TRIGGERnometry - Why Britain Arrests 30 People EVERY DAY For Speech

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Lord Toby Young is a British journalist, social commentator, and political activist known for his outspoken views and involvement in education and free speech advocacy. Founder of the Free Speech Union - https://freespeechunion.org/ Follow Toby: X - https://x.com/toadmeister Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Protect your wealth with The Pure Gold Company. Get your free investor guide at https://pure-gold.co/trigger - Go to https://shipstation.com and use code TRIGGER to sign up for your FREE trial. - Shopify! Sign up for a £1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.co.uk/trigger/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 07:34 The Free Speech Guardrails Of The Bill 11:39 Removing Anonymity On The Internet 19:27 Are You Concerned This Is Just A Way Of Censoring People? 29:29 The Left's Instinct Is To Keep People Safe 37:06 Peter Kyle Saying Nigel Farage Is On The Side Of Jimmy Saville 42:06 You Won't Be Able To Suppress People's Concerns About Illegal Migration 43:44 The Government Is Demanding Access To Messaging Apps Like WhatsApp And Signal 49:30 The Difference Between Tolerance And Respect 54:47 Blasphemy Laws 59:42 The Free Speech Union's Case Load 01:03:43 What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Really Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I first started the Free Speech Union, I didn't think it could get any worse, hopelessly naive. And actually, all we'd been able to do is kind of hold back the incoming tide a little bit. So that's over 30 people a day being arrested. Are you worried that this is basically a way of censoring people so that they don't challenge the government? It's a kind of willed naivety and a kind of avoidance of confronting their own policy failures. I think Sequea Stama, Peter Kyle, do genuinely think that the Online Safety Act doesn't go nearly far enough. So I think in all likelihood, the Online Safety Act is not going to be repealed. It's not going to be improved.

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Shop Ultima on Amazon or in store at Target and Whole Foods Market. Lord Young, director and founder of the Free Speed Union, welcome back to Trigonometry. Good to be here, Constantine. It's good to have you on. Obviously, we want to talk about the Online Safety Act, which has effectively come into force in recent days. To most people's surprise, the impact of it has been to most people's surprise. Let's talk about it. What is it? How is it introduced and why are people now, you know, you see lots of people talking about using VPNs, and there's lots of online censorship effectively happening in this country. Talk to us about the Online Safety Act. So the Online Safety Act is a piece of legislation that was partly prompted by a moral panic

about children self-harming and in some cases committing suicide as a consequence of things they'd seen online. And it was first introduced by Sajid Javid when he was Home Secretary, I think, I think under Theresa May. And he said that his ambition was to make the UK the safest place in the world to go online, which on the face of it sounds quite anodyne. But when you think about it, it's like, well, what does that mean? Safer than North Korea, safer than China. And what does safety mean in this context?

Does it mean the most heavily censored? And that was the original way to pitch it, but always linked to child safety. and it became more explicitly about protecting children, or at least the way to sell it, became more explicitly, about that under Boris's government. Protect them from suicide content and pornography, right? Yeah, protect them from pornography, from self-harming websites,

from websites promoting anorexia. The idea was that the premises, that children are at enormous risk from being exposed to unregulose, content online, exacerbated by algorithms, and it's leading to a kind of epidemic of self-harm, including suicide. So that was the kind of moral panic, which prompted it. And that was very much the way it was sold under Boris's government. This is really a bill about protecting children from the Wild West that is the unregulated social media environment. But Toby, isn't that quite

noble aim, let's be fair, because you do look at some of the content that kids are accessing. You know, 11-year-olds have got a smartphone which basically gives unfettered access to however much pornography they want. That's surely not a good thing. Yeah, I think it's hard to object to the ambition of wanting to protect children. When the bill was originally drafted, I mean, it's gone through many iterations. It was, wasn't just about protecting children from legal but harmful content. It was also about protecting adults from legal but harmful content. And there was this, the words legal but harmful never actually appeared in any of the iterations of the bill. But the form it took was a clause which

enabled then the Secretary of State at DCMS to draw up a list of legal but harmful content which social media companies, search engines, user-to-user providers, would be under a particular obligation to remove. So we thought that at the Free Speech Union, we thought that was very dangerous. Why should adults have to be protected from legal but harmful content? And in particular, why should a senior politician be tasked with designating what content social media companies in particular are under a particular obligation to remove on pain of being fined up to 10% of their annual global turnover or 18 million by

offcom, whichever was the highest. I mean, a pretty savage penalty for noncompliance. So we push back hard against that. One reason for pushing back was that seemed to be a breach of a sacrosanct principle of English common law, which is that unless something is explicitly prohibited, then it's permitted. That's a kind of cornerstone of English liberty, and very different from the Napoleonic Code, whereby unless something's explicitly permitted, then it's prohibited, which tends to be the kind of basis for much continental law.

