The arrest of a man for holding up a Private Eye cartoon at a protest was “mind-boggling”, the legendary magazine’s editor Ian Hislop has said.
Retired teacher Jon Farley, 67, was detained during a silent protest in Leeds for holding a placard featuring a cartoon from the satirical magazine that joked about the government’s recent proscription of the group Palestine Action.
“[Police officers] picked me up, grabbed me, and took me to the side, and I ended up sitting on the pavement,” Farley told the Guardian.
“I think that’s when they said something about the placard. And I said: ‘Well it’s a cartoon from Private Eye. I can show you. I’ve got the magazine in my bag,’ by which time, they were putting me in handcuffs.”
He was arrested under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which bans support for banned groups. “I thought, this is all a bit surreal,” he said. “I clearly wasn’t any kind of physical threat. There was no need for them to act in the way they did.
“By this point I was in the van, so I wasn’t going anywhere. I said: ‘You take the handcuffs off and I’ll show you the magazine because what you’re doing is just daft.’”
Police identified him via his senior bus pass and took him to a station. After six hours and questioning by counter-terrorism officers, he was released with bail conditions banning attendance at Palestine Action events, something he had never done.
A counter-terrorism officer later told him he would face no further action. “So I said: ‘If I go on another demo and I hold up that cartoon again, does that mean I will be arrested or not?’ And she said: ‘I can’t tell you, it’s done on a case-by-case basis.’”
He added: “There’s been no apology, no explanation. It’s this murky lack of clarity.”
Hislop said the cartoon was “quite blatantly an example of freedom of speech on the subject of a government policy” and called the arrest “ludicrous… mind-boggling.”
West Yorkshire police said: “We are sorry that the man involved is unhappy with the circumstances of this arrest. As this is a new proscribed organisation, West Yorkshire police is considering any individual or organisational learning from this incident.”