Britain's free speech crisis

How did we get here?

Almost every week brings a new, absurd example of the authorities breaching the free speech values and traditions for which Britain has long been known.

A policeman visits a cancer patient to tell her to apologise for a Facebook post the officer can’t even specify. The comedy writer Graham Lineham is met by five armed policemen at Heathrow and arrested for several tweets posted months earlier. It’s “Carry On 1984” as Free Speech Union founder Toby Young put it.

These high-profile cases are the tip of a growing censorship iceberg. Information gathered by citizen journalist The Stark Naked Brief and The Times reveals that the Thames Valley Police – the force which sent an officer to the cancer patient’s house – made 1,068 speech-related arrests in a year (about three a day) under the Communications Act, Malicious Communications Act and Online Safety Act. Nationally, the police now arrest about thirty people daily for online content deemed offensive.

Less talked about are new plans from Ofcom which threaten to regulate much of the British internet out of existence. Since the last Substack, I’ve spent a lot of time trawling through an alarming consultation document called “Additional Safety Measures” which I’ve written about here. The body charged with implementing the Online Safety Act is proposing sweeping new measures aimed at making Britain “the safest place in the world to be online”. It wants livestreams to be backed up by reporting systems costing tens of thousands and monitored by paid moderators, imposing a compliance burden that would make citizen journalism and many online meetings, courses and live podcasts unviable.

On top of that, Ofcom would like “services” - which means websites and platforms as well as podcasts - with more than 700,000 monthly users to assess the feasibility of using software scanning for illegal content at an annual cost of up to £260,000. The regulator admits such measures would curtail online activity in the UK, infringe freedom of expression and association and privacy rights, but argues that the “harm” they would prevent makes them proportionate. It will have no hesitation, it adds, in introducing further measures and suggests that in future citizens might be required to verify their identity in order to access live broadcasts.

Then there’s the latest restriction on the right to protest, with the government announcing that the police are to have increased powers to consider the “cumulative impact” of demonstrations and ban them accordingly. “Just because you have a freedom doesn’t mean you have to use it at every moment of every day,” said the home secretary nonsensically. Meanwhile someone on X argued that the new restrictions should be limited to “sectarian issues” so that we can still protest about digital ID. His definition of sectarianism as “conflicts stemming from strong adherence to a specific sect, faction, or belief system, often leading to prejudice and ill-will towards other groups” potentially covers all the protests I’ve ever witnessed.

Reader, we have a problem, and it doesn’t just lie with globalist technocrats. This kind of contorted thinking – you can have your freedom when I say so, people should only protest about the issues I think valid – are symptomatic of how the consensus about free speech and the kindred rights of freedom of expression, thought and protest has broken down. A big section of society has forgotten that such freedoms are the condition for human wellbeing, creativity, the emergence of new developments and genuine democracy. Despite the lessons supplied by authoritarian regimes of the recent past, our institutions have forgotten what life in societies suppressed by censorship was like.

As John Power wrote in July: “Britain’s moral authority now lies in tatters. We have long used our tradition of free expression as diplomatic capital: from Cold War-era BBC broadcasts that cut through the Iron Curtain to our self-presentation as a haven for journalists and dissidents. How can Britain lecture authoritarian regimes on the virtues of open discourse while throttling it at home? To countries watching from abroad, the Online Safety Act is a clear signal that the oldest liberal democracy in the world no longer believes in itself.”

Power is one of a number of mainstream commentators highlighting the role of the establishment in Britain’s journey from beacon of free speech to pioneer of global censorship. The Online Safety Bill was passed with overwhelming cross-party support, actively creating a situation “for which British diplomats would castigate third world or tyrannical governments,” notes Fred de Fossard, with “little awareness of the danger of this law among our own governing class.” Fleur Elizabeth Meston documents the stark contrast between MPs’ statements about the importance of free speech and their actions: “Britain does have a “free speech crisis”, but it is not, as some would have it, a result of administrative overreach alone. It is the direct legacy of politicians across parties - shrugging off reasoned warnings, choosing the path of censorship, and then feigning surprise when their constituents are arrested for their thoughts.”

How did we get here? How did our MPs, with all the resources and wisdom of Parliament and our democratic infrastructure, take Britain down this path? How did some become so enamoured of the perfectionist dream of “Safety” that they felt entitled to jettison basic rights for all of us? How did a society known for tolerance and reasonableness become so hyper-vigilant and quick to take offence?

In this Substack, I want to put aside the machinations of the technocrats and their attempts to “control the narrative” and take a look at the psycho-social conditions for this profound shift.