So that was one of the fundamental lynch pins of English common law, an important foundation of English liberty. And this seemed to be a departure from that, the creation of a new grey area, whereby it's legally permitted, but nevertheless in some sense prohibited. And the same applies to non-crime hate incidents. So we push back hard against that. and so did other kind of free speech advocacy groups.

And the Tories, to be fair, dropped that. They dropped that clause. But they kept in the obligation on providers to protect children from legal but harmful content. And what happened recently was that the clause requiring providers to protect children, to put an age gate on their content that they think isn't suitable for children. that came into force. And of course, it led to an enormous amount of over-removal. So social media platforms like X ended up age-gating blog posts about Richard the Lionheart,

speeches by Katie Lamb about the grooming gangs, footage of someone being arrested at an anti-migrant protest in Leeds. And that obviously raised questions. Well, why do you need to be 18 to see this content? and particularly if Labor are going to lower the voting age to 16. I mean, this is kind of democratically important content. How are 16 and 17-year-olds going to make informed decisions at the ballot box when they get the vote in 2029? If they're not allowed to access this content until they're 18, it seemed kind of ludicrous. But we always fear that this obligation to protect children from legal but harmful content would lead to over-removal.

Companies are very concerned about the penalties they'll face. if they don't comply. In some cases, noncompliance can lead to executives going to jail. I mean, that is one of the more kind of authoritarian clauses in the Act. So, of course, they're terrified of not complying with all the requirements of the Act. And as you've probably seen, it's like it's almost 300 pages, and it's unbelievably dense and complicated. So for most kind of tech company executives, of course they're going to kind of err on the side of extreme caution.

and over-remove content, and that's exactly what's happened. One of the interesting things I found about it is when I was reading up on this, it goes, so they talked about free speech guardrails, didn't they? Yes. And implementing it in the act itself. Yeah. That really hasn't worked out quite the way we expected to. Yes.

And one of the free speech guardrails, one of the original guardrails in an early iteration of the bill, was that social media companies, when deciding what content to remove to comply with the act had to have regard for free speech. And talking that over with various MPs, they kind of laughed, said, having to have regard for something is like the lowest possible legal duty,

which is always trumped by other legal duties, so almost pointless, including that. So the Free Speech Union lobbied to have that change to have particular regard, which is kind of one notch up, barely in better. This is some of British fight. in the history. It is. But one notch up.

But that duty currently applies. And we've seen from the over removal of the last few weeks that clearly that isn't having much impact on deterring platforms like X and Facebook from over removing. But there's another reason why the safeguards haven't had much impact. So two additional safeguards were that for category one providers, and most big social media platforms were going to be designated as category one providers by not the Secretary of State at DCMS, but the Secretary of State now it's changed at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. Peter Kyle, good friend of Secere Starmes. So he was tasked.

He's supposed to have said which providers are designated as category one providers. And once that designation has happened, category one providers then have these additional free speech duties. They're not supposed to remove content of democratic importance or journalistic content. But because I think Wikimedia are concerned about Wikipedia being designated as a category one provider, they have legally challenged the criteria that Peter Kyle is going to be using to designate which platforms are category one, which platforms 2A and which platforms 2B. And so for the time being, Peter Carl hasn't done that. So that designation is yet to take place because that hasn't taken place. And social media companies don't know what category they're in.

Those two additional safeguards to protect content of democratic importance and journalistic content haven't kicked in yet, which is another reason why we've seen so much over removal in the past few weeks. We can get into this. But the reason Wikimedia is legally challenging the government's criteria, for designating what sites are in category one. The reason it doesn't want to be in category one is because when you're in category one, you have to carry out these pretty onerous annual risk assessments.

And in the course of doing that, you have to disclose exactly who the content creators are on your particular website. You have to actually share their identity with offcom. And Wikipedia doesn't want to do that because a lot of its editors are anonymous. I mean, they have various ways of making sure that they're respectable, they're not bad actors and so forth.

But nevertheless, they don't want to share their identities with Ofcon. So that's why they're legally challenging this set of criteria. They don't want Wikipedia to be designated a category one provider. And they've effectively said that if it is, we might have to geo-block Wikipedia in the UK, or at least limit how often users are able to access Wikipedia, which is a top of unintended, one of the many unintended consequences of the online. Every cloud, Toby. Right.

If you see what's happening to my Wikipedia page, I'm totally on board of this. It looks like it was written by a joke. Yeah, exactly. We're joking, of course. But actually, Toby, I think you touch on something very important, which is that I think, as Francis said, I think we'd all want children not to be able to access pornography. I think we'd all want children not to be able to access really harmful content,

Although the link between suicide and watching things, I think, is very tenuous, and it's probably quite the other way around. People who are already suicidal seek out content like that to verify and confirm what they already feel as opposed to, you know, a perfectly happy child suddenly discovering something. But anyway, the issue is, it seems to me, that the problem with all of this is that once you start introducing a mechanism by which people have to prove that they're over 18, then you've effectively. removed anonymity from the internet, which has very important uses for people, you know, to be able to speak freely, who aren't necessarily able to speak freely. I mean, the Free Speech Union, which you found it represents many people who've been punished for speaking freely, and this will take that away from them. But it effectively ends anonymity in general on the internet if we are constantly having to prove that we're over 18, especially when, as you say,

it currently extends to journalistic content or just covering footage of protests or whatever else it might be. So are you hopeful that once this process has taken its course, these overreaches will go back or are you worried that the slippery slope is going to remain slippery?

