“The despicable behaviour of the few must not become a pretext for silencing the many,” writes Fraser Myers for Spiked in the wake of the riots that have spread across a dozen towns and cities, initially triggered by the tragic murder of three children in Southport last week.
Fraser continues:
Here comes the crackdown. After days of rioting and disorder across England, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to get tough – and not just on those criminal and far-right elements directly involved in the despicable violence that followed the horrendous murder of three young girls in Southport last Monday. The thuggish and racist behaviour of the few has rapidly become a pretext for constraining the liberties of the many.
The UK prime minister, in two Downing Street press conferences last week, unveiled a suite of proposals to try to quell the rioting.
Most striking of all, he damned the supposedly malign influence of ‘large social-media firms and those who run them’, and demanded that they get a firmer grip on the posting of misinformation. He also warned that there would be consequences for those who ‘whip up’ disorder by spreading rumours or speculation online.
The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, went further on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, declaring social-media companies to be responsible for both the ‘shocking misinformation that has escalated’ the riots, as well as ‘the deliberate organisation of violence’ on these platforms.
It is entirely possible to loathe the actions of these rioters, while also being alarmed by the government’s response and its implications for free speech. Any crackdown on so-called misinformation, or even on the ‘whipping up of hatred’, is not going to be confined to those who are directly participating in or inciting violence. It will inevitably be wielded against dissenting views more broadly. This is always what happens.
Just look at the McCarthyite climate that is raging at the moment. There are widespread demands to have Nigel Farage either arrested or booted out of parliament in the wake of the riots. The Reform UK leader released an ill-advised video last week suggesting that the authorities might have been withholding information from the public about the identity of the Southport suspect and his possible motives.
Nevertheless, #FarageRiots and #ArrestFarage have trended for much of the past week. LBC’s James O’Brien, for his part, has accused Farage of directly ‘inciting’ the riots. Another prominent commentator has called for parliament to take ‘urgent action’ against those ‘extremist’ MPs that have ‘fan[ned] the flames of far-right hatred and violence’ – a thinly veiled demand to have Farage and his colleagues in Reform expelled from the House of Commons.
As the cultural elites’ response to the rioting shows, it’s unlikely to be only outright fascists and racists who are condemned to any digital gulag. Populist politicians, right-leaning journalists and those with commonly held political views could soon find themselves being lumped in with rioters and extremists.
The grim irony here is that any crackdown on free expression – online or off, through state sanction or cancellation – risks galvanising the very forces that Starmer and Co claim they are trying to contain. If concerns about immigration, multiculturalism and sectarianism are banished from mainstream media and major platforms, they will not simply disappear. Instead, they will find expression only on the fringes. No one benefits more from the ever-expanding definition of the ‘far right’, and the censorship that always comes with it, than the far right itself. The censoriousness of the establishment is a gift to those grifters who claim to speak truth to power and pose as the silenced voice of the majority.
Violence, rioting and vandalism must be punished. Speech, on the other hand, must be protected from clampdowns at all costs. Censorship will only make martyrs out of bigots while curtailing all of our rights. Free speech isn’t the problem here. In fact, it is a big part of the solution. It is our only way to thrash out the issues that confront us – to expose the failings of the establishment and the lies of the hard right. These riots have done enough damage to our nation. We can’t let them be used to trash our precious liberties, too.
Worth reading in full.
