Labour’s War on Free Speech

Thursday, August 22, 2024

MAKE A DONATION

Get in Touch

Member Login

BECOME A MEMBER

Join Today

Live Campaigns

Use our campaigning tool to write to your MP

Sir Keir Starmer must be reminded that free speech is a fundamental human right

The Prime Minister’s recent clamp down on free speech is deeply worrying. Since the beginning of August, we’ve witnessed the greatest assault on free speech in this country since Oliver Cromwell passed a law banning all theatrical performances in 1642.

In the wake of the civil unrest that spread across the UK following the murder of three children in Southport, Sir Keir has blamed ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ on social media for whipping up violence and urged the authorities to prosecute people for saying supposedly inflammatory things online.

As a result, a man who has been sent to jail for 18 months for sharing something “offensive” that someone else said on Facebook, another man was sent down for three years for posting “anti-Establishment rhetoric” and a third man was jailed for 18 months for chanting “Who the f*** is Allah?”.

Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has even warned that people sharing footage of the riots online may be prosecuted. “People might think they’re not doing anything harmful, they are, and the consequences will be visited upon them,” he said.

This threatening language is more reminiscent of a tin-pot dictatorship than the birthplace of parliamentary democracy and it has unleashed a wave of terror across the country, with hundreds of thousands of people now worried that they may be sent to prison for posting something un-PC online.

This has to stop. We need to remind the Prime Minister, a former human rights lawyer, that free speech is the most important human right of all because without it we wouldn’t be able to defend any of the others.

Time remaining for you to raise this issue with your local MP:

Days

Hours

Minutes

Seconds

Thank you for your interest in this campaign. The window has now passed for you to contact your MP about this matter.

Here’s how you can take action

At the Free Speech Union, we’ve sent a pre-action protocol letter to the Education Secretary, threatening a judicial review if she doesn’t reverse her decision.

However, to increase our chances of rescuing this vital piece of legislation, we also need to keep up the pressure on MPs. Please use our campaigning tool to write to your local MP, urging them to ask Ms Phillipson to think again.

Completing the form is a simple, fast process that can have a significant impact. We’ve even provided a template to help, but feel free to personalise it. Your voice matters and it’s vital that you make it heard.

Note: Please write your name and address underneath “Kind regards” at the bottom of the letter in addition to filling in the boxes asking for your name, address and email. If you don’t do both, your MP won’t be able to see who the letter is from.

Write to MP

Enter your postcode

Your local MP

Your constituency is:

Your MP is:

Email:
Telephone:

Write your message

Feel free to customise our template

Dear {{name}},

I am writing to express my unhappiness about the government’s recent clamp down on free speech.

We are just a few weeks into this administration and everything I have seen so far suggests that Sir Keir Starmer’s attitude to free speech has changed significantly since 2013, when, as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), he warned that too many prosecutions of people for social media posts would have a “chilling effect”.

“The CPS is bound by the Human Rights Act 1998, which enshrines Article 10 [the right to free expression], so as long as article 10 gets it right, there’s an in-built safeguard,” he said while talking about the DPP’s recently issued guidelines on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media.

It was, he explained, “about trying to get the balance right, making sure time and resources are spent on cases that really do need to go to court, and not spent on cases which people might think really would be better dealt with by a swift apology and removal of the offending tweet”.

Sir Kier the Prime Minister would do well to heed the words of Mr Starmer the DPP.

In the wake of the civil unrest that spread across the UK following the murder of three children in Southport, the Prime Minister has blamed misinformation and disinformation on social media for whipping up violence and urged the authorities to prosecute people for saying supposedly inflammatory things online.

This includes one man who has been sent to jail for 18 months for sharing something “offensive” that someone else said on Facebook.

It also includes a woman who was arrested, held in custody for 36 hours, and then released pending further investigation for wrongly identifying the Southport attacker in an X post, even though she used the phrase “if this is true” and then, once the facts became known to her, rectified with – in the former DPP’s own words – “a swift apology and removal of the offending tweet”.

Sir Keir’s successor as DPP, Stephen Parkinson, has even warned that people sharing footage of the riots online may be prosecuted. “People might think they’re not doing anything harmful, they are, and the consequences will be visited upon them,” he said.

Sir Keir has also said social media companies should do more to remove supposedly harmful content from their platforms, with his government now weighing up plans to strengthen the Online Safety Act 2023.

It remains unclear how the Prime Minister would amend the Act or why Sadiq Khan thinks it is “not fit for purpose”.

Is the Prime Minister suggesting that one of the criminal offences created by the Act – the section 179 false communications offence, which came into force in January – is inadequate because it applies only to messages that are knowingly false (i.e., ‘disinformation’) and fails to catch those spreading messages which they are unaware are false (‘misinformation’)?

Or does he wish to restore a clause the previous Conservative government dropped during the legislative process, which would empower the Secretary of State at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, to lay a statutory instrument identifying a list of lawful content that social media companies would be obliged to remove?

The problem with forcing X, Facebook and YouTube to remove ‘legal but harmful’ content is do we trust politicians to decide what opinions should be banned? All too often, ‘misinformation’ is just a euphemism for any point of view the government of the day happens to disagree with.

The key phrase there is ‘government of the day’, and I would ask you to remind the Prime Minister that a more censorious Online Safety Act would one day be inherited by a government of a different political persuasion. As the civil rights activist Ira Glasser once remarked: “Speech codes are like poison gas: they seem like a good weapon when you have the gas, and a detested enemy is in your sights. But it all depends on who has the gas, and how the political winds blow.”

Some of the other risks I see coming down the track include a Westminster version of the Scottish Hate Crime Act, the criminalisation of ‘Islamophobia’, a ‘conversion practices’ ban that will punish parents, doctors and teachers who dissent from gender ideology, a Race Equality Act that will embed Critical Race Theory across workplaces, and an attempt to force newspapers and magazines to bend the knee to a state-controlled press regulator.

Sir Keir Starmer’s attacks on free speech have already done serious damage to the U.K.’s international reputation. Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, recently ridiculed the Prime Minister for “putting people in jail for posting on social networks”.

As your constituent, I urge you to remind Sir Keir Starmer that freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It is arguably the most important human right of all because without it we wouldn’t be able to defend any of the others.

As a former human rights lawyer, the Prime Minister must have understood this at some point in the past. You need to remind him to stick to his principles and not ride roughshod over our human rights when it is politically convenient to do so.

Kind regards,

Email preview

I'm happy for the FSU to process and store my information *required I'm happy to receive future content for FSU

Live Campaigns

Use our campaigning tool to write to your MP

Sir Keir Starmer must be reminded that free speech is a fundamental human right

Time remaining for you to raise this issue with your local MP:

Here’s how you can take action

Enter your postcode

Your local MP

Write your message

Email preview

Join Our Community

Quick Links

Organisation Address

Welcome to the Free Speech Union