In the wake of Keir Starmer’s response to recent riots, Tom Slater makes the case that Britain is sliding into authoritarian censorship.
Writing for spiked, Slater argues “Britain has fallen. That’s been the take on the anti-woke chattersphere this past 24 hours, as prime minister Keir Starmer’s post-riots crackdown has taken an Orwellian turn. Alongside coming down hard on the violent racist thugs on our streets, a move no sane person has a problem with, Starmer has also trained his ire on the apparent cause of every societal ill, at least according to our ruling class: too much free speech on social media.”
“All week, the government has been calling on the Big Tech firms, particularly Elon Musk’s X, to do more to clamp down on misinformation and hate. Of course, we’ve seen plenty of both, online and off, recently. A lurid claim that the Southport child-killings, the spark for nearly two weeks of unrest, were committed by a Muslim asylum seeker swirled in the wake of that horror. But while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is passionately in favour of misinformation or hate, the past few days have reminded us of the sinister territory you enter into when the powers-that-be try to police them.
“Since Musk has refused to play ball, even goading Starmer with accusations of ‘two-tier policing’ and feverish suggestions Britain is verging on ‘civil war’, the government has resorted to doing the silencing itself. Yesterday, we had director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson telling us that even a retweet could land you in an all-grey prison tracksuit. ‘You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred’, Parkinson told the PA news agency. ‘Think before you post’, screamed the Gov.UK X account last night, reminding Brits that ‘content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal’.
“The latter post caught the attention of Musk, who retweeted it to his millions of followers. Now Gov.UK’s mentions are full of furious Very Online yanks, mourning our tumble into totalitarianism, sharing pics of Starmer done up like a well-coiffed North Korean dictator – Keir Jong-Un. I appreciate the concern, guys. But the more mundane truth is that the UK’s slide into woke authoritarianism has taken place over decades, not days – and Starmer’s crackdown on speech will be of zero surprise to those who have been paying attention.
Britain’s almost 60-year experiment in hate-speech legislation is a warning to the world. We first introduced an offence of ‘inciting racial hatred’ in 1965, in the Race Relations Act. Fast forward to today and we now have laws against ‘incitement to religious hatred’, ‘grossly offensive’ online communications and a police force who routinely harass women for calling men men on the internet. Cops have also taken to quietly recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’ against citizens’ names, when the pesky law gets in the way of their authoritarianism.”
Slater continues: “The Very Online Right’s telling of recent days, that Keir Starmer has all but taken power in a post-riots coup, is obviously a fantasy. For one thing, his crackdown is being prosecuted using existing laws, passed by Labour and Conservative governments over decades. The Online Safety Act passed last year, another signal achievement of those freedom-loving Tories. But that doesn’t mean our fight for free speech is any less important, or that the task ahead of us is at all simple or straightforward. At least a despot could potentially be toppled. Normality could then quickly resume. In the UK in 2024, being locked up for saying things is kind of normal. And it has been for a very, very long time.”
Worth reading in full.
