When Writing to Your MP Lands You in a Police Cell

This story shows that Britain's key democratic channels are catastrophically broken

I say it all the time: democracy is about more than mere elections. When you’re really peeved about a policy issue and polling day is miles away, there’s a standard set of democratic channels you’re strongly encouraged to use. Sign the Parliamentary petition. Demonstrate peacefully. Write to your MP.

Of those, writing to your elected representative is perhaps the most basic. A key tenet of our democratic contract is that citizens can freely and confidently tell their MP what they think – in confidence, without fear of reprisal. It really is the death knell for trust in public life if we lose that essential representative function.

And that’s why this story about Peter Kyle and his constituent is so deeply disturbing.

At 4:30 AM on June 17 2025, four police officers arrived at the basement flat of a 54-year-old woman in Hove. They arrested her, confiscated her phone and laptop, and held her in a cell for over eight hours – without any of her relatives knowing she was there.

Kerrison was arrested after sending emails to her MP, Peter Kyle, copying in the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. She was ultimately charged under the Communications Act of 2003, accused of sending emails “to cause annoyance/inconvenience/anxiety.” It’s understood that Kyle’s Director of Operations, Chris Henry, made the call to Sussex police.

I’ve seen the emails. In a series of brief, eloquent, and utterly unthreatening – if quite impassioned – messages, she implored her representative and her leaders to finally address the catastrophic human suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. She specifically urged them to protect the ‘Freedom Flotilla,’ a UK ship attempting to deliver aid to Gaza which was, at the time, illegally seized by the Israeli government.

This week – after a year of tribulations – Kerrison was acquitted.

“Lawfare is increasingly being used to silence our voices and quell our dissent,” Kerrison said after her acquittal. “This is not only a waste of time and public money, it is also an infringement of our rights and freedom of speech.”

This was no isolated incident. In February this year, Peter Kyle also called for police to investigate activists in Brighton who were urging residents to boycott Israeli goods, for “hate crimes” and antisemitic incitement. Police concluded there was “no evidence of criminal activity.”

It’s one thing for Peter Kyle – who is no random MP but the Secretary of State for Business and Trade – to ignore the prevailing sentiments of Labour voters about atrocities committed in Gaza. He’s in the minority of his party now, and that will cost him politically.

But it’s another thing entirely for a top politician to punish dissenters for leveraging key democratic channels – the same ones they’ve been encouraged to use all their lives. Of course anti-semitism is a real and pernicious problem. But it’s really dangerous to invoke it in order to cut people with genuine, non-hateful humanitarian concerns out of democracy.

Kerrison has every right to tell her MP – in confidence - what she thinks about his government’s foreign policy stance. The fact that a sitting Government Minister was able to involve the police in response to peaceful political activity should concern anyone who cares about democracy.

For years now, regardless of party affiliation, Britain’s leaders have been raising the cost of political dissent. A healthy democracy encourages pluralistic debate. It recognises that petitions, protests, boycotts and correspondence with elected representatives are not threats to democratic life but crucial expressions of it.

Our system instead broadcasts to its citizens that there may be hell to pay for caring too much, or for caring about the wrong things. There are millions of people in this country that care about what’s happening in Gaza, and they’ll take from this that they’ll be punished for making a fuss. That their civic engagement is illegitimate. That’s dire for trust in the democratic process.

This is really not the same as the right’s complaints about “free speech.” The Tommy Robinsons and Nigel Farages of this world whine whenever the national debate shifts away from migration for even one moment (which is rare). They demand constant airtime, attention, and impunity for genuinely hateful and violent rhetoric.

Claire Kerrison and the Brighton boycotters are not asking for impunity, and they’re not demanding a grand platform. They’re asking to exercise extremely basic democratic liberties, without fear of state retribution. It shouldn’t be a huge ask.

This, on top of the the UK’s draconian crackdown on protest rights across parties and governments, sends a clear message to an already disillusioned and distrusting public: the table is tilted. Your opinion, your agency, doesn’t matter. Don’t even try.

Does that sound like the ethos of a healthy democracy to you?

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