by Arthur Parashar, Daily Mail
A Metropolitan Police officer calmly defending the rights of a Christian street preacher being surrounded by an angry mob.
This was a rare moment caught on camera in modern-day Britain, where Christian preachers have in recent years been targeted by other religious groups – and more concerningly police officers – for expressing their right to free speech.
But a pattern has emerged of preachers being arrested, DNA swabbed, detained in custody for hours and hauled before the courts at the taxpayers’ expense – only to be cleared of any offence and even paid out in damages.
One Christian preacher, Hatun Tash, has even been paid £10,000 in damages twice in two years by the Met Police at Hyde Park‘s famous Speakers Corner in a stark admission that she was wrongly arrested on both occasions.
Elsewhere, in November 2025, preacher Shaun O’Sullivan was cleared of racial harassment after he was arrested for the 16th time – this time for saying, ‘Pray for the Jews and pray for the Palestinians’ in relation to the Gaza conflict.
A few months earlier, a group of Christians were told to stop spreading the gospel outside King’s Cross Station, with a female British Transport Police officer telling them: ‘I just think it’s wrong.’
Also last summer, John Steele – a Christian preacher of 25 years – had charges dropped against him after he was arrested for asking a woman in a headscarf what she thought about Quran verses on domestic violence in Rotherham.
And just last week, it emerged Christian preacher Dia Moodley, who has been backed by the White House, was arrested for ‘inciting racial hatred’ and detained for eight hours after giving a street sermon in Bristol last November.
That is why the female officer who defended a preacher in Whitechapel, east London, while a group of Muslim men demanded his removal has been hailed as ‘exemplary’ for reminding them: ‘In this country, we have freedom of speech.’