No, I think when I first started at Free Speech Union back in 2020, I naively thought that things had reached an absolute nadir and could only get better. And one of the jobs of the Free Speech Union would be to try and repeal the fetters, the legal fetters on our free speech. I didn't think it could get any worse, hopelessly naive. And actually, all we'd been able to do is kind of hold back the incoming tide a little bit.

So I think in all likelihood, the Online Safety Act is not going to be repealed. It's not going to be improved. It's just going to get worse. worse. I mean, I think you make a good point about the risks of having to verify your age. And, I mean, as you say, anonymity is a really important safeguard. It's a really important safeguards for Muslim apostates, for instance, whose lives will be at risk if they're identified, if they're criticizing Islam or talking about having left the Islamic religion, you know, the penalty for which is death.

People in oppressive countries like China and North Korea, particularly refugees from those countries, they rely on anonymity to protect themselves from, you know, hostile secret services. So, and then the kind of age verification site say, oh, no, don't worry, you know, we'll keep your information confidential. There's no risk that it'll ever escape our servers. And it's like, you know, the Ministry of Defense, which you'd think would have pretty good secure protocols about protecting privacy recently, inadvertently. certainly leaked the names of 33,000 people who collaborated with the British Army in Afghanistan to the Taliban. So, you know, I'm not sure how much confidence you should have in these age verification companies, particularly as a lot of them have kind of sprung up in, you know, the last few weeks because everyone's kind of frantically trying to kind of verify their age so they can access, you know, Katie Lamb's speeches in the House of Commons or whatever it might be.

I mean, I think going back to the fear of change. children being exposed to harmful content. And I think there are, as you say, I think there is this tendency on the part of the paternalistic authorities to believe that when children do engage in self-destructive behavior or when they engage in violent behavior, particularly sexually violent behavior, the cause, the fundamental cause is exposure to kind of toxic, harmful content on particularly social media. And that seems to me to be kind of psychologically pretty naive. It's a pretty kind of impoverished analysis. And you saw it in adolescence, you know. I mean, first of all, it was ludicrous to imagine that the greatest

threat of sexual violence to young women was posed by white working class boys, brought up in kind of stable two-parent working-class households. I mean, we know that's not true. And in addition, the analysis was, well, the reason he's engaging in this behaviour is because he's been exposed to the manosphere, you know, which is completely, I mean, a pretty threadbare analysis of why, you know, women and girls are more and more vulnerable to sexual assaults in contemporary Britain. But there is this kind of naive kind of belief that, you know, the internet, social media, user-to-user services are the main cause of all our problems. And we didn't have any of these problems 15 years ago, you know, before this kind of,

before this horrible apparatus kind of got into our souls. I mean, it's just kind of, I guess it's partly a kind of form of avoidance, not wanting to kind of think more deeply about what the real causes of these kind of long-running society. Well, knowing what they are and refusing to address them and then censoring the people who are attempting to address them. Yeah. Let me introduce you to the people I work with

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As the Krispy Chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal.

And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet? No. Krispy, saucy and $4. Very. Only at 711. Value 3-6-2326, participating stores only while supplies last the app for full terms. And I guess another reason to push back a bit against this kind of argument that we have a kind of, the state has a duty to protect children from exposure to harmful content is that, well, isn't, okay, maybe the state needs to do a little bit about that, but isn't that really the responsibility of parents? and why should the state be taking on the role

that really parents should be discharging? I think there's a technological dimension to this, Toby, which is a lot of parents don't have the first clue of what the internet is or how to use it. And I think I understand why people are concerned. I've told the story before, I think. Last time, not last time, one of the times I was on question time,

you know how they don't record the first question. There's a practice question before the full program. And there was a question, about Donald Trump being removed from Facebook. This was several years ago. And the Labour representative on the panel, we must have the safest internet in the world, very much speaking to your point earlier.

And I think for a lot of people, particularly when it comes to children, look, the safety of children is very important, of course. And I think we're both parents. We'd certainly share that view. But my sense is that this is kind of being used now to achieve other ends. to suppress dissent.

I mean, you had an article on one of your blogs earlier this week talking about the fact that the government is introducing a policing unit to monitor social media for signs of dissent and protest moods. I mean, I think we'd all recognize that the country is kind of a fever pitch at the moment with protest outside migrant hotels and so on. Are you concerned that part of this is simply about preventing people who are expressing their genuine fears and concerns about what's happening in the country. And it's a way of, you know, they will argue is preventing real world harm,

but a lot of people would argue it's a way of preventing the expression of concern about government policy from being, from happening. Are you worried that this is basically a way of censoring people so that they don't challenge the government? Well, I think the government, I think, I think, Sequea Stama, Peter Kyle, other senior members of the government, do genuinely think that the Online Safety Act doesn't go nearly far enough, that the legal but harmful to adult clause should never have been removed. And Morgan McSweeney's pro-censorship lobby group, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, I say Morgan McSweeney's, he's Kirstehm as Chief of Staff, because he was the founding director.

