Labour’s Gagging Acts

The current government’s war on social media and online anonymity appears to have ramped up in the strange interregnum between Keir Starmer’s resignation and the projected elevation of Andy Burnham. We’ve had Lisa Nandy’s Media Green Paper planning the “prominence of trusted news sources on social media”, accompanied by her (and her department’s) flounce-delete from X. This was followed by Lucy Powell’s plan to “regulate” social media during election cycles, in line with the purdah imposed upon mainstream broadcasters.

Combined with the already-passed Online Safety Act and the previously announced intention to ban under-16s entirely from social media — a ban that Prime Minister-in-waiting Burnham intends to support — these laws, enacted or proposed, look to anyone except a Labour lickspittle to be a serious erosion of the rights of the British people to access information freely and express their political opinions online. 

These draconian measures bear a striking resemblance to the reaction of a seemingly very different British government to ostensibly dissimilar circumstances: William Pitt the Younger’s infamous series of repressive laws enacted during the 1790s. 

Pitt’s anti-radical legislation was designed to preserve elite power, control the public narrative, and protect the lower orders from ideas — what we now call misinformation — reckoned likely to lead them astray. The intent of these laws and the fears they were enacted to allay shed considerable light on Labour’s own attempts at gagging us.

Pitt’s laws came into effect in response to government anxieties that the revolution engulfing France would spread to Britain. By 1793, the First Republic’s Reign of Terror was under way and Britain was awash with stories of massacres and public executions. At the same time, a rash of anonymous pamphlets, large public gatherings and radical discussion societies sprang up, many with a strongly republican bent. One could forgive Pitt for not wanting Britain to become a mirror of the French bloodbath. Compared with this, Labour’s use of legal restrictions to prevent the spread of information which might result in — quelle horreur — the democratic election of a populist party, smacks of rather lower stakes.

The first of Pitt’s Gagging Acts was the Seditious Meetings Act of 1795. Its purpose was to ban all public gatherings of more than fifty people unless pre-approved. Magistrates were given the power to dissolve meetings and arrest speakers on the spot. Labour’s Crime and Policing Act similarly gives police sweeping discretion to restrict or relocate public assemblies if they anticipate “cumulative disruption” from repeat protests. 

The modern state, however, exercises its authority as readily online as it does on the street. Ofcom’s Crisis Protocols, implemented in June, compel tech companies to deploy emergency algorithmic measures to suppress “illegal content” before it can go viral during periods of social unrest. Add to this the government’s recently announced plan to ban under-16s from social media altogether — a generational digital assembly ban — and the family resemblance becomes plain to see.

1795 also saw the Treasonable Practices Act, which made it a capital offence to speak, write or print anything that brought the King or his government into hatred or contempt. This finds its modern analogue in hate speech laws and in Labour’s official, albeit non-statutory, Definition of Anti-Muslim Hostility. Pitt and Labour proceed from the belief that the state defines the boundaries of acceptable expression.

Pitt and Labour share a terror of anonymity. Pitt’s concern was the anonymous tract — cheaply printed pamphlets carrying radical ideas and scurrilous satire. They were the eighteenth-century equivalent of unmoderated viral internet posts. Pitt’s solution was strikingly similar to the principal consequence of Labour’s social media ban for teenagers: ending the anonymity of those publishing the material. The Newspaper Publication Act of 1798 required all printers to register with the state. Labour’s proposed extension of the Online Safety Act would end anonymous participation in social media by requiring users to verify their identity before gaining access to a platform. It may be claimed that the government will do nothing with the harvested identities of adults wishing to use online platforms. I shall leave it to the reader to decide whether such data might one day come back to haunt a miscreant user.

One of Pitt’s biggest bugbears was the proliferation of reading and debating societies, whose membership was drawn largely from skilled craftsmen, small businessmen and shopkeepers. Here, ideas considered dangerously radical at the time were openly discussed — although they consisted of such unremarkable features of our democracy as universal suffrage and annual parliaments. Pitt was having none of it, especially as the London Corresponding Society had become the hub of a vast nationwide web of interconnected radical societies. He promptly outlawed such associations in the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799.

The network that most troubles our Labour overlords is Web 2.0 and its pesky social media meeting places. Pitt was appalled by the lower middle classes daring to involve themselves in political discourse, and terrified by where it might lead. Labour appears equally alarmed at the prospect of the great unwashed encountering anything but approved narratives. The assumption underlying its proposals is that users of X are incapable of weighing conflicting claims and reaching an informed judgement for themselves. Hence the plan to require social media companies to prioritise approved sources, such as the BBC, over less established voices.

Many of those less established voices are, of course, unreliable. But anyone relying solely on the BBC to tell them what a woman is, or what has been happening in the Israel-Hamas war, would be equally ill-served. In a free society, the burden of separating the wheat from the chaff falls on the citizen, not the state.

Both Pitt and Labour are governing elites panicking over a transformative new medium of mass political communication

The idea that social media users should be bound by election rules designed for broadcasters comes straight from Pitt’s anti-Corresponding Societies playbook. Lucy Powell’s proposal mistakes social media for broadcasting. In reality, social media is simply millions of people talking to one another. How, exactly, does one stop a private citizen expressing a political opinion online in the run-up to an election? Notice that it is the digital public square, full of heaven knows who, that worries Powell. I doubt she has any plans to regulate what the chattering classes say about Reform over dinner.

Both Pitt and Labour are governing elites panicking over a transformative new medium of mass political communication that bypasses traditional gatekeepers — cheap print, pamphlets and corresponding societies in the 1790s, algorithmic social networks today. Both are marked by a terror of the people going off message and falling prey to ideas deemed unacceptable. The principles Pitt resisted are now happily taken for granted. The expectations Labour appears to resist — that government should control crime and the nation’s borders — were once taken for granted, and hopefully will be again.

The final irony is that another of Pitt’s legislative innovations — the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 — sought to suppress workers combining to demand better conditions. They inhibited precisely the sort of organisation of workers that the Labour Party — the Labour Party! — was founded to champion. Truly, we can look from pig to man, and once again it is impossible to say which is which.