New FSU Podcast: Andrew Doyle and Lord Young on new Orwellian proposals from Government advisors to tackle "misinformation"

Max Thompson, Campaigns Officer

7 August 2026

In this week's episode of the FSU Podcast, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young of Acton, sits down with a good friend of the FSU, comedian and free speech campaigner Andrew Doyle.

In the episode, they discuss a little-noticed, government-commissioned report which was published in May on misinformation and its implications for public debate. Andrew has called this report an "attack on democracy".

The report's Orwellian proposals include "psychological inoculation", "pre-bunking", and game-based "interventions" designed to steer the public towards state-approved political messages. It seeks to tackle so-called "misinformation" — what we would simply call the truth.

The 136-page report classifies "anti-LGBTQ+ narratives" as one of several types of "false and misleading information" said to be circulating in Britain. Other categories identified alongside it include "electoral fraud claims" and attempts at the "institutional delegitimisation" of the European Union, while a further category on immigration covers "false claims about migrant entitlements, misrepresentation of the demographic composition of migrant arrivals and the misattribution of criminal acts to migrant communities." You can read more about this Orwellian report commissioned by the Government Office for Science from FSU Campaigns Officer Max Thompson here.

One particularly striking example cited in the report is the claim that Olympic boxer Imane Khelif is a man, which the report classifies not under its gender category but as "racist/Islamophobic misinformation."

Andrew and Lord Young also discuss Andrew's move to Arizona, where he has been working with Graham Linehan and Rob Schneider. They turn, too, to the deeply dystopian government green paper Watch this Space, which seeks to force social media companies to prioritise the promotion of public broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4 as "trustworthy" sources over other outlets, including GB News, The Telegraph, and The Guardian.

Watch the episode on the FSU YouTube channel here.