I don't think he's any longer involved, but they held a special summit during the riots that followed the Southport attack last summer. And they concluded the Online Safety Act needs to be toughened up. We need to reinsert the clauses that were removed when it was going through Parliament. Offcom needs more powers to censor legal but harmful content which adults are exposed to. And Peter Carl in particular needs to be able to stipulate. I think the kind of safeguard was in an emergency. In an emergency, Peter Carl needs these special powers to direct off-com to remove legal but harmful content from being able to be seen by adults.

But of course, in an emergency, I mean, as far as the left is concerned, there's always an emergency of one kind or another. Emergencies are always being invoked to kind of justify the suspension of democratic norms. Toby, before you go on, one thing I will just interject is, we interviewed the director, then director, I don't know if he's still there, of the Center for Countering Digital. Hey, it was one of the most bizarre interviews

that we've ever done. What's his name? Imran. Imran Ahmed. Irman Ahmed. We interviewed him. People can go and watch that interview. It is one of the most weird interviews

we've ever done because for 50 minutes we had a very reasonable discussion. But then the moment we started to test some of his arguments. He just became bitterly, personally antagonistic and rude. and it kind of showed you where some of these people are coming from, unfortunately. I think that was that that interview was revealing and his reaction to being challenged was revealing and we'll get onto that in a second. But I think the government were probably pleasantly surprised that lots of content which fuels an anti-immigration narrative, such as Katie Lamb talking about the grooming gangs, an X account which published transcripts of the grooming gang trials,

footage of an anti-immigration protestant being arrested in Leeds. Government's probably pleasantly surprised that that stuff was suppressed by X just on the grounds that it needed to verify that you were 18 before you were able to see it and until you could, you couldn't see it. But I think they do want to increase the powers that Peter Kyle, that Ofcom has, to suppress legal but harmful content that supposedly fuels an anti-immigration narrative. Because I think on one level, they actually believe that the Southport disturbances, the social disorder that followed the Southport attack last year,

wasn't caused by roiling public anger about mass uncontrolled immigration and unhappiness that successive governments have promised to do something to reduce overall migration and have done the opposite. Boris being the prime example, the Boris way. If you know, take back control about borders, no, he didn't do that. So I think there's this sense of distrust, betrayal, loss of faith in British institutions, this feeling that we need to take the law into our own hands. we need direct action if we're going to do anything about this because successive governments have ignored us. I think that there is this kind of belief, I think, on the part of the authorities, particularly the kind of pangendrums of the Labour Party, that these disturbances, social disorder,

the fact that we are kind of seemingly kind of sitting on an unexploded bomb that various towns and cities have become tinderboxes. I think they think it's got nothing to do with mass uncontrolled immigration, nothing to do with multiculturalism, all the policies we've been advocating for cheerleading for for the past decades. Rather than admit that they got anything wrong, or that they failed the public in some way, or betrayed their own manifesto promises, no confrontation about that at all, no acceptance of that, no, it's all to do with bad actors on social media spreading miss and disinformation and hate speech about asylum seekers. So all we need to do to solve the problem is suppress that.

If we can suppress that, the problem goes away. I mean, it's a kind of will naivety and a kind of avoidance of confronting their own policy failures over the past decades. I think there's a degree of self-deception involved. They don't want to have an argument. They don't want to be forced to defend those policies in the public square because they recognize, you know, at some level that they haven't been a success. and that they've created this legacy of distrust, this kind of crisis of democratic legitimacy.

But rather than defend those policies in the public square, better to just suppress anyone criticizing them, demonize them as far right, xenophobic, etc. And I think it's partly avoidance, it's partly an unwillingness to confront their own failures, it's partly a kind of crisis of faith in liberalism itself. And you can see that in the kind of curdling of their faith in multiculturalism. You know, from thinking diversity was our strength, multiculturalism has, you know, improved our cuisine, enriched our cultural life, et cetera, et cetera, to suddenly thinking, crikey, you know, we're sitting on a powder cake, which is going to blow at any moment.

We need to. But I think it's also about one of the reasons they don't want to have an argument, defend their policies in the public square, is because they've lost the kind of ability to argue, those muscles of atrophy. So when they're confronted, when you confronted, when you confronted the CEO of the Center of Countering Digital Hate, instead of having an argument, instead of defending his position, he just gets angry and just launches into ad homin and attacks, because they've lost the ability to argue that muscle has atrophied. And that's another reason, I think, the impulse to suppress rather than engage is so powerful.

