Free Speech Union (FSU) Director Ben Jones joined GB News hosts Dawn Newsom and Bev Turner to discuss the threat posed to free speech by Labour’s proposals to combat the alleged ‘radicalisation’ of boys and young men at the hands of online influencers like Andrew Tate by categorising the potentially vague and capacious term “misogyny” as a form of extremism.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has announced the Labour Government’s new approach to fighting extremism, and vowed to crack down on people pushing what she describes as “harmful and hateful beliefs”, including “extreme misogyny”.
But who gets to decide what constitutes “extreme misogyny”?
Under Labour’s plan to include this term on the Home Office list of extremist ideologies, the obvious risk is that boys and young men who engage in distasteful but laddish classroom banter will be perceived by woke teachers as exhibiting “extreme misogyny” and then referred to the Government’s counter-terror programme Prevent, for assessment as potential terrorists.
As Ben points out, Prevent has been subject to ‘mission creep’ of this kind for many years now, and regularly captures in its dragnet people who happen to hold and express perfectly lawful views that some people in society find ‘triggering’.
At the FSU, for instance, we know of Christians who have been referred to Prevent simply because they don’t believe in gay marriage – a minority view, to be sure, but it remains the right of people for religious or other reasons to say that marriage is between a man or a woman.
Earlier this year, a 12 year-old schoolboy from Northumbria was investigated by counter-extremism officers after he declared there “are only two genders” and produced a YouTube video in which he stated: “There’s no such thing as non-binary.”
In 2021, a 24-year-old autistic man was referred to Prevent after his social worker noted a number of concerns, including that he was looking at “offensive and anti-trans” websites and “focusing on lots of right-wing darker comedy”.
We could go on.
But what’s clear is that the Prevent strategy rests on an assumption that no-one has ever convincingly been able to demonstrate, namely, that a causal relationship exists between undefined ‘extremist’ views and ideas, which may be espoused by lawful non-violent groups, and acts of ‘terrorism’.
Inevitably, this leaves the strategy wide-open to politicisation, depending on which views and ideas a particular government or government minister happens not to like.
Click here to read more about Labour’s proposals, and why they pose such a grave threat to free speech.
