Here comes the free speech CRACKDOWN –which we must RESIST

How Labour and the left plan to undermine our hard-won freedoms

Matt Goodwin Aug 12

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Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 44,000 subscribers across 160 countries, and thousands of paying supporters who help spread the word. Like our stuff? Then become a paying supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join our community on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X.

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“One of the most dangerous trends of our times”, said American writer Thomas Sowell, “is making the truth socially unacceptable, or even illegal, with ‘hate speech’ laws”. And this is exactly what is taking place in Britain.

Ever since the riots and protests erupted on Britain’s streets, I’ve argued consistently, much like Labour and liberals argued during the Black Lives Matter protests, in 2020, that we need to address the root cause.

But this is not what Keir Starmer and the Labour government are saying. Instead, much like we saw when a radical Islamist murdered Sir David Amess, when what should have been a national debate about how to squash radical Islamism turned into an utterly bizarre debate about “online safety”, Labour and the elite class are using the unrest to launch a further crackdown on free speech and, ultimately, democracy.

Instead of acknowledging what this is really all about, like the fact British people no longer feel safe in their own country, Starmer’s Labour, who have long mistrusted free speech, clearly see this is an opportunity to launch further restrictions, to crackdown on all those awkward people who do not support the elite consensus on the extreme policy of mass immigration, broken borders, and a failing policy of multiculturalism.

Just look at what we’ve been told and seen in recent days.

Tech firms may be forced to ban “fake news” from their platform. Social media laws will be reviewed to “prevent further disorder”. Police scouring what people are saying online to see if they can be arrested, with some already imprisoned. Police knocking on doors because of what somebody posted on Facebook. And the Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, remarkably, even considering extraditing people from overseas who write the wrong thing online.

Labour ministers, meanwhile, have made it clear they will look at introducing a new duty on social media firms to restrict what they call, ominously, “legal but harmful content”. They will do this by announcing and reshaping the Online Safety Act. What this means, in plain English, is that social media firms may soon be legally required to remove or suppress posts that are thought to be spreading “fake news”, particularly about topics like immigration, even if the posts do not meet the threshold for illegality.

This is, put simply, bananas.

Aside from sounding as though it’s come straight out of the Soviet playbook, the very concept of “legal but harmful” directly conflicts with the principle of English Common Law, namely that unless something is prohibited then it is permitted.

It pushes us into murky and dangerous waters, where any speech that’s considered by the state, by the government, by some as-yet-unspecified agency, to be harmful will be removed from the online square, even if it’s not actually forbidden, with the so-called “perpetrator” severely punished.

Feeling uncomfortable about idiotic and extreme things people say online is one thing; empowering the state to determine and control the limits and boundaries of free speech, and punish people for voicing views that are entirely legal, is another thing altogether. This is, put simply, politically-motivated censorship.

Once established, furthermore, how long until this will be widened to include print media? And what “chilling effects” will this have on ordinary citizens, leading them to curtail their free speech and free expression because they are fearful of violating the new boundaries of “hate”, “misinformation”, and a Gestapo-style state? These are serious questions but, so far, I’ve not seen anybody ask or answer them.

And that’s not all. We’ve also been told this week that our children, remarkably, will now be given lessons in how to identify “misinformation”, “spot extremist content”, and “fake news”. Enter the politically-biased teacher presenting everything from Brexit to opposing the small boats as “misinformation” and “extremist content”.

And I suspect, too, that Labour will soon expand the definition of “Islamophobia”, essentially creating a blasphemy law that will shut down legitimate debate about the role and spread of Islam in British society, not least as Labour tries to appease its increasingly shaky electoral coalition of Muslims and radical woke progressives.

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What’s happening, in other words, is that Keir Starmer and Labour, who don’t forget worked overtime to try and overturn the democratic vote for Brexit, are about to use their enormous majority in the House of Commons to make sweeping changes that will undermine our freedoms, suppress our voice, and weaken our democracy.

Don’t believe me? Just look at what’s already happened.

Labour’s only been in power a few weeks and it’s already announced plans to overturn a free speech law for universities, without any serious debate, a law that would have protected free speech on campus, making it virtually impossible to disinvite, sack, and harass people who reject the dominant woke groupthink on campus. Labour, clearly, mistrusts ordinary people and does not want to prioritise free speech.

What all this reflects is a wider point about the political left; in the end, as history shows, it will always sacrifice free speech and free expression on the altar of “social justice”. This is what we see in the online ramblings of people like Paul Mason, Oliver Kamm, Jessica Simor, and Edward Luce, all of whom have called for the shutdown of social media platforms, alternative television channels, and, ultimately, conversation among concerned citizens.

Why do they do this? On one level, this is simply about power, a political and media class that can sense it is now losing control of the narrative and is backlashing by trying to shut down alternative media and free speech so that it can re-establish control and consolidate its power.

But this is also because of how the ideology of wokeism, which is rooted in viewing racial, sexual, and gender minorities as sacred, is hard-wired to subordinate free speech behind “group protections” and the need to protect minorities from “emotional harm”. In surveys across the West, radical, left-leaning progressives are always the most likely to say they are willing to compromise on free speech if it means bolstering protections for minorities. In this illiberal ideology, free speech is almost always the first victim, which we can now see once again with Starmer’s Labour.