If you kept interrupting me during the course of this conversation, which you have, and I perceived that to be motivated by the fact that you're from a Muslim background, I'm from a Jewish background, would that make that hate speech? No. But my self-perception is that. No, it's just that you're really slow at talking, and my brain's already finished your sentence for you. But my perception isn't that? You walked out of the room, and when you walk out of here, I'm going to turn to these guys and say,

well, that was a lot of hate speech, isn't it? That's fine. You can say that that's hate speech. And then you can be prosecuted. It's absolutely fine for you to say that's hate speech if you want. And then you can be prosecuted. If me interrupting you is hate speech, and that's your definition of it, I tell you what, you are being disrespectful to the people who do receive hate speech. The enormous number of people who receive hate speech, real clear, undeniable hate speech.

So do I. And your sophistry right now is both transparent and deeply disrespectful. And I warn you that most of your listeners will think themselves, actually, Constantine's being a bit of a dickhead right now. That's interesting that you say that, because what I'm doing is I'm stress testing your argument. And the point I'm making to you is a person's self-perception can be manipulated. People can lie about how they perceive the things that they experience. And sometimes people will use the law against other people when it's badly written.

Don't you think that's true? I do think it's true. That's what I'm saying. So I'm not really being a dickhead. I'm stress testing your argument. And calling me a dickhead might be considered hate speech. No, no, it's not hate speech. It's just good observation. Fine.

Toby, I actually think as well, if we put a good faith spin on this, I think that's kind of how the left look at it in that they have quite a paternalistic attitude to people. And their instinct is to protect, is to keep people safe. And the people who tend to vote for these kind of policies or governments want to be kept safe. So for these types of people, it is actually quite. a mutually beneficial relationship, isn't it? Well, I think, yeah, we saw that kind of dynamic at work during the pandemic, with the, to my mind, surprisingly wide public acceptance of the lockdown policy.

People were willing to have their liberties temporarily suspended in order to keep themselves safe, keep vulnerable people safe. A very different to the reaction to previous pandemics in the kind of second half of the 20th century. And it does feel as though as we've become a kind of more comfortable affluent society, so people have begun to prioritize safety over liberty. And I think people are willing to kind of make that trade often because they don't think it will affect their liberties or if it will, it will only affect their liberties temporarily. I mean, a lot of the restrictions that were imposed during the lockdown weren't lifted, you know, when the

lockdown was lifted, so it turned out not to be temporary suspension of liberties at all. But I think one of the impacts of the Online Safety Act in the past few weeks is that people are beginning to realise that, you know, when they make this Faustian pact and agree to sacrifice some liberty for safety, they don't think of their own liberties as being kind of sacrificed. But now they're beginning to discover that actually it does involve their own liberties. I think people are waking up the fact that actually this is a kind of harder trade than they imagine because, you know, it isn't just affecting the liberty of people on the kind of far right to rabble rows and disseminate mis and disinformation and hate speech on social media platforms. It's actually

affecting their ability to access content that they want to see, like people being arrested at anti-immigration protests. Well, I have to take issue with both of you making this about the left. Let's just go back to where we started this. This bill was brought in. by the last conservative government. Let's just be honest about it, right? So this isn't about the left. This is about, as you say, the country is becoming more pro-restrictions. The country is, and you mentioned the public supported during COVID.

I don't know if they support this. I imagine at the surface level without delving into it. A lot of people will support this as well. And so I don't think it's about the left at all. I think we just live in a country that's pro-censorship. Well, if you look at surveys, people's attitude towards censorship obviously depends on how the questions are phrased. Yeah, there's a massive part of it.

But when you ask people whether, you know, people are too sensitive, people are too easily offended, people should be able to kind of speak more freely without being worried about jeopardizing their livelihoods. Generally, there seems to be a lot of public support for free speech. I'm sure. So have we become more pro-cenship? I mean, yes, I think we have. And our elites are in a more pro-censorship. Our elite, certainly.

I mean, one curious change in the attitude of the elites is that until about 15 years ago, the kind of prevailing orthodoxy when it came to censorship was what's known as the counter speech doctrine. So the Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, in a landmark First Amendment case in the early part of the 20th century, said, and I'm paraphrasing, the best way of countering, misleading and harmful speech is not in false silence, but more and better speech. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Suppression doesn't work. You know, if you're concerned about, you know, various narratives kind of getting abroad

and having a kind of toxic effect on public life, on the functioning of democracy, the best way to respond to that is not in force silence, but to actually engage with the people making these arguments. And that was the kind of prevailing orthodoxy amongst our elites till about 15 years ago. But suddenly they seem to have come back around to censorship as the best way of dealing with, of countering, kind of harmful and misleading speech. And I think it's a huge mistake, not least because it's always counterproductive. I mean, the kind of paradigmatic example is the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, the early 1930s, banning Nazis, banning Nazi propaganda. in various German states. Hitler was banned from speaking in various German states. Antisemitism

