The sinister rise of connotation policing

The state is not just punishing what is said but what is inferred

I’m delighted to have another piece in The Critic, this one on the prosecution of Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was convicted last week for silently holding a sign that read “Here to talk, if you want to” outside an abortion clinic.

It was a difficult one to write. I wanted, as far as possible, to avoid rehashing the polarised pro-life vs pro-choice debate and instead focus on something else that lurks beneath the surface: the quiet rise of subjective, perception-based policing.

I understand the context. There’s a legitimate need to protect women accessing abortion clinics from serious harassment, and the old Public Order Act provisions weren’t always up to the job. I get it.

But we’re now transitioning from a patchwork of local Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs), which prohibited “interference” outside abortion clinics, to a new national law — Section 9 of the Public Order Act 2023 — which makes it a criminal offence to “influence” anyone within a 150-metre buffer zone.

That shift may seem technical, even minor. But because “influence” isn’t defined (and I’m not sure how it could be), it leaves frontline police and prosecutors making value judgments — not based on what a symbol is, or what a sign says, but on what it might mean at some second-order level, as interpreted by a third party.

As with the UK’s perception-based “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) regime, or Ofcom’s exhortation to social media platforms to go “above and beyond” the Online Safety Act in censoring “harmful” content, the offence is not necessarily the action itself, but what it might suggest or represent to others.

Policing, Roland Barthes style: “We’re arresting you on suspicion of possession of some harmful floating signifiers, sir.”

That kind of connotation-policing has real implications for freedom of expression, especially when it comes to unfashionable speech and symbols associated with Christianity or moral dissent.

You can read the full piece HERE.

And if you’ve found my work useful or thought-provoking, you can support my writing (and help cover the cost of the online research tools I use to produce it) via my Buy Me a Coffee page HERE.