being utilised to police the Social Media was enacted before both Facebook and Twitter were available.

“When I addressed the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications in 2014 I argued that we have more than enough law to deal with potential criminal offences on the Social Media, the problem was that they were scattered over legislation placed on the statute book between 1861 to 2003, which led to confusion and inconsistency.”

In June 2013, the then Director of Publications (DPP) issued formal CPS guidelines on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media.

The 17-page document gave “clear advice” to prosecutors. In cases such as mine, it said prosecutions should be subject to a high public-interest threshold, adding “and in many cases a prosecution is unlikely to be in the public interest”.

It went on to highlight “there is the potential for a chilling effect on free speech and prosecutors should exercise considerable caution before bringing charges”.

The DPP who issued the guidelines was a Mr Keir Starmer; he was knighted the following year.

In my case, the deeply-flawed Section 127 law has been exploited by Fiona Sharpe, a Zionist extremist and prominent member of the Israel lobby. Sharpe has deliberately embedded herself in the criminal justice system, in the CPS (Criminal Prosecution Service) as well as Sussex Police.

Sussex Police interviewed and charged me only because of a vexatious complaint by Sharpe — recipient of the Chief Constable’s Commendation and well-known to many senior officers. If it had come from anyone else, I cannot believe they would have bothered.

Indeed, for a decade or more, supporters of Palestine have received short shrift when they have complained about abuse and threats from Zionists like Sharpe. Sussex Police have never investigated the complaints. In my case, in the past 14 months, at least 12 officers — many of them senior — have involved themselves.

Sharpe — a founder of Sussex Friends of Israel and spokesperson for the self-styled Labour Against Anti-Semitism (LAAS) — has been helped throughout by allies in local and national media who have repeated and amplified her lies about me and countless opponents of the terror state of Israel and its genocide in Gaza.

It is no coincidence that Zionist extremists in Brighton and Hove routinely make formal complaints about expressions of support for Palestine — from “Free Palestine” chalked on the pavement of Brighton seafront, to stickers on bus-stops, even to a Palestinian embroidery workshop in the city’s main library.

Especially worrying is how the police use Section 127 against journalists like me. 

Or against the 54-year-old constituent who has been charged with “causing annoyance, inconvenience, anxiety” by emailing Peter Kyle, her MP, about the genocide committed by Israel.

Or even against comedians like Reginald D Hunter, who is facing a private Section 127 prosecution by the so-called charity Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA) after even Sussex Police refused to take on board a vexatious complaint by Heidi Bachram, who lives in Brighton and is a friend of Sharpe.

All three examples are paradigm cases under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”

Imagine if the CAA — well-funded by unspecified donors — is allowed to bring such Section 127 prosecutions against anyone whose social-media posts they do not agree with.

Even if targeted individuals are ultimately acquitted, their lives can be put on hold for a year of more. In Reginald D Hunter’s case, his career has been significantly impacted. The waste of court time would be incalculable.

In the criminal justice system, the process is the punishment and the punishment is the process.

My journalism has proved the Labour Party is, in effect, a criminal conspiracy against its members. It is undemocratic and unaccountable. Because of senior figures like Caplin, the Labour Party needs to confront its own “me too moment”.

At best, Labour MPs are turning a blind eye to the abuses of Section 127. At worst, MPs like Peter Kyle are complicit in such abuses.

In Hove, a woman living alone can be arrested after six police officers turn up at her flat at 4am — simply for emailing her local MP. Her trial may not take place until May 2026, during which time she cannot contact her local MP because of her bail conditions.

This is a dystopian world, where Big Brother is policing social media and stifling free speech.

Stasi-like surveillance, with an extensive network of police informants, will — like in East Germany in the 1950s — create a self-perpetuating, high-tech surveillance culture.

We must stop it while we can. We must repeal Section 127.

But we cannot expect Sir Keir Starmer and Labour MPs like Peter Kyle to do it for us. Not when the likes of Caplin appear untouchable. And not when Starmer’s favourite novel is Franz Kafka’s The Trial.