was a criminal offense in various German states. And this was thought to be the best way to kind of suppress the rise of the Nazis. Didn't work. And you can see that these various efforts to censor social media in particular, not just here, but in Australia, in New Zealand, across the continent as a way of kind of countering kind of populist insurgents has been just completely ineffective. The rise of populism continues unabated. In this country, I don't think that suppressing anti-immigration content on social media is going to, in any way, impede the progress of Reform UK. I mean, they're topping the polls. And the efforts of the authorities to kind of suppress, you know, public anger about mass uncontrolled immigration, about the small boats, etc., etc. It's having the

opposite if it's intended effect. You think kind of when are they going to learn that suppression, censorship doesn't work? Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If they want to defend their policies, if they want to cling on to power, then, you know, get out there in the public square, make as good a fist as you can of defending these policies. Don't just try and smear your opponents as kind of far right kind of lunatics because that doesn't work. When I order something online, it's the shipping experience that often makes or breaks it. Fast delivery, tracking updates, no issues. That's what builds loyalty.

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I mean, have you lost your mind? As I said, if you want to overturn the Online Safety Act, you are on the side of predators and paedophiles. Nigel Farage wants to overturn the Online Safety Act that puts in it the duty to prevent children from being groomed by paedophiles that prevents adults from contacting children who don't know each other, strangers contacting children.

This is an act that is a biggest step forward in the experience that children have online since the creation of the internet, the biggest step forward in the safety of children across Britain since the internet was created. And Nigel Farage wants to overturn all of the internet. that to send it back to the days when predators and paedophiles could contact children. So I am not going to apologize for pointing out the obvious.

He wants to overturn those measures. I will stay steadfast to make sure that children are kept safe in the digital age, just as we strive to keep children safe in the online world, offline world as well. I think Peter Kyle, what Nigel Farage is asking you to apologize for is saying earlier this morning that if Jimmy Saville were still alive, he would be perpetrated. his terrible crimes online and that you're saying Nigra Farage is on the side of Jimmy Saville and people like him. There are people like Jimmy Saville who are trying to get access to children online that will be prevented from doing so by the Online Safety Act.

Nigel Farage wants to overturn the very laws that are preventing that from happening he is on the side of people like Jimmy Saville and I'm not going to apologize for saying so. It is about time that Nigel Farage was held to account for the words that he says, the actions that he takes, because this is politics. We have taken the action to prevent those things happening to children in our country. And Nigel Farage wants to throw all of that away, to turn the clock back. I will not apologize for pointing it out. Nigel Farage needs to be held to account for the dangerous policies that he is trying to impose on children across our country. It was, I mean, quite a bold argument to make.

Given, you know, that Kier Stahmer's track record as direct for public prosecutions when it came to prosecuting Jimmy Savor isn't, you know, completely unblemished that we could get into that. But, yeah, and you initially thought that he's overreaching here. This is a political blunder. But actually, various other senior Labor ministers have doubled down on it. I think, is it Angela Rainer, the most recent one? Yeah, it's such a tenuous argument. I mean, the idea being that, I suppose, that modern-day groomers, the kind of contemporary equivalents of Jimmy Saville, are going to use unregulated kind of, I don't know, user-to-user services on the internet to kind of groom children and find their victims. So if you're opposed to

age-gating content and protecting under 18-year-olds, then you're basically on the same side of Jimmy Saville. I mean, a real stretch. And I just can't imagine that argument is landing with the public and making the think, oh, well, crakey, yeah. Nigel Farage, if he repeals the online safety act, we're going to have a kind of tsunami of Jimmy Savils kind of stalking our children on the web.

What it shows to me, I find it very interesting, actually, because I was watching an episode of the news agents where they were talking about this, and even they were saying that this is completely ludicrous. Wow. That's, if even they're saying it, then, yes. And you just look at it. And to me, it looks like a government that is completely rattled, doesn't have any answers. And like you said before, is just resorting to ad hominems.

And I'm thinking, guys, you haven't even been in power for what? Barely a year. And you already look like you're losing the plot massively. I mean, I think one of the reasons. various governments, not just our government, are so quick to press the censorship button, is because they are becoming more and more brittle, less and less confident. You see, I think it's a historical fact that as regimes become more fragile, as they begin to lose authority, so they become more repressive.

And that seems to be what's happening here. And they're becoming further from the people as well. I mean, your point about, I mean, anyone who thinks that you're going to suppress people's concerns about illegal immigration in Britain in August of 2025 is a moron. I mean, the entire country is concerned about illegal immigration. And it's not because of online content. It's because they experience it on a daily basis. There's no suppressing that. And that will backfire, don't you think?

Absolutely. I mean, even in the past few days, there have been a couple of cases, one I think, brought to light by the mail on Sunday, another by the son of asylum seekers, sexually assaulting, kidnapping, minors, efforts by the police to suppress the fact that these crimes were committed by asylum seekers only for it to then come out. I mean, talk about fueling anti-immigration sentiment. I mean, I think people are. incredibly suspicious. Whenever there is a terrorist incident, whenever there's an attack on a sexual assault on children, people just automatically assume now it must have been carried out by an asylum seeker, probably from a Muslim majority country. Not because that's more likely to be the case than not, but because we know there have been just so many occasions in which the government I've tried to cover up the fact that one of these attacks, one of these episodes, has been carried out by an asylum seeker from a Muslim majority of country.

