“IF YOU GET INTO TROUBLE FOR SOMETHING YOU’VE SAID, WE’LL RESPOND FASTER THAN AN AMBULANCE WILL IF YOU’RE ILL.” At the Free Speech Union, our founding principles are to defend our members’ right to free speech and to campaign for free speech more widely. @BenBarryJones, our Director of Case Management, explains our approach: to cause more trouble for your university, business, department or institution than the other side will if they try to silence or punish you for exercising your right to lawful free speech. We’re successfully changing the balance of terror. It’s now harder to punish people for exercising their right to free speech, because we’ll back them to the hilt. Only around 1% of the cases the Free Speech Union handles ever make it into the press. As of last week, we’ve fought more than 7,000 cases defending our members’ right to free speech. Watch the FSU Podcast on our YouTube channel 👇

A mother was referred to Prevent and visited by police at home because of her visit to Israel and her interest in“Jewish issues”. In yet another shocking case, Holly Passmore, a mother of two from County Durham, was visited at home last July by two plain-clothes police officers who wanted to know why she had recently travelled to Israel. The officers told Ms Passmore, who cares for her severely autistic nine-year-old son, that it was a “safeguarding issue”. A police intelligence report seen by The Telegraph reveals that the referral said she “over-identified with the conflict between Israel and Palestine” and was “supportive of Israel to the point that she has travelled to Israel”. It also described her as having “MH” — meaning mental health — issues and being “vulnerable to negative influence”. Three days after the visit, Ms Passmore lodged a complaint. Two more officers, including a superintendent, then came to her home. “They said that, clearly, I’m not a terrorist,” she recalled, explaining that they were keen to reassure her that police did not consider her a threat or an extremist. “I thought that was strange at the time. You don’t usually end up with a superintendent on your couch.” Ms Passmore’s concerns deepened when she discovered that her NHS records had been updated to describe her as a “vulnerable adult”, before later being changed to say she was no longer vulnerable. It is now even more clear that Prevent is being weaponised by activists to silence people for their lawful and legitimate views. These vexatious complaints also waste police time and resources. Enough is enough. Read more in @Telegraph 👇