Breaking History - London’s Falling: How the Birthplace of Free Speech Became a Censor’s Paradise

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Once, Britain was the cradle of free speech- the land of Milton, Orwell, and John Stuart Mill. But in 2025, police are arresting citizens for tweets, comedians are detained for jokes, and ordinary people are jailed for words deemed “hateful.” In this episode, we trace how the birthplace of liberty became a censor’s paradise - and what it reveals about a Western world that’s forgotten Mill’s warning: that without dissent, truth itself cannot survive. CREDITS Executive Producer: Poppy Damon Associate Producer: Adam Feldman Sound Designer and Composer: Tony Peer Original theme songs by Eli Lake Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's a stunning irony in modern Britain. The birthplace of free speech is now a country where speaking your mind can be dangerous. Today, tweets can get you arrested. Online speech is policed by the actual police. And digital snitches are always watching. Has the cradle of liberty become its coffin? After the break, how the nation that gave the world to set. has become a censor's paradise.

The animal that caught his attention there was the wild horse, which covered the country in immense herds. Little known to Catlin or to Thomas Jefferson who longed to know more about horses in their natural state. Horses were so successful in the western wilds because they were original natives of North America. Eventually, a trade in wild horses dominated the southern west. It became an unexpected success and mustangers, a working-class phenomenon. of the West. Learn more on episode 11 of the American West with Dan Flores, the latest show from The Meat Eater Podcast Network, hosted by me, writer and historian Dan Flores, and brought to you by Velvet Buck, Wine with a Backbone. By focusing on deep time, wild animals, and the West's unique

environments, this podcast is a look at a West available nowhere else. Tune in now to the American West on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Once upon a time in a kingdom not so far away. I'm arresting you on suspicion of improper use of the electronic communications network. Watch. It's a place where the police regularly pay visits to citizens at their homes for their posts on social media. This is in relation to some comments that you've made on a Facebook page. Oh, really? I'll see a Facebook crime, is it? I'm going to be arrested for posting on Facebook.

Some comments that are offensive, obscene, and people have made a complaint about that. Where a man was recently fined for burning a Quran, while his knife-wielding assailant was spared incarceration. The man who burned the Quran was charged with a hate crime, found guilty, and find. The Muslim man who attacked him with a knife and shouted, I will kill you, walked free from court. Now, he pleaded guilty. He was given a suspended sentence after arguing that he was protecting his religion. A place where a well-known comedy writer was met at the airport by armed officers and detained for three offensive tweets. It sounds like Saudi Arabia or Qatar. But this is England in 2025.

You can find these videos everywhere on the internet. Constables politely show up at a private home to inquire about a resident who has tweeted or in some cases only liked a post that, quote, spreads hate, or may incite violence or provokes general offense. According to data obtained by the Times of London, police departments in the United Kingdom average 30 arrests a day for a fact. offensive posts on the internet. That's 1,200 per year. The country that gave the world John Stuart Mill and George Orwell now sends its police to arrest thought criminals. Reply guys and

red-pilled Facebook moms are doing time. It's really the idea and this shift that's taken place, the role of the police is not to protect us from violent crime, from burglaries and this sort of thing, but the role of the police is to protect us from hate. This is Paul Coleman, a British lawyer who represents clients that have run afoul of the UK's content police. Which is an extraordinary thing for a police force to claim as one of its primary goals. But I think what has happened in part of a broader trend of the sort of managerialism that we find ourselves in in Western civilization is it's become almost like part of the

quota reporting, tickboxing that we see in many other different sectors, and police are saying that there are targets. There are quotas for those who have violated a myriad of laws and regulations. Off-color jokes on Instagram or X risks violating the Online Safety Act. There are now non-crime hate incidents. This is when the cops show up to ask about a post that has been reported by a neighbor. Even the venerated English pub is at risk. A new bill is about to receive royal assent called the Employment Rights Bill,

