We are six weeks into the Labour government, and instead of enjoying the afterglow of a landslide election victory, the Prime Minister is busy waging war against public disorder, rioting, and free speech.

The new government’s honeymoon has ended with global attention focused on the state race-relations, policing, and freedom of expression in Britain. Some countries have advised against travelling to the UK, and the richest man in the world has repeatedly mocked the Prime Minister and the British police for how they responded to the riots.

The response deserves attention. Idle scrollers of TikTok will see that the British Government is bombarding social media with videos of people involved in this month’s riots being arrested, meanwhile newspapers are filling up with reports of children as young as 12 being jailed for taking part in violent disorder, and many others arrested, not for violent acts, but for posting false information or jokes about them online. One man was jailed simply for posting offensive anti-immigration memes.

The Prime Minister has taken a personal role in directing the police response – as if he were still a public prosecutor – and his government is now going to attempt to strengthen the regulations of online speech by using powers in the Online Safety Act. Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, is in the Government’s firing line. It has been blamed for spreading so-called misinformation about the riots – and previously the Southport murders – and inciting violence. This week, the European Union chimed in, with a fresh threat of censorship to X. European Commissioner Thierry Breton even suggested that livestreamed footage of riots might even violate the EU’s Digital Services Act. Elon Musk has, so far, responded with bullish irreverence, almost daring the British Government and the EU to go to war with him over free speech.

Britain today is not the free country she used to be. In the latter part of the 20^th century and into the 21^st, Parliament has passed a stream of laws restricting speech, and the courts have created a web of precedents around privacy which have restricted it even further. The Public Order Act functions like a de facto blasphemy law, and the Communications Act has made it a criminal offence to send offensive jokes on social media, even in private group-chats. Following the rise of de-banking, political speech is also being prosecuted via other means, with financial institutions and regulators utilising ESG rules and codes to remove bank accounts from people whose political views they dislike. Freedom of speech goes much further than just the right to offend.

Unsurprisingly, there are many calls for a First Amendment to protect freedom of speech in Britain. This is understandable, but codification of rights does not necessarily solve the issue. After all, the Human Rights Act of 1998 states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.

While this sounds nice, it doesn’t seem to have protected the countless people from prosecution and imprisonment for matters of speech since 1998. Indeed, when the then Labour government passed the Communications Act into law, it signed a statement that some of its provisions were not compatible with the Human Rights Act. Instead, British free speech advocates would be better focusing their efforts on campaigning to repeal the laws which are restricting speech. No Parliament can bind its successor, after all.

But right now, there does not seem to be a majority for free speech in Parliament. The last Parliament passed the woeful Online Safety Act, and this Parliament looks set to go even further. Ministers seem intent on turning their attack on free speech into a full-blown culture war by even insisting on bending the school curriculum to counter so-called “misinformation” that children might encounter online.

It is clear where this will end. Already, the prosecution of speech is asymmetrical. A government minister, Jess Phillips MP, spent much of Monday 5^th August posting online that a far-right mob was about to attack Muslims in Birmingham, which necessitated the formation of mobs of Muslim men to defend themselves in the city’s suburbs. Not only did no such far-right mobs appear, instead the Muslim gangs vandalised a pub, hospitalised one of its customers, and even attacked multiple journalists who reported on the affair. So far, it seems that Phillips has escaped sanction for her actions, which might easily be considered incitement, or at the very least inflaming tensions. Similarly, left wing activists who spread false rumours about a wave of acid attacks in Middlesborough have faced no accountability. This week, Conservative leadership contender, Tom Tugendhat MP, called for Phillips’ sacking. A reasonable call, but one which is unlikely to be answered.

The government narrative around “misinformation” is a matter of power and politics. Political speech that it does not like can be dismissed as conspiracy, and the untruths emitted by its allies conveniently ignored. The ominous definition, “legal but harmful”, which first appeared in the Online Safety Act, may well be used by the state to eradicate speech it does not support.

This is shown in the growth of the politicised fact-checking industry, such as BBC Verify, which is devoted to creating an alternative reality, paid for by the licence fee. In this environment, it is hard to see if objective truth can ever be agreed. British politics may go the way of America’s: towards a post-modern brawl over fake news, disinformation, and every faction’s own preferred truth.

In the meantime, the Government is going to make hay and headlines for a few more weeks jailing people following the riots. Its exercise in information control seems doomed, however. Already the European Union is backtracking on its threats to Elon Musk, and the state is quite simply incapable of controlling the flow of information like it used to. Opinion polls have shown the government’s approval ratings fall in the last fortnight – even despite widespread disapproval of the riots – and the public will note that the Government is releasing violent criminals to free up prison space for those convicted of spreading “misinformation” about the riots online.

To restrict speech in the interests of multiculturalism will end in disaster. Free expression is the lifeblood of democracy. This autumn marks 380 years since John Milton published Areopagitica, his defence of unlicensed pamphleteering, which led to the end of restrictions on political printing. It is one of the bedrocks of modern free expression. Its memory should be honoured with a new movement to protect and defend free expression in Britain, and to remove the laws which have so restricted it in this country in recent years.