‘Think before you post’: Britain’s slide into censorship

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.

The upshot of this is a scale of speech-policing that is surely unprecedented in our history. In 2017, an investigation by The Times found that nine people a day were being arrested for ‘posting allegedly offensive messages online’ – with 3,395 arrested in 2016 alone. Even then, that investigation was limited to one piece of legislation – the Communications Act – and the real number is almost certainly higher, not least because many police forces didn’t respond to the survey. Greg Lukianoff, president of America’s estimable Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, argues that, on the basis of those partial numbers alone, Britain is comfortably locking up more people today for speech crimes than America did during the first Red Scare.

When people think of hate-speech laws they probably imagine some vicious fascist, being dawn-raided for airing toxic, ancient hatreds. There’s still a bit of that. But as those racist rioters remind us, while they are mercifully small in number, censoring racists doesn’t make racists go away – it just forces them to spew their bile out of sight, at the fringes and in fetid echo chambers, where they can’t be clocked or challenged. What’s more, there are many supposed speech criminals who – while offensive to some – are hardly dangerous bigots. There’s Count Dankula, the YouTuber who was convicted in Scotland for making a ‘grossly offensive’ comedy video in which he taught his pug to do a Nazi salute. Feminist Kate Scottow was convicted of causing ‘needless anxiety’ via persistent ‘misgendering’ – thankfully, that one was overturned. Christian street preachers are often arrested by the police for airing their predictably less-than-liberal views on homosexuality and transgenderism. This has been going on for decades now. Indeed, it’s been almost 20 years since Sam Brown, a student at Oxford University, was famously arrested for calling a police horse gay.

More alarmingly, the British state is increasingly taking an interest in things people say in private. There have been a few cases now in which people in England have been convicted for racist posts made in private WhatsApp groups. In Scotland, the great, sinister innovation of Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act is that it forgoes the usual dwelling defence – a feature of existing hate-speech legislation that prohibits arrest over speech uttered in your own home. Now, any Scottish dinner-table chat could be a crime scene.

Certainly, incitement to violence, true threats and so on are crimes in every civilised society – even in America, where the First Amendment renders any censorship of speech and the press unconstitutional. But ‘incitement to hatred’ and ‘grossly offensive’ speech are different things entirely. One man’s hatred is another man’s passionately held moral conviction. Offence is always in the eye of the beholder. We all think we know hate or offence when we see it, but at the end of the day everyone will draw the line slightly differently. You’re then left with someone having to decide, and nowadays that means someone like Keir Starmer – a man who until about five minutes ago thought it is ‘not right’ to say that only women can have a cervix.

The same goes for policing misinformation. Of course misinformation exists. The question is, who do you want to act as your Ministry of Truth? Big Tech? The state? Neither has a particularly encouraging track record. In 2020, Silicon Valley brutally suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, labelling it Russian disinformation, even though it later transpired to be legit. And if you’re comfortable with the state deciding what is and isn’t true then, let’s just say, you’re a much more trusting soul than most. Grimly, this seems to be another new frontier in British state-led censorship. The new Online Safety Act contains a ‘false communications offence’. A 55-year-old woman has just been arrested in Cheshire on suspicion of committing this offence and another, for her alleged role in spreading the rumour about the Southport killer being a Muslim asylum seeker. As much as I loathe those cranks who spread that bogus, inflammatory claim, cases like this will open Pandora’s Box where censorship is concerned.

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.

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