and one of the things that will do will be to extend the liability of employers to the harassment of their employees by third parties, i.e. customers, members of the public. This is Lord Toby Young, the director of the United Kingdom's Free Speech Union. In pubs, if a pink-haired barmaid, overhears a couple of men who've had a couple of points telling a dirty joke in the corner, that will be harassment which our employer should take all reasonable steps to protect her against and she'll be able to sue her employer if he doesn't. So that will mean banter bounces in every beer garden having to prove you've had a suite

of diversity training before you can get served in pubs. It'll kill off the British pub. The highest profile example of the UK's war against free speech involves one of the finest humorists of his generation, Graham Linnehan. Hello, this is your cabin manager speaking. I just want to thank you for flying with us today and welcome you to London Heathrow. Yeah, it just landed and then there was a delay. Normally people jump up to their feet when a plane lands and they were told to stay in their seats.

It was all very strange. I heard my name being called over the thing and it almost immediately I knew what was going on. The passenger Graham Linehan in C-A-53, please disembark before the other passengers. Everyone else, please remain seated and your seatbelt fastened. Gathered all my stuff in front of a bunch of confused Arizonians and just walked out the door and yeah, they were all there. They were airport police, so it's not unusual they were armed. but the sight of them surrounding me it was just one of the funniest

and most surreal experiences of my life are actually going to march me through the airport, you know? Graham Linnehan isn't just a comedy writer. For those people in Ireland and Britain, in particular, he is the comedy writer. Maybe you've heard of Father Ted? Have you done things bad recently? Anything wrong?

Wrong? Yes, Dougal, wrong. You remember right and wrong, between the two. Page one of how to be a Catholic. Black books? Just look at this bastard. The IT crowd?

I'm afraid our adventure has come to an end. What? But why? It's not you, it's me. No, actually, it's not me. It is you. For the hugely popular Netflix show, Motherland. What about this fundraiser?

Oh, God. No way I'm organizing it. Would I miss that? As sitcom writers go, for a while at least, Graham was king. And yet, on September 1 of this year, a team of armed airport security men detained him and arrested him for his tweets. One of them recommended that women who see biological men in their bathrooms kick them in the family jewels. Very interesting thing happened that added to the... strangeness of it all, but my bail conditions, they started off as you're not allowed to go on Twitter.

And then they changed their minds and they said, you're not allowed to go, what did they say? Yeah, yeah, you're not allowed to go on Twitter. And they didn't say you can't go on your substack. So that's immediately what I did. I went to rant on my substack and I wrote the whole thing up. They changed it and they said, you're not allowed to contact the victim. Now, unless there's one big trans person who I insulted. There's no victim in this case.

You know, the tweets were, you know, scabrous, as I say, but they weren't named at anybody. So there's no victim for us not to contact. And yet those were still the bail conditions. In other words, Graham Linehan's ex-account is a threat to trans people everywhere. What in the name of Christopher Hitchens is going on? But Linnehan's problems stemmed not only from an intrusive state that considers raunchy jokes to be incitement to violence. His colleagues are co-conspirators in his censorship. Graham Linnehan really has been canceled.

He lost a Broadway musical because of his opinion that trans ideology encourages adolescents to mutilate themselves. Activists have stalked and sued him. The day he was arrested for the tweets, he was on his way to a court appearance where he was accused of assaulting an activist trying to film him outside. Ironically, this all took place at the Battle of Ideas.

Diaz Festival. Reportedly during the confrontation, Lennahan threw the individual's phone into the street after they repeatedly filmed him and other conference attendees. The problem with cancellation when you're someone who makes TV shows is that there's so many people you have to gather together, like actors who may be cautious about it, and agents who might be cautious about letting their actors do it, and the friends of the actors and the gay friends of the actors and the trans-identified friends of the actors. And, you know, you couldn't end up, I don't know, just going through the motions and never

quite actually getting a team together. So it's not only the cops that come and check on you if you're suspected of spreading wrong think. The elites themselves have played an important role in silencing of dissent. This is historian and free press contributor, Neil Ferguson. The odious thing is the collective spontaneous action by highly educated people in universities especially, but not only in universities, also in the legal profession, also in the media, also in technology companies, to suppress debate on a kind of Rob Spierrean principle that the public safety is more important than liberty. This kind of soft censorship has a long tradition, too, in England, is not unique to the early 21st century. When George Orwell finished his novel Animal Farm in 1943, a withering allegory about the false promise and brutality of Soviet communism,