The response of some British people to the assassination of Charlie Kirk is illustrative. I don’t think many here knew much more about him than I did (nothing), but that fact did not stop some exulting over the murder of a young man and the public elimination of someone known for open debate, executed while he was doing just that. For those who shouted “good” and “serve him right”, Kirk was clearly a proxy for Trump, the Baddie in a far-off land who serves as a foil to their virtue. The mystery is how this has become enough, for those signed up to the values of the New Censorship, to justify killing.

Curious to get a sense of the man onto whom so much was being projected, I went online and found a video of Kirk at Cambridge University’s debating society. I expected something like a debate at Oxford, a posher extension of the discussion I was taught at school. Such debates had long seemed to me a kind of a game – adversarial and artificially binary – but at the same time I understood the set-up as a formal way of separating the issue from the person expressing a viewpoint. They were an expression of a wider culture in which, my parents explained, others had an inalienable right to their points of view regardless of whether they were wrong or demonstrably mad. In this, the world in which I lived until recently, it was clearly understood that laws against assault, incitement and defamation were adequate ways of dealing with “harm”.

Watching Kirk at the Cambridge Union, I felt a mix of incredulity and embarrassment at the behaviour of his hosts. The first question was an accusation in both substance and tone, designed to undermine an outsider. Kirk dealt with this directly, with a “I flew five thousand miles … I came to Cambridge to have you ask me that?” as well as addressing the substance of the question. During subsequent questions, the faces of some students looked as if they were watching a show trial in which the verdict had already been decided. The whole thing struck me an exercise in bad faith, a world away from what you would expect from the educated elite of a liberal democracy. It carried an oppressive subtext, the message that dissent from the official view will get offenders mocked and humiliated.

Kirk got similar treatment at my alma mater, according to Jonathan Sacerdoti who on advice took security when speaking at the Oxford Union: “The atmosphere was hostile, the crowd volatile. The sense of potential escalation was real enough to justify the precaution. The combination of vitriol and visceral mob behaviour made it abundantly clear that, had the opportunity arisen, something worse could have occurred. That such measures were even considered necessary, at a debating society in a Western democracy, speaks volumes about the moment we are in.”

Browsing Facebook a few days after Kirk’s death, I came across a post by someone I know. She happens to a former researcher at Cambridge University; let’s call her Cam. Cam had posted a link to a Spectator article by Kirk with the following comment: “It’s alarming because it’s superficially well written – good structure, grammar and syntax – but the underlying principles are most wobbly. It reminds me of Chat GPT – looks good at first glance, but a deeper read reveals critical flaws.”

What a strange thing to do in the wake of the murder of someone you dislike. There was no attempt to engage with any of the points in the article (which you can find here), just an assertion there was “something wrong” with it and an implication that the author’s prose was deceptive. I recognised the ploy as a familiar one, part of a phenomenon I’ve seen repeatedly in recent years – a slur of a person aimed at discrediting what they stand for without engaging with the issues in question. In visual terms, it’s rather like someone popping up from behind a parapet, launching a missile and ducking back down again.

Cam’s post was an unconscious attempt to counter the sympathy Kirk was getting in other quarters as both murder victim and free speech activist. And it elicited at least some of the desired reaction, including an “Ughh” from one commenter. No thought or debating involved: just a surface reaction, a simple dislike emerging from tribal affiliation.

These behaviours characterise the shift Britain has undergone to bring us to where we are now. To understand them, it’s helpful to turn to the body of social psychology that emerged in response to the totalitarian regimes of the last century.

They draws on insights into mass psychology. The pioneer of this field, Gustave Le Bon, described how individuals in a crowd become subject to the collective mind of the group, reducing the capacity for critical thinking and independent reasoning. Crowds, according to Le Bon, tended to be “dominated by emotion” rather than intellect, and the individuals within them subject to prevailing emotions such as anger or excitement.

In an age of mass communication you do not have to be in a physical crowd – the stereotypical mob - for this process to occur. With the phenomenon social theorists now refer to as “social contagion”, strong emotions can spread rapidly across society and once they take root, harden into attitudes and beliefs that can have far-reaching consequences. Negative emotions of fear and anxiety are particularly powerful: it’s now widely recognised that the humiliation of the Germans after the First World War fostered the conditions for the rise of Nazism. Twenty-first century Britain has yet to acknowledge the role of fear in generating the country’s severe and long-running response to Covid.