Suppressing this information is just has the opposite of its intent. It's crazy. And there's one other thing I wanted to touch on with you as well. One of the things I've read is that what's happened signal, I think, are two of the companies, but I'm sure others as well, who are saying it hasn't happened yet, but the government is effectively attempting to force these companies to give access to the government to up in critical. private messages and this may be another consequence of the introduction on online safety act. Can you talk a little bit about that? There's one threat to encrypted messaging apps is linked to a crime and terrorism act whereby which granted the the British police and security services access if the government issues a special notice to encrypted data

on encrypted messaging apps. And that's currently being contested by Apple amongst other companies. And it meant that Apple said they could no longer offer the highest level of encryption to users of Apple services in the UK. But the Online Safety Act requires category one providers, I think, so when they finally, when Peter Carl finally gets around to designating them, to do these risk assessments and annual risk assessments that they need to provide Offcom with. And that will mean disclosing some of the, or being in a position to disclose some of the messaging on their apps. And the argument is that groomers, the Jimmy Sables

of today are using encrypted messaging apps to kind of groom children undetected. So Offcom has to have access to this content if it's going to protect children. But what it means is, that unless offcom backs down, it could well mean that apps like Signal, WhatsApp, telegram are just geo-blocked in the UK. But, you know, the more I read this act, because I sat down, and God bless my little brain, I sat down and I tried to read this act. Now, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an expert, but I was trying to go through it. And the thing that kept jumping out to me, as I was reading through it, I was just trying to make sense of it, was A, it's incredibly difficult to read. It's incredibly opaque. Now, maybe that might be because I'm not legally trained. I'm not bright enough. But the thing I also kept jumping out to me was the use of nebulous terms. Safety. I have a very particular issue with safety because the past couple of years, when everybody said the words, I need to feel safe or you have compromised my safety, they're not talking about.

safety, what they've said is, I don't want my ideas to be challenged. You make me feel uncomfortable because you challenge my ideas. Significant psychological harm. Well, who judges that? What does that actually mean? Does that mean that you get a form of PTSD? And that makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable. Yeah. I mean, I think to your first point, it isn't just you. I mean, the Online Safety Act is an incredibly dense, voluminous piece of legislation. Really hard to understand. I mean, we've got a team of lawyers at the Free Speech Union going through it, trying to summarize it, trying to see what parts of it are legally challengeable. And, you know, our Chief Legal Council has a PhD in Classics from Oxford,

and he's struggling with it. I mean, it is an unbelievably opaque and dense document. On the kind of frequency with which these kind of nebulous terms occur, you're quite right. And that seems to be a kind of recurring feature of kind of, sensorial legislation. So Section 127 of the Communications Act makes it a criminal offence to communicate messages which are grossly offensive. Well, how to define grossly offensive. Section 179 of the Online Safety Act criminalizes disinformation. So if you knowingly disseminate

information which if you disseminate information which you know to be false and it's likely to cause psychological harm to a likely audience, then you can go to prison for two years. And, you know, how do you define psychological harm? I mean, could you be prosecuted for causing psychological harm to someone who's particularly psychologically vulnerable because they're suffering from mental illness? Do we have to take their possible reaction into account? Could you be prosecuted for that? And as you say, the concept of safety, the concept of harm, have been just stretched to breaking point, particularly in the last decade or so. It's not a longer just about physical harm, about protecting people's physical safety. It's about

protecting people from psychological harm. It's about protecting their psychological well-being. And as you say, that can include not challenging people. I mean, we see it again and again in university students claiming they need safe spaces, they need trigger warnings and so on and so forth, because if their ideas are challenged, they find that psychologically traumatising. They find that undermines their psychological well-being. I mean, that's taking the the concept of safety and harm to ludicrous lengths. And it's also as well, they go, oh, they were talking about truth and something that may not be true.

And I was thinking, and I think Nigel Farage made this point. What about humour? Humour and satire is taking something that we know to be true and then exaggerating it. And you're going, what? So are we now going to get rid of humour? Because you made a satirical joke and somebody would say, well, actually, if you look at it,

maybe David Cameron didn't have intimate relations with the pig. And the reality is that David Cameron would find that particularly upsetting. Yeah. One way of looking at this is to distinguish between tolerance and respect. So when it comes to different religious faiths, being able to practice in the UK, we pride ourselves on religious tolerance. It's why the UK is such an attractive country for migrants from other countries. particularly Muslim majority countries, because we have this tradition dating back,

you know, more than 100 years of tolerating people of different religious faiths, of tolerating the practice of different religious faiths in our midst. And that applies to all kinds of beliefs, all kinds of traditions, customs, communities. We have this great tradition of which we're rightly proud of tolerance. But that in the past few decades has somehow segued into respect. So now it's not enough to tolerate people with different beliefs to the mainstream,