a succession of publishers would not print it out of fear it may offend Joseph Stalin at the time when the USSR was an ally against the Nazi-led Axis powers. Orwell's initial preface Animal Farm, published posthumously, in 1972, takes his colleagues in the Republic of Letters to task for doing the work of the censor for him. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark without the need for any official ban. Orwell here was talking not only about the newspapers, but about the entire culture of wartime, England. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is not done to say it. Just as in mid-Victorian times, it was not done to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silent.

with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. You're listening to Breaking History. In this episode, we dive into genuinely unfashionable opinion and how it has fared over the years in the United Kingdom, how the country that invented free speech became a nation of snitches and censors after the break. some third world, burgers hide the face of girls.

When I post that in a tweet, I am told I must be. Even if I take it down, I might still go underground. Facebook rebate our police, who claim to be the social peace. Hi, watch what you say when you type it on your phone. This is the day when the cops are on to your home. Watch what you post when you share your fire your tape. Even city jokes may end up sweating hate. Hey, oh, ooh, ooh.

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talk a bit about English history, because to understand how free speech came to be, we have to get a sense of what came before. Until 1689, England was a censor's paradise. The king and the church determined what could be published. No parliamentarian or pamphleteer was sick. There were severe punishments for blasphemy. Think about roasting witches at a stake. But the glorious revolution in 1689 began to change them. Long story short, a group of prominent Protestants

persuade William of Orange to raise an army to unseat his father-in-law, the Catholic King James II. This confessional conflict ended up advanced. a kind of secular liberalism. Part of the deal was that this new king would accept the English Bill of Rights, which enshrined first and foremost the right to unfettered parliamentary debate. And this has been a feature of British political culture ever since.

Descent. Everyone, from radicals to reactionaries, gets to make their case inside Parliament. As Benjamin Disraeli jeered into silence during his maiden speech in the House of Commons, famously said, though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me. That was in 1837. This little opening in the late 17th century lit a spark. England already had an impressive intellectual tradition, Sir Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, John Milton, but the glorious revolution paved the way for what we know today as the age of reason. Think of John Locke, who lived through that glorious revolution, and his argument that man had inherent rights that derived from God, not privileges granted by kings.

Of course, these ideas also shaped our own revolution in America. Now, the fact that Parliament was a free speech zone, so to speak, meant that England developed a culture that at least respected dissent inside its legislature. And even when the reformers and the radicals lost, there was a record of their arguments. To give an example of this, the founding fathers in America had allies in the parliament. Edmund Burke and his rotund protege, Charles Fox, argued passionately against excessive taxation of the colonies. Over time, London became a safe haven for some of the world's most incendiary radicals, Karl Marx, Kwame and Krumah, and Ho Chi Minh, all counted the English capital as home in exile.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Finsbury Mosque in London featured the al-Qaeda propagandist Abu Hamza al-Masri's weekly sermons. That's the English tradition that helped to inspire a wave of democratic revolutions all over the world. Though, of course, as in the case of Marx and Krumah and Ho, beneficiaries of liberal speech laws do not always foment liberalism and often exploited for opposite ends. That's another episode. But England also has a rich history of suppressing dissent.

Blasphemers and heretics were jailed. Judges presided over the trials of witches. And this censorial tradition did not go away with the English and Scottish Enlightenment. So it's not surprising that in 2025 the police arrest British housewives and humorists for offensive social media posts. Well, it would be lovely to think that there was an ancient English or Anglo-Saxon tradition of free speech dating back to, I don't know, Magna Carta, nothing of the sort is true. This is Neil Ferguson. In fact, there was a long and established tradition of censorship.