The path which leads from strong emotions to the safetyism that underpins Britain’s new culture of censorship is less easy to discern. But the analysis of the conditions for the authoritarianism we saw under Covid outlined by Matias Desmet, with his updated version of Hannah Arendt’s thinking – social isolation, a lack of meaning, free-floating anxiety and generalised frustration or anger – is pertinent to Britain, a secular culture in which many people spend most of their waking hours doing jobs they don’t like. Within such a society, some specific developments create the ideal conditions for the impulse to “shut down and suppress”.

The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 provoked strong feelings of anxiety and guilt across the nation and led, partly through the efforts of his mother, to a focus on institutional racism. The resulting inquiry called for Codes of Practice to create “a comprehensive system of reporting and recording of all racist incidents and crimes”. Non-Crime Hate Incidents, in which police must log all reported “hate incidents” on a database where they remain for up to six years, followed. Subsequently expanded to include other “protected characteristics” of religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, NCHIs became a powerful weapon of offence: in their first decade 370,000 people were given such a record in England and Wales, potentially affecting their ability to work.

All without evidence or trial – what a huge set of unintended consequences to come from a single tragedy!

The Molly Rose Foundation set up by the parents of Molly Russell, a teenager who committed suicide, was instrumental in the passing of the Online Safety Act. The parents blamed their daughter’s death on the online material she’d seen and vowed to do all they could to prevent to same thing happening to others. From a psychological perspective, it was an understandable response: they’d found a channel for emotions that threatened to be unbearable and a cause that would make their daughter’s death meaningful. Their mission to project children from “harm” chimed with parents across the nation.

The trouble is, after entrance into British policymaking, we’re all now paying, adults and children alike, for the emotional fallout of the tragedy. It seems that the Online Safety Act has given Ofcom unlimited powers to keep on introducing measures to curb what we may read, see, say or hear online. Ofcom even aspires to the role of global censor, having issued violation notices to US tech firms (and are likely getting sued in return). The Molly Rose Foundation has been campaigning for tougher measures and ahead of the consultation, the government has already extended the compliance burden to more online services.

In a civil society as rich as Britain’s, there’s almost no cause or issue that doesn’t have a campaign. In such a culture, it’s easy to succumb to the temptation of believing there’s a simple fix to the complex reasons for tragedy and discrimination and attempt to legislate them out of existence. Stamp Out Hate. Eliminate Harm. When these emotionally-driven aspirations are amplified by social contagion and, yes, hijacked by nefarious actors, we end up with laws that are as dangerous as they are absurd.

Vagueness and openness to subjective interpretations are a hallmark of such laws. The Communications Act 2003 made it a criminal offence to “persistently make use of a public electronic communications network for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. Twenty years on, the Online Safety Act has gone much further, creating new crimes based on “illegal content”, “hate” and “false communication”. The law identifies a 130 “priority harms”. Those offering online services to a British audience are expected to go through complex and time-consuming processes, while Ofcom officials attempt to categorise and tabulate the innumerable attitudes, emotions and expressions of human life into a ever-growing web of requirements and restrictions to End Harm.

Good luck with that.

Arendt, the great sense-maker of totalitarianism, argued that authoritarian societies exhibited a collapse of moral common sense, making it possible for people to justify persecution and murder as they became increasingly detached from reality.

With the policeman, with Cam, with Ofcom, I think we’re witnessing such a collapse of moral common sense. Meanwhile, in the sphere of governance, we no longer have a consensus about the foundational values of democracy. As Britain hurtles towards overt authoritarianism, the split between those whose attachment to such values is deep-rooted and those whose adherence was superficial is becoming more and more obvious. This split is peculiarly levelling: an Oxbridge student, an educated civil servant and a parliamentarian can still favour group think and mob behaviour over tolerance and reasonableness.

Collectively, the British are now deciding whether in future we’re going to live by the values underpinning the imperfect form of self-governance that is democracy or whether we’re going to morph into the kind of society where almost all decisions, right down to what we’re allowed to see and say, are decided from above.

What it comes down to is: Who do you want to be? How do you want to live? What are your values, priorities and principles?

The next few years will see Britain decide the answers to such questions.

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Some resources

If feel like responding to the Ofcom Consultation you can find the relevant documents here. They look off-putting but it is fine to respond to just one question. Message me if you want access to some of the guidance I’ve prepared for Together. The consultation closes on 20^th October.

If you or anyone you know is worried about the police knocking at their door, the barrister Steven Barrett has done a good video with guidance on how to respond.

And finally:

“Carry On” films are no longer being made but as “The Ofcom Song” by Dominic Frisby shows, Britain’s famous humour goes on.