Which is why I have some questions.

Are we living in England, the birthplace of liberty and parliamentary democracy, or some tinpot dictatorship like North Korea? Who, exactly, will determine what is and what is not “fake news”? Who will decide what is “misinformation”? Who will determine what is considered “harmful”? Who, for that matter, will decide what our children are taught about “misinformation” and “fake news”? And why are we even clamping down on “legal but harmful” content in the first place?

Clamping down on people who are literally organising mass violence and murder I understand; clamping down on people because they happen to express unfashionable but legal views on things like immigration or Islam smacks of authoritarianism.

It certainly does not suggest we are living in a healthy, resilient, democratic society that is capable of tolerating dissent and confident in its ideas and people. As Robert F. Kennedy Jnr has said, there has simply never been a time in history where the people who were censoring free speech turned out to be the good guys.

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I ask these questions because we’ve all seen this playbook before. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Labour and other “liberal” left politicians were jumping up and down proclaiming that all the people who voted for Brexit were “misinformed” by Russia, Dominic Cummings, and what was written on the side of a big red bus.

What would have happened at that referendum, or a similar referendum in the future, if the elite class concluded that voters were swayed by what the elite class decide is “misinformation” and “fake news”? Would they just have declared that an entirely legal outcome was illegitimate? You might laugh but this is essentially what many MPs said about Brexit at the time. What happens if they are empowered by law?

And do you honestly trust the elite class —after things like Brexit, the Covid-19 lockdowns, their reaction to Islamist terror, and open hostility toward anybody who dares to question things like mass immigration—to make these kinds of judgements?

Personally, I suspect all this is just the start of a much bigger plan to shut down debate about issues the elite class does not want to discuss, or issues on which it holds very different views to those that are held by much of the country.

As I said on Twitter/X, given statements made this week by Keir Starmer and the Crown Prosecution Service –“think before you post”–it’s really not hard at all to see how, five years from now, simply criticising things like mass immigration, Islam, and multiculturalism will be branded “fake news”, “misinformation”, and “hate”.

After all, it’s already happening. And just look at Scotland where radical progressives, who sound a lot like their counterparts in Westminster, ushered in the Hate Crime Act to try and curtail debate, which is now widely seen as a complete disaster.

As in Scotland, Starmer’s plans are not only alienating voters and threatening free speech but have also become a laughing stock on the world stage. I’m fortunate enough to do a fair amount of international media, where I’ve been making the same arguments I make here, in our Substack community.

And I can tell you that when it comes to how the Labour government is responding to the protests, by clamping down on our freedoms, many people overseas and not just Elon Musk think it has gone completely insane. As one journalist asked me this week: “You were the home of Magna Carta. What the hell happened to you?”

It’s a good question and I wish I could have answered it by pointing only to Starmer and Labour. But the truth of the matter is that in recent years both Left and Right, both Labour and the Tories, have been riding roughshod over our freedoms.

It’s not just the concerted effort by Labour and Conservative MPs to overturn the democratic vote for Brexit. And it’s not just their combined efforts to stigmatise those who asked perfectly reasonable questions about Covid lockdowns.

It’s also about an elite class that appears increasingly comfortable using the law and police to try and actively suppress what we say and think, whether online or offline.

It was the hapless Tories, don’t forget, who set the stage for much of this by ushering in the Online Safety Act and who despite running the country for fourteen years failed to row back things like “hate crimes”, and “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), which are recorded by police to collect information on “hate incidents” which *could* escalate into harm, but which in themselves do not constitute a criminal offence.

Which is another reason why, amid the looming clampdown on free speech, one of the crucial new fault lines in British politics, especially over the next five years, will not be about specific policy decisions but, more fundamentally, freedom in all its forms.

Increasingly, I think many people in this country will be looking for economic freedom from an overbearing, inefficient, and ever-expanding state, which is suffocating our economy, small businesses, and undermining prosperity.

I think they’ll be looking for national freedom from the disastrous policies of mass immigration and multiculturalism, and an insecure elite class that would rather transfer power to unelected governmental agencies and supranational institutions than hold it themselves, or transfer it back to the British people, where it belongs.

I think they’ll be looking for physical freedom from illegal migration, lawlessness, and spiralling crime, which have left many British people no longer feeling safe in their own country, bombarded by an array of internal and external threats.

And, lastly, I think they’ll be looking for cultural freedom, from the relentless advance of this radical, illiberal, woke political correctness, which is increasingly infecting our institutions, politics, and ways of life, clamping down on our free speech and liberty.

This, this battle over freedom, is the battle that will have to be fought over the next few years, as Keir Starmer and the Labour government increasingly bear down on our hard-won freedoms in the name of political ideology. And much of the opposition to this will have to come not from the Conservative Party, which has shown it cannot be trusted to defend our freedoms, but rather ordinary people, like you and me. I know which side of this battle I am on and I know I am ready to resist. Are you?

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Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 44,000 subscribers across 160 countries, and thousands of paid supporters who make our work possible. Like our stuff? Then help us by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join our community on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X.