All kinds of laws governed what you could say, particularly on religious matters, right the way through the medieval and early modern period, and indeed even the 19th century saw significant at restrictions on what we would call free speech. Free speech was a far more American idea than a British one. And I sometimes think it's true to say that there wasn't really a sense of free speech in England until the 1960s. And it's really, for my generation, that free speech has made available as a result of the onslaught of the Beatles and Monty Python.

and this kind of wave to sweep away the Victorian remnants of censorship. It's not the besor. He's a very noisy boy. Which was still around for, you know, D.H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's lover. Carries you all the way through to the sex pistols. So it's a complicated story. There is this incandescent intellectual tradition of free speech and dissent in England. That's great.

And there's also this long tradition of. censorship. So to illustrate this problem, I want to take us to an episode from the early 1800s. The year is 1825, and a radical tinsmith named Richard Carlyle was testing the limits of dissent of his own era. Carlisle was a troublemaker. He was first arrested in 1817 for publishing and selling a pamphlet that contained a parody of the Lord's Prayer. Later, he would be jailed for selling Thomas Payne's classic common sense. In 1825, he went further. He published his own pamphlet as advice to young women thinking about sex.

It was one of the first pamphlets to make the argument for contraception and family planning, as well as equality between the sexes. Carlisle even went so far as to basically propose that women had a right to good sex. Good for him. The full title, What is Love? containing most important instructions for the prudent regulation of the principle of love and the number of a family. And here's a snippet.

It is a barbarous custom that forbids the maid to make an advance in love or that confines the advance to the eye, the fingers, the gesture. It is ridiculous. Why should not the female state her passions to the male as well as the male to the female? Young women, assume inequality, plead your passions. It will not surprise you that Carlisle's genuinely unfashionable opinion, to borrow Orwell's phrase again, landed him in the clink. Victorian England was, well, quite Victorian. It was considered ill-mannered, for example, to use the word trousers in front of a lady. A pamphlet, asserting the right of women to experience an orgasm, was way out of the norm. Nonetheless, Carlyle was also admired by the intellectuals and reformers of his day.

His advocacy for early forms of contraceptions, sheepskin condoms and sponges, appealed to followers of Jeremy Benton and Thomas Malthus, who both worried a great deal that the industrial workers teeming into the cities were having too many babies. They feared there would not be enough resources to feed the population if the trend continued. Now, we should say Carlyle was not the only target of the police. These young reformers who would distribute pamphlets like What Is Love also risked incarceration for their activism.

And one of them was a young man named John Stuart Mill. He would become one of the greatest philosophers in English history. The details here are disputed. Mill, who was only 19 years old when Carlyle published What Is Love, is said to have been jailed for a few days for distributing that pamphlet back in 1825. Historical accounts differ. One version of the story is that Mill was arrested at age 16

for distributing a similar pamphlet advocating birth control, and some of his biographers say that this incident never happened. What is clear is that as a young man, the trials and tribulations of Carlisle, as well as the overall stifling of public opinion during the Victorian era, spurred the young Mill to chafe against the censor. Eventually, in 1859, he would publish

what is by my lights the best argument for free speech ever committed to the page. On Liberty. Before we dive into On Liberty, a brief background on Mill because it's just too good. His childhood was quite literally designed to turn him into a Spock-like logic machine. His father, James Mill, was a leading intellectual of his day

a student of Bentham's. John Stuart Mill was prohibited, for example, from playing with other children. They thought it would distract him, and he was deprived of his dinner at times if he got something wrong when he recounted his day's readings and afternoon walks with his father.

But this intellectual boot camp produced a prodigy. By the time he was three years old, John Stuart Mill could read basic classical Greek from flashcards. When he was six years old, he wrote a 1,500-word paper on the history of the Roman Empire based on Gibbon's classic work.

And at the age of seven, he was reading Plato's dialogues and the histories of Herodotus. At 13, Bentham became John Stuart Mill's personal tutor, and he learned economics, logic, and advanced mathematics. Mill developed a painful fear of socializing with others in his adolescence, and at the age of 21, he suffered a nervous breakdown, where he seriously questioned whether he had the capacity to feel human, in emotion. He only snapped out of it by reading French and English poetry. This boy genius would emerge to become one of the greatest intellectuals we've ever seen.

