Keir Starmer’s two-tier tyranny

After the riots, comes the crackdown. In Downing Street last night, UK prime minister Keir Starmer addressed the nation following violence, protests and clashes in Southport, Hartlepool and London – all sparked by the horrific alleged murders of three young girls by a 17-year-old in Southport on Monday. Starmer unveiled a suite of measures in response to the despicable scenes that have lit up TV and smartphone screens this week, including an attack on a Southport mosque on Tuesday.

While he was a little thin on the details, Starmer called for criminal behaviour orders to be used to restrict known agitators’ movements and for sinister, facial-recognition technology to be rolled out by forces across the country, civil-liberties concerns be damned. He also called on social-media firms to do more to tackle ‘misinformation’, a thinly veiled call for censorship.

It goes without saying that the rioting we’ve seen in recent days is contemptible. As was the fake news, spread online by hard-right influencers, about the Southport suspect being a Muslim small-boats migrant. We now know he’s a Brit of Rwandan heritage, with reportedly no known links to Islam. Still, the violence and bigotry of the fringe cannot become an excuse to corrode all of our freedoms, particularly free speech.

Starmer was typically weasel-worded about what he wants the social-media firms to do, suggesting ‘there’s a balance to be struck’ on content moderation. No doubt he was taking aim at Elon Musk’s X in particular, given it is basically the only major platform that even tries to uphold freedom of speech, even reinstating the account of anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson last November.

But the direction of travel is undeniable. Hot on the heels of Labour cancelling the implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – one of the Tories’ few positive legislative achievements – it’s now clear that our fundamental freedoms mean even less to this government than they did to its predecessor, which tried to protect free speech on campus while placing it in deadly peril online via the new Online Safety Act.

For as bad as the Tories were on the free speech and civil liberties front, things will only get worse. Starmer belongs to a breed of politician who instinctively sees dissent as dangerous and citizens as needing to be monitored and managed. I dare say we can expect more ‘liberal’ authoritarianism from this barrister turned chief prosecutor turned technocrat-in-chief. It’s in his DNA.

This censorious crusade will reach far beyond the hard-right fringe he is posturing against at the moment. Labour’s manifesto pledged to toughen up hate-crime law where it relates to ‘gender’ – opening the door to an SNP-style assault on ordinary people’s ability to call a man a man and a woman a woman. Starmer is also a long-time advocate of press regulation, having presided over a slew of outrageous and spurious prosecutions of journalists in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, when he was running the Crown Prosecution Service.

At the same time, I think we all know who Starmer’s clampdowns will spare – or at least go a little easier on. Indeed, he could have done that press conference after the Harehills riot two weeks ago, when police were attacked and a bus was set on fire by a mob after social workers attempted to take some Roma children into care. But he didn’t. We only got a perfunctory statement back then. ‘Whatever the apparent cause or motivation, we make no distinction. Crime is crime’, Starmer said in Downing Street last night. If that were true, you’d think he’d have mentioned the other huge riot that took place just a fortnight ago.

Thus, the two-tier treatment of violent disorder looks set to be entrenched. West Yorkshire Police retreated from the Harehills riot, leaving its residents terrified in their homes. Perhaps cops were fearful of further inflaming ‘community tensions’, even though the community was literally in flames. By contrast, more than 100 people were arrested in central London on Wednesday night, after a Southport-related protest on Whitehall turned into a violent clash between troublemakers and the cops. Some will wonder if police are only willing to intervene when it is largely white working-class men kicking off. Such double standards have fuelled public anger and allowed hard-right shit-stirrers to pose as martyrs.

It was also interesting to hear Starmer summon so much passion to denounce hateful activism last night. After all, we’ve heard no such condemnation from him about the ‘pro-Palestine’ protests that have been periodically roiling London this past year, often descending into carnivals of Jew hatred. The silence is particularly deafening given we know that some of the groups behind those demos have links to Hamas, the genocidal, Islamofascist terror group. One of them, the Muslim Association of Britain, was founded by a former Hamas chief. But don’t you dare call them ‘hate marches’…

If we want to have any hope of getting to grips with the horrors of this week, we need to stand up for free speech, impartial policing and civil liberties. It’s the only way we’ll be able to discuss what has gone so badly wrong, rebut the nonsense being spouted by bad actors and stop feeding the new sectarianism in our midst. Starmer’s two-tier crackdown must be resisted.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_