A prominent donor to Reform UK is facing the loss of his OBE after being accused of “bringing the honours system into disrepute” over critical social media posts about London mayor Sadiq Khan.
Charlie Mullins, the multimillionaire founder of Pimlico Plumbers, was informed in September by the Honours Forfeiture Committee that it was “minded to recommend to His Majesty that your OBE be revoked”. The warning related to comments dating back to 2022, including a controversial post about Khan as well as a series of online and in-person remarks described by officials as “offensive”.
Mr Mullins accused Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer of orchestrating a political “revenge attack” following the attempt to strip him of the honour.
FSU General Secretary Lord Young has written in The Telegraph arguing that the treatment of Charlie Mullins illustrates a broader and deeply concerning trend: that free speech protections in the UK increasingly depend on your political affiliations. Here’s an extract:
Should people be penalised for supposedly harming an institution’s reputation? How, exactly, is that harm to be measured? Does it only count if it brings an institution into disrepute in the eyes of right-thinking people?
Two people this week have run afoul of this standard. One is Charlie Mullins, the founder of Pimlico Plumbers, who got away with a warning. The other, Ben Woods, who ran the wine counter at the Henley branch of Waitrose, was not so lucky. He was fired yesterday after working there for 25 years.
The difficulty with applying this rule is that, because it’s so subjective – what counts as “harm”? – the investigators’ political bias inevitably intrudes, with the threshold of what constitutes “gross misconduct” rising or falling according to whether the social media posts in question – and it nearly always is social media posts – express robust Right-wing or robust Left-wing views.
If you doubt this, ask yourself whether Charlie Mullins would have received a letter from the honours forfeiture committee informing him it was minded to rescind his OBE if he had criticised Boris Johnson rather than Sadiq Khan. Would Ben Woods have lost his job if, instead of posting supposedly offensive memes about Muslims, he had done so about Christians?
At the Free Speech Union, the organisation I founded five years ago, we’ve fought over 3,500 cases – people who’ve found themselves in trouble for exercising their right to lawful free speech. Not all of them have been placed under investigation – or fired – for dissenting from radical progressive orthodoxy. We’ve defended a handful of people for their outspoken defence of the Palestinian cause since October 7. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that 95 per cent of them have got into trouble for saying something coded as “Right-wing”, including feminists who believe in the biological reality of sex, who make up about 40 per cent of our case load.
In the metropolitan echo chambers where these investigations into reputational harm take place – with KCs often being pressed into service – the same double standards apply as they do in our criminal justice system. Post something criticising the Rwanda policy or Big Oil or Nigel Farage, and you’ll suffer no penalty, however many people complain.
Criticise illegal immigration or net zero or Jess Phillips, and you’re for the high jump, even if just one person complains. Indeed, one complaint from a woke activist is often all it takes. “See,” the equity, diversity and inclusion officer will say. “What this person said has lowered our reputation in the eyes of this complainant. We have no choice but to launch a six-month investigation.”
In one recent FSU case, a man lost his job at Severn Trent water company after describing Hamas as “violent and disgusting”. Had he said the same about the IDF, I believe he may still have his job.
Read the full piece here.