He wrote a widely regarded treatise on economics, which was taught in universities until the early 1900s. He wrote thousands of columns, and he wrote the first book to make an extended in serious argument for gender equality. His most enduring work, though, is on liberty. Now, many of you are probably familiar with Mills' phrase, the marketplace of ideas, a metaphor that instructs that better speech is the antidote to bad speech. From the vantage point of 2025,

it's easy to dismiss this as foolish optimism. The Internet era has brought us the return of discredited notions like the theory that the Earth is flat. Is sunlight really the way? the best disinfectant when tens of millions of Americans apparently believe in UFOs? But this is a facile reading of On Liberty. Mill did not support a marketplace of ideas because he thought that the truth would always win out.

Rather, he believed that the only way to know the truth is if it can be tested in what he called the collision of adverse opinion. I will let the master take it from here. First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth.

And since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, It is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true but the whole truth, unless it is suffered to be and actually is vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. I want to linger in a few parts of this.

Let's start with the idea that most opinions are neither entirely true or entirely false. Isn't that a perfect description of political discourse? You don't get the whole truth from a prosecutor's brief or a political platform. Rather, it's the collision of arguments that one can then sift through the facts and fictions of both sides. And that's the real value of dissent. When we start denying dissenters the right to voice, again, genuinely unfashionable opinion, we lose a check against our own prevailing dogma because these positions are rarely entirely wrong

or entirely correct. And while it's not always true that new ideas or arguments are proven to be true over time, it happens quite a bit. In 1825, the prevailing opinion was that it was obscene and blasphemous to urge factory workers to use contraception. Today, this is basically a consensus opinion. A second insight from Mill is that he understands that free speech is not simply the absence of government restraints on what citizens can and cannot say. Like Orwell's concern about the acquiescence of publishers and writers to the dogmas of their day, Mill is just as worried about social pressures that stifle distancing opinions. It is the opinions men entertain and the feelings they cherish, respecting those who disown the beliefs

they deem important, which makes this country not a place of mental freedom. For a long time past, the chief mischief of the legal penalties is that they strengthen the social stigma. It is that stigma which is really effective, and so effective is it, that the profession of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in England than is in many other countries. Mill later concludes that the price of what he calls intellectual pacification is the kind of self-censorship that many in the English-speaking world know today as cancellation. It's true that Mill is influenced by his own era. In Victorian England, the disapproval of one social class carried a greater penalty than the rough and tumble of American politics as it plays out on social media today.

But there is still truths to what Mill is saying. most people do not have the means and the guts to swim against the tide of moral opprobrium. There are a few Graham Blanahans or J.K. Rawlings. It's just not worth the trouble. And we see it on both sides of the Atlantic. After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, many Democrats were cowed into endorsing the defund the police movement, even though they knew in their hearts it was wrong.

And in the UK, climate change skeptics were targeted by activists and compared to holocaust. cost deniers. From Mills' perspective, it doesn't matter what the better policy is in these examples. If proponents of the minority view are demonized and penalized for making their case, as they were in these instances, then their opponents are depriving their own side of testing the truth of their propositions. After the break, how England forgot Mills' enduring lessons. Ontario, the weight is over. The gold standard of online casinos has arrived. Golden Nugget Online Casino is live.

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Eligibility restrictions apply. See Golden Nuggett Casino.com. for details. Please play responsibly. As a first step, we will implement a program to take 250,000 young people off benefit and into work, funded by a one-off windfall levied on the excess profits of the privatized monopoly utilities. You just heard from Tony Blair on his road to 10 Downing Street. This was another era. The free world had won the Cold War. And the Labor Party, after being beaten down,

for nearly 20 years by Margaret Thatcher's Tories was back in power. This was the era of Oasis in Cool Britannia, but it was also the beginning of a new era of censorship. So what happened, I think, was that the left's fundamental illiberalism began to creep back into the political bloodstream under Tony Blair. This again is Neil Ferguson. A prime minister who wasn't a socialist, he was really a liberal in disguise, but the party retained its tendency to want to shut down

