The knock on the door. The police on the doorstep. The trip to the police station for questioning. The possibility of prosecution for saying something unpleasing to the powers that be on social media.

Observers of the febrile socio-political scene in the savagely sundered United Kingdom — as with the USA, there is a special sorrow in writing the U-word in these supremely disunited times — may note that the woke mantra of “words are literally violence” has been eagerly adopted by the British police.

As they’ve been pretty bad at solving actual violent crimes — in 2020 the Victims Commissioner warned of the imminent “decriminalization of rape” in the United Kingdom — it seems odd and a trifle unhinged that they’ve widened their brief so. Those who only recently called for the defunding of the police are supporting the furthering of police powers now that they will be used against the “Extreme Right.”

Members of the aforementioned right are, nine times out of ten, simply disaffected and powerless working-class white people. Extraordinary measures include two 12-year-olds becoming the youngest ever accused of “violent disorder” — will British courts revert to criminal trials of animals soon, as we did until the 18th century? — and the jailing of people, for years, for their behavior on social media.

The latter — governmental crushing of the free expression of vulgar, sometimes silly, opinion, often under the guise of ‘kindness’ — isn’t new; the comedian Rowan Atkinson made a stirring defense of free speech back in 2012 when he said:

“I am personally highly unlikely to be arrested for whatever laws exist to contain free expression, because of the undoubtedly privileged position that is afforded to those of a high public profile. So, my concerns are less for myself and more for those more vulnerable because of their lower profile.

“Like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse gay. Or the teenager arrested for calling the Church of Scientology a cult. Or the café owner [given a police caution] for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen.”

Perhaps the most chilling — yet encouraging, because of its cloth-eared, tone-deaf imbecility — unintentional self-tell by the powers that be came when it was reported that a man appeared in court on the charge of posting “anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric.”

What a glorious, hilarious giveaway. It no longer feels paranoid to believe that there is a desire that only licensed commentators should be allowed to give their opinions on “anti-establishment” beliefs (such as those that immigration should be controlled) in the next phase of social and actual policing — and eventually, not even then.

In terms of stamping out racism, which is the ostensible intent,  it’s bound to be counter-productive; you’ll get a short-term win by deterring a few people from saying racist things online, but that’s not going to magically stop them being racists.

It’s just going to turn them into angrier racists, who’ll be more likely to lash out at the people of color they meet in their everyday lives — at locations the police have not been informed of beforehand.

Meanwhile, cry-bullies are utilizing the hysteria around social media to settle scores with people whose careers and/or fortunes they envy; see the boxer Imane Khelif’s avowed intent to sue JK Rowling and Elon Musk for “cyberbullying.”

The situation makes me think of the French dueling tradition — but instead of a couple of excitable comtes risking their skins, free speech is in the cross-hairs. “How did you go bankrupt?” one character in “The Sun Also Rises” asks another, who responds “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

My country, which we foolishly dreamed had some kind of Special Relationship with freedom, has been sleepwalking into selective censorship — “anti-establishment” censorship — for years.

Poignantly, Shakespeare had Hamlet still punning away shortly before his dying soliloquy, when he refers to the act of dying as an “arrest” as well as a good long rest from worldly cares. The attachment of the British people to free speech has been loud and proud — but increasingly, it looks as if the rest is silence.