Politicians can’t handle free speech

By now, it should be clear to all but the most regime of regime apologists that Britain has a free speech crisis. But to really understand the hatred that politicians today have against the right to free expression, you have to understand how they interact with the outside world — especially social media.

Most ordinary people are charmingly unfiltered about what they put online, often blithely insouciant to the real-world implications that posting can have. Back in the early days of Twitter, even journalists who should have known better were making jokes about — well, you didn’t really think I’d list the heretical works as samizdat here, did you?

But it wasn’t long before offence archaeology reared its head, and public figures were cancelled for all manner of “likes” and “pokes” deemed haram. The world of political spin, already geared more towards avoiding gaffes than effectively communicating, reacted to this by becoming even more cautious. I’ve sat in government meetings where single tweets were laboriously workshopped as if I was watching John Adams track changes on Thomas Jefferson’s declaration of independence Google doc.

Worse than the “do no harm” doctrine, is, for most politicians, the kinds of comments they receive. For a group already pathologically desperate to be loved, to read reams of vitriol and bile from everything from hard-done-by constituents to the most psychotic St Petersburg troll farmer has had a destabilising effect on the self-esteem of even the most bunion-skinned minister.

Announcing a well-meaning policy to help poor kids afford crayons, or a new scheme to save cats stuck up trees focus groups well, and will receive plaudits from the hand-picked stakeholders in a government department or Quango engagement meeting. But once it is tweeted out, every insult under the sun and every accusation of noncery or genocide-support is thrown at you.

Every post gets replies to with a greatest hits of your worst scandals. To recall one fairly witty example; it wasn’t enough for Nadhim Zahawi to have saved the nation from lockdowns with the vaccine rollout without someone posting a mock up poster from the movie War Horse, but with him nuzzling the stallion and the title replaced with Warm Horse.

In short, politicians feel the effects of robust speech personally and constantly, in a way that the secured cocoon of the Parliamentary estate or their inflation-busting pay rises otherwise often shield them from the consequences of their actions.

Hopefully this lurid picture explains (though I would not want to ever justify) the contempt with which many modern politicians now view free expression online. And by gosh are they responding in kind. A thousand different mechanisms are now deployed to curb speech they don’t like and install an architecture where the state has a greater say in the flow of information.

A thousand different mechanisms are now deployed to curb speech they don’t like and install an architecture where the state has a greater say in the flow of information

Legislatively, there was the Online Safety Act that forced you to give over your ID to look at boobs online, followed now by a total social media ban for under 16s. Add to that the threatened stripping away of the same VPNs that a few years ago the Prime Minister was encouraging Russian citizens to download to discover the truth about Putin.

Now there is a consultation to downgrade the impact of independent content creators on YouTube and force the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky News to greater algorithmic prominence. These would be the same organs whose lack of attention to serious stories has generated such mistrust in the first place.

There is the heavy-handedness of the police in responding to some alleged hate speech. Graham Linehan being jumped by 5-armed coppers as he exited a plane, an ordeal that hospitalised him, is one example. There are people like Lucy Connolly who was given a longer prison sentence — admittedly, for saying unpleasant things — than many receive for much worse crimes, is another.

And now we have Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, flouncing off Twitter and forcing her whole department to exit the debate rather than empower “misinformation”. I predicted last week that this may be a prelude to a total ban on X, precisely because it allows for awkward and unpleasant truths to be shared. The great Chris Bayliss has just made a similar prediction in these pages.

Finally, the currently-live Representation of the People Bill would force social media companies to even try to enforce “balance” of debate during election times, stripping back our rights to free expression back to repressive laws put in place during the civil war. These only lapsed after the Glorious Revolution, when we realised the benefits of free enquiry and robust exchange of ideas. As Milton says in the Areopagitica (in response to the Licensing Act) on the benefits of free expression: “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.”

But who needs Milton, when we have Lisa Nandy? As Goya observed with a famous etching, the sleep of reason brings forth monsters. And into this slumberous vacuum comes the Islamists and the woke speech policers in equal measure. The “you can’t say that” brigade may have been on retreat in the last few years, with the Health Secretary James Murray recently forced to recant by Camilla Tominey on his mad idea that a woman could have a willy.

But the Islamists are benefiting from our broader civilisational attack on free speech. The Islamophobia definition, fought against so long and so well by so many, is being re-introduced via back doors, including attempts by Welsh police just this week. Whilst politicians think they are going to usher in a kinder world, with enlightened experts deciding what can and can’t be discussed, our internal enemies use the protections afforded by censorship to continue to spread their barbarism.

If we are not allowed to criticise politicians, religions, or ideas, then we are not free. And no civilisation that wants to survive would hamstring its best means of restoration, the right to free expression. There is only one thing we can’t say; we can’t say we haven’t been warned.