that which it disapproved of. Roger Scruton saw this very clearly, and Roger was one of the most influential conservative thinkers for my generation, and Roger saw earlier than the rest of us that there was going to be this creeping censorship based on concepts such as hate speech, and this would give rise to a kind of new blasphemy regime. One of the most consequential pieces of legislation introduced and enacted during the Blair years

was the Human Rights Act of 1998. This was something new because it overturned a long English tradition of common law understanding of free speech. If something was not explicitly prohibited, then it was tolerated. Paul Coleman explains. He introduced the Human Rights Act to England in 1998, and this is significant because up until this point,

as I say, freedom of speech was considered something permitted in England, Wales, under the common law, and by enumerating it as a right in the human rights act, Act, all of a sudden, our whole understanding of freedom of speech shifted to, well, what does this one article say in this Human Rights Act? And Article 10 of the Human Rights Act, although it protects freedom of speech, it has a huge number of caveats, a huge number of qualifiers and restrictions. And so it sort of fundamentally shifted how we, as Brits, thought of freedom of speech, which is something that we sort of have, but at the same time heavily caveated and heavily limited. So this marked a significant change, not only when it comes to enumerating permitted speech as opposed to tolerating that which isn't restricted, but it also introduced a new progressive

understanding that speech itself could be a kind of violence and that the fomenting of hate was not protected speech. This went hand in hand with the promotion of a kind of multiculturalism that led to cultural relativism and ultimately a kind of selective approach to justice that favored historical outgroups over the prevailing majority. Blair had effectively introduced a new kind of blasphemy. In the past, the state would crack down on those who libeled the church or published obscene material. Now speech that could be construed as stirring up hatred against a minority was the focus of the news censors. This idea that speech is on a continuation with violence has taken over most universities, sadly. But hate speech is still protected under the first

Amendment in America. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, treats its citizens the way Ivy League College presidents have treated their students and faculty. By the early 2000s, the UK began regulating digital speech as well. Blair's government passed the Communications Act in 2003, which penalized grossly offensive, indecent, obscene, or menacing communications online. He also introduced the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which banned any speech that stirred hatred of a race or religion. Here is Paul Coleman again. Gordon Brown followed, and he expanded that legislation. He expanded various other policing acts as well. And then in came the Conservatives in 2010 under David Cameron, and they just picked up where Labor left off. And so under Cameron's

Conservative Party, we have, for example, the Anti-Social Behavior Crime and Policing Act. That introduced this idea of public space protection orders, which essentially allow local councils to restrict otherwise lawful behavior in public spaces. And it's that legislation under the conservatives that have led to all of these Christians that we've been seeing in England be prosecuted for, for example, silently praying or holding up signs, offering for consensual conversation. It's a concept known as public space protection orders. and it came under the Anti-Social Behavior Crime and Policing Act. So that was 2014. And so the cases that we've seen, for example, Vice President J.D. Vance referred to the case of Adam Smith-Connor

in Vance's now famous Munich Security Conference speech. And he talked about this veteran, Adam Smith-Connor, who was arrested for silent prayer. That took place in Bournemouth. And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.

A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes. and Adam Smith-Connor was arrested and prosecuted and convicted under one of these public space protection orders that came from this conservative legislation in 2014. And so just to finish off the legislative picture, after Cameron came, Theresa May, she wanted to introduce an extremism bill without defining what extremism meant. And unfortunately, that was struck down, but it showed her. intent. And then in came Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and they introduced the Online Safety Act, and they introduced the Public Order Act, and the Public Order Act made these public space

protection orders national rather than just at the local level. And so the summary, really, from, I would say, 1997 through to the present day, has been, whether it's Labor or conservatives, both parties, following on from Tony Blair's example, how, have taken the position that their role as the government is to increase the power of the state and pass more and more censorial legislation that restricts speech both online and offline. So this is how England became a country where the police show up at people's homes to ask them about what they've posted on social media. A country where a housewife and daycare provider named Lucy Connolly

was sentenced to more than two years in prison for posting and later deleting. The following message on X. Fast deportations now. Set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care. If that makes me a racist, so be it. This was on July 24th, 2024. Connolly was responding to a horrific attack in Southport where a man, first misidentified as a Muslim immigrant, stabbed three girls. She was released from prison at the end of August and is now on probation. Here is what she told the telegraph last month.

