Can free speech survive Keir Starmer?

As a free-speech campaigner, I was deeply alarmed by the prospect of a Labour government. But it turns out, I wasn’t nearly worried enough.

The unrelenting assault on this essential human right since Sir Keir Starmer entered Downing Street in July has shocked even the most jaundiced of observers. Who could have predicted this time last year that scores of people would be prosecuted for offensive speech on social media following a brutal knife attack? That two police officers would turn up at the door of an award-winning journalist on Remembrance Sunday to interview her about a year-old tweet that she’d deleted within hours? That Britain’s record on freedom of expression would be so bad that it has turned us into a global laughing stock? All of which means that when speculating about what will become of free speech in 2025, we should assume the worst.

Let’s start with the threats already in the pipeline. The Employment Rights Bill, which will almost certainly receive royal assent next year, contains a clause that will extend employers’ liability under the Equality Act to third-party harassment – ie, the harassment of employees by customers and the like. That means that owners of pubs, bars, restaurants, hotels, sports stadia, concert venues, etc, will have a legal obligation to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to protect their employees from ‘harassment’ by anyone they come into contact with in the course of doing their jobs.

When you bear in mind that under the Equality Act ‘harassment’ includes overheard conversations that might upset or offend someone with a protected characteristic, the implications of this are deeply sinister. Pubs will have to employ ‘banter bouncers’ to police the conversations of customers to make sure no one is saying anything risqué that could be overheard by a member of staff. Hotels will have to stop anyone entering the lobby wearing a ‘Woman: Adult Human Female’ t-shirt. Football clubs will have to ban anyone who shouts ‘Are you blind?’ at a linesman, in case they’re overheard by a partially sighted steward. In short, the chilling effect that the Equality Act has had on workplaces, in which everyone is constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure they’re not overheard, will be extended to every area of our lives.

Then there’s the Football Governance Bill, another piece of legislation bound to go through next year. It includes several clauses that will require football clubs to promote equality, diversity and inclusion even more aggressively than they do at present. When you consider that Newcastle FC has already given a gender-critical feminist a two-season ban for saying on X that she doesn’t think transwomen are women, the mind boggles.

We already have Kick It Out and Rainbow Laces. Stonewall hovers over every boardroom in the Premier League. Not long ago, footballers would religiously take the knee before each match. Does the Labour government want fans to produce a certificate proving they’ve had unconscious-bias training before being allowed into a stadium? In future, when visiting fans at the Emirates chant ‘Is this a library?’, Arsenal supporters will be able to point to Sir Keir in his executive box and then put their fingers to their lips. If Starmer has his way, every stadium in the country will be a library.

Labour also promised a ‘full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices’ in its manifesto and it’s a racing certainty that this will happen in 2025 as well. What does that mean, given that what’s commonly thought of as ‘conversion therapy’ is already illegal in Britain and, in any event, all but disappeared about 25 years ago? The answer is that Labour wants to criminalise parents and health professionals who deviate in any way from the ‘gender-affirming care’ approach, whereby any adolescent suffering from gender confusion is encouraged to embark on an irreversible medical pathway rather than pause and reflect, or undergo a course of psychotherapy.

Finally, home secretary Yvette Cooper has said she wants to lower the threshold for the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs). Yes, you read that correctly. Police forces in England and Wales have recorded about a quarter of a million of these since the concept was introduced by the College of Policing in 2014, which is an average of 65 a day. Already they have been recorded against playground taunts, un-PC jokes and political speeches about immigration. But Cooper thinks this isn’t nearly enough. By the time Labour is turfed out in 2029 – please God! – newspapers will be running news stories about those rare and exotic creatures who haven’t had an NCHI recorded against them.

Okay, so those are the anti-free-speech measures we know are heading towards us next year. What about the stuff that wasn’t in Labour’s manifesto?

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sir Keir takes steps to criminalise Islamophobia, something he hinted at when answering a question from Tahir Ali MP during PMQs in November, about what ‘measures’ he’d take to ‘prohibit’ the ‘desecration’ of the Koran. Instead of ruling out any new blasphemy laws, Sir Keir replied: ‘I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.’

Now, I think it’s unlikely that Labour will actually bring forward a bill outlawing ‘Islamophobia’. More probable is that it will just quietly lower the threshold for the offence of stirring up religious hatred under the Public Order Act 1986 to include all forms of ‘Islamophobia’ as defined by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (a definition the Labour Party has already officially adopted for internal matters, by the way). This would outlaw ‘claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword’. Among other things, that will mean Tom Holland’s publisher having to withdraw all copies of his history of Islam, The Shadow of the Sword, or face prosecution.

Then there’s the overwhelming likelihood that Labour will introduce the Westminster equivalent of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. The Law Commission of England and Wales urged the last government to do precisely that and it would have happened if it hadn’t been for intense, behind-the-scenes lobbying by the Free Speech Union. But if the Law Commission dusts off its oven-ready bill and presents it to the current government, it’s guaranteed to get a warm reception. Soon, the ‘dwelling defence’, whereby you cannot be prosecuted for ‘stirring up’ hatred in your own home (by telling your pink-haired daughter that you don’t think biological men should be able to compete in women’s football, for instance), will be a thing of the past in England and Wales, just as it is now in Scotland.

The last ‘known unknown’ is legislation forcing newspapers and magazines to bend the knee to a state regulator of the press. At the time of writing, it looks likely that the Spectator will withdraw from IPSO, the voluntary press regulator, because of its ridiculous decision to censure the magazine for publishing an article correctly describing trans activist Juno Dawson as ‘a man who claims to be a woman’. The Spectator’s departure might well be swiftly followed by the Telegraph and then The Times, at which point I would expect IPSO to collapse. That will give the government the excuse it needs to revive Lord Leveson’s proposal for state regulation of the press, with publishers having no choice about whether to submit to its diktats. That will be the end of press freedom as we know it.

All of this probably sounds too horrific to be true. Is this government really going to blithely toss aside a right that has existed in this country to a greater or lesser degree since 1215? Judging from its merciless attacks on free speech since 4 July, you’d better believe it.

Toby Young is the general secretary of the Free Speech Union.