to all the people that, you know, jeering that I was sent to prison think it's a good thing, think it's funny, hope that they broke me while I was in there, but I'm here to tell you that they didn't. Have you been Keir Starmer's political prisoner? Absolutely. To be sure, Connolly's tweet was offensive. But should she be imprisoned for that? Well, here's someone who believes that she should. There's the case of Mrs. Connolly, which is cited repeatedly by right-wing groups, which is you'll know of the

fact that three children were brutally murdered in Southport, which is in the northwest of England, in July of last year. This is Lord Charlie Falconer, who served as Secretary for Justice and Tony Blair's government. And there was a whole issue about whether or not asylum seekers had been involved in the murder. And there was riots in the country against asylum seekers. There was an attempt to burn down a asylum seekers hotel.

Mrs. Connolly posted on, I think, X, a tweet that said, in effect, burn down asylum seekers' hotels, I don't care. She took it down after a few hours. The attitude that the courts took towards the South, they're called the Southport riots, and the people who incited them was to take a really hard line on those who were rioting and attacking, for example, asylum seekers. And she was sent to prison, I think, for 31 months for posting that tweet. And she, in fact, served about 10 months in relation to it. Now, the question is, does that, is that an indication that there's a problem with free speech

in this country? Absolutely not. I think it's perfectly legitimate for people who incite that sort of hatred to be arrested and charged. This ties things back to Graham Linehan and the idea that a post on social media counts as incitement to violence. But even if you concede Lord Falconer's point, it's also true that Lucy Connolly received a hars than most anti-police rioters. Much like the disparity in initial sentencing for the man who burned the Quran versus his assailant, word crimes appear to get you into more trouble in the UK these days than actual crimes.

Now, a final factor here is the British Police Service itself. At the top levels of the institution, this ideology that demands the state protect minorities against offensive speech has taken over. Here again is Lord Toby Young. The higher echelons of the police force, it's actually no longer called the police force, called the police service now, appear to have been captured by radical progressive ideology and see it increasingly as their role to protect vulnerable, historically disadvantaged identity groups from persecution, from oppression.

And that means they, I think, under Home Office rules, the police are required to take very seriously any reports of... offensive things posted online, which have caused offense or alarm to minority groups. And I think various identity groups have become very adept at weaponizing this guidance to make sure that if something one of their political opponents are said online, they report it as, you know, as a potential hate crime. They know how to frame the report to trigger a kind of a bureaucratic, involuntary response on the part of the police service, which necessitates often the arrest of the person who's posted this particular offensive tweet. So that was what

happened to Graham Linehan, the celebrated comedy writer who now lives in the United States when he arrived at Heathrow a few weeks ago on a trip to the UK. What a nightmare. And yet Prime Minister Kier-Starmer would have a Have us believe that his government still cherishes the free exchange of ideas. Here he is just last month at a press conference with President Trump. And on free speech, that has long lived in this country. Free speech, it's one of the founding values of the United Kingdom, and we protect it jealously and fiercely and always will,

and we will bear down on any limits on free speech. Wait for it. And here's the butt. I draw a limit between free speech and the speech of those that want to pedophilia and suicide social media to children. And therefore, I'm all for free speech. I'm also for protecting children from things that will harm them, pedophiles, those that peddle suicide, which had a terrible consequence for individual. particularly teenagers, and so that's the balance we strike.

But we have had freedom of speech in this country for a very long time, and we will always protect it. No one in the UK, or for that matter, America, is arguing that free speech protects the dissemination of child pornography or harmful websites that encourage teenagers to take their own lives. Again, here is Paul Coleman. It was interesting what Kiyosama said in regard to his justification. for essentially what is the online safety act.

Because, again, he spoke to things that there's not really any disagreement on. There's not a single person making the case for why the distribution of child pornography should be legal within the UK. There's no one making the case for why speech that incites people to commit suicide should be lawful within the UK. But the Online Safety Act in many, many different ways, goes so far beyond. those intentions, which Kirstama well knows, but it is how almost all of the speech restrictions are introduced as this bait and switch, because those in power know full well that the people

won't go along with it if they're told what's actually happening. It would be easy to focus entirely on the state. Starmer deserves the opprobrium for pretending his government has defended free speech when it has restricted it. But the threat goes deeper. It's not just the government. It's the universities, the media, the professional associations. Just consider the case of philosopher Kathleen Stock, who taught until 2021 at Sussex University. She quit after students organized protests of her classes, claiming that she was transphobic. The final straw was that after one nasty protest, her own faculty union declined to defend her right to dissent from the prevailing dogma on gender ideology and instead launched an

inquiry into transphobia on campus, as she told the Guardian at the time. There's a small group of people who are absolutely opposed to the sorts of things I say, and instead of getting involved in arguing with me, using reason, evidence, the traditional university methods, they tell their students in lectures that I pose a harm to trans students, or they go on to Twitter and say that I'm a bigot. So where does this leave us today? Lord Toby Young is pessimistic. every Free Speech Union anniversary party for the last five years, I've said that things have reached absolute rock bottom when it comes to free speech in Britain, and they can only get better from now on. And then suddenly it gets worse by an order of magnitude. And I feel sometimes

like a man falling through a burning building. And every time I think my feet have reached rock bottom. Suddenly, the floor gives way again, and I'm plunging down again. That said, Young does see some slivers of hope. I'm hoping that if Labor doesn't get re-elected in 2029 and its prospects look pretty bad at the moment, then whoever forms the next government, whether it's reform, the conservatives, some combination of the two, they will set about trying to strip away some of these fetters on our free speech. Will that solve the free speech crisis in the United Kingdom? I'm not so sure.

In America, we had a swing of the pendulum as well in the last election. And while the president has admirably addressed the needless restrictions on speech of his predecessor, the new administration has also threatened speech in different ways. President Trump is currently suing the New York Times for billions of dollars as a private citizen. And here is Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination. There's free speech and then there's hate speech. And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. Now the good news is that many on the MAGA right took Bondi to task for sounding like the woke professors and government

functionaries that have tried to carve out a First Amendment exception for this so-called hate speech. Here is Megan Kelly. Whoa, sister, we on the right do not crack down on hate speech. We don't believe in that nonsense. There's this pesky document called the Constitution that doesn't allow it, but we don't even agree with it in principle was kind of extraordinary. But free speech in America is not out of the woods. There were other threats as well.

Actor Jimmy Kimmel said this on his late-night ABC show. We hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. The chairman of the FCC said this. I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.

These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. At first, the Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, gave to the pressure. Two of the nation's largest conglomerates that own local television affiliates said they wouldn't air Kimmel's program. But after a three-show suspension, Kimmel was back on the air. Trump's jaum boning didn't work.

But Maga still loved it. The FCC chairman's threats were widely popular among the same people who only a year ago correctly called out the efforts of the Biden administration to regulate disinformation on social media. Will Nigel Farage punish the speech of his opponents? Will he fall into the same trap as Donald Trump? We don't know that answer. We do know, though, that in the end, a real commitment to free speech requires a humility that is missing today. As John Stuart Mill teaches, the collision between opinions is how we arrive at the truth. So we should cherish the speech of those with whom we disagree, because without their dissent, we would not know the truth of our own opinions.

It's very hard to do when one's opponent engages. and shoutdowns, cancel culture, or snitching to the police, but it's the only way to save our liberal democracy, and with it, our ability to disagree in a way that helps us get closer to the truth. Oh, the best in podcast excellence, the Elenay Experience, oh, baby, The best in podcast, excellence, the Ila Lake Experience. The best in podcast, excellence. The Elen Lake Experience.

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