various minority groups, practicing their own customs and religions. Now they demand to be respected. And I give you just two examples. One obvious example is Muslims wanting their blasphemy codes to be respected by non-believers. And one of the Free Speech Union's big cases recently was defending Hamet Koskin, a Turkish political refugee, who was prosecuted for burning a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge. And unfortunately, that prosecution was successful. We're now going to appeal it. But we don't want to see the reintroduction of blasphemy codes

via the back door, particularly blasphemy codes that only protect people of one particular faith. But Islamophobia, another example, the government is currently tasked this group with coming up with a definition of Islamophobia slash anti-Muslimshatred, which seems to be a way of embedding and forcing non-believers to respect Islamic believers to respect Islamic blasphemy codes in the public square. But the other example I'm thinking of is

trans rights activists and trans people. It's not enough that they should be tolerated. They also want to be respected. And that means they want to compel people to use their preferred gender pronouns. I mean, that's one of the forms it takes. So I think we've gone from a society which was very tolerant of all these different communities, these different religions, and we prided ourselves on being tolerant, but that didn't mean that non-believers had to respect them. We might tolerate people of different faith. That doesn't mean, particularly if you're an atheist,

that you have to respect people of different faiths or respect their religious beliefs. But we seem to have segueed into a society in which everyone is required to respect everyone else. And that means tiptoeing around. It means biting our tongues, not saying what we think, for fear of offending someone by disrespecting them.

And that's a recipe for disaster. That's not a recipe for making a multicultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic society work. The way to make a society like ours work is to promote the value of tolerance, not to demand that every different identity group respect what are in effect the blasphemy codes, the sacred values of every other identity group.

That just means a society in which no one talks to each other. I mean, if you look at these communities like Leicester, where, you know, there are these kind of sectarian religious conference, which are currently break out into the open, not just Lester, I mean, virtually every town and city in the UK. But the way to resolve this, the way to bring about a kind of lasting kind of peace and tranquility in these communities, to avoid these kind of sectarian conflicts breaking out is not to force everyone to kind of tiptoe around, tread on eggshells, respect each other's blasphemies, not trespass on each other's sacred values. The way to make sure these communities get along to forge some sense of common identity and common purpose,

some new sense of kind of Britishness rooted in our multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith society is for these people to talk to each other, to argue, to negotiate, you know, to promote free speech, not to suppress it. Look, starting a business is exciting, but it isn't easy. It's not just logos, merch and big ideas. It's late nights, awkward first sales and wondering if your bankers, balance is going to survive until Friday. That's why having the right tools from day one makes all the difference. Enter Shopify. Shopify powers millions of businesses around the world from big names like Mattel and Jim Shock to people just getting started on their kitchen table. It gives you hundreds

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One more time. That's Shopify.com. Dot-Uk slash trigger. It's a great point because you think, let's take the example of blasphemy laws. If Labor implements blasphemy laws, would some Labour MPs want to do, like Tahir Ali?

Is it that really far of a stretch to go, well, you can't make a joke about this religion because I find this psychologically damaging? And then so what you have is just a censorship industrial complex, don't you? You do, yeah. And another argument for why we shouldn't be forced to respect the blasphemy codes of different religions is that what about our tradition in this country of humour of taking the Mickey, you know, of deliberately disrespecting, you know, the sacred values of different identity groups,

which creates a kind of good-humoured atmosphere. What about that? Don't our traditions deserve to be tolerated as well? I mean, you probably know about this, but one of the big campaigning issues that the Free Speech Union and me and the House of Lords have been kind of engaged in over the past six months or so is the banter ban. So clause 20 of the Employment Rights Bill

extends employer liability for the harassment of their employees to third parties. And I'm not talking about. talking about third party sexual harassment of employees. I'm talking about that's already, you know, employers are already liable for that. I'm talking about the non-sexual harassment of employees by third parties. Employers are now liable for that, meaning they could be sued by their employees for not taking all reasonable steps to protect them from non-sexual harassment by customers, by members of the public. And what do we mean by harassment? Well, it's one of

these nebulous terms that just seems to be becoming more and more capacious. So in the employment Tribunal, harassment has evolved to include now overheard conversations. So if a blue-haired barmaid in a pub overhears a couple of gender-critical feminists talking about how unfair they think it is that biological men who identify as women should be able to compete against women in women's sports like boxing and football, she could claim, I feel harassed. And I feel harassed in virtue of one of my protected characteristic, you as my employer, Mr. Publican, should have done more to protect me from that. And I'm going to sue you because you didn't. How will publicans react to this? They'll employ banter-bouncers to eavesdrop on people's conversations to make sure they're

not saying anything likely to offend or upset the kind of pink-haired barmate. They'll be notices on the wall saying, don't assume my pronouns. You know, before you can buy a pint of beer, you'll be able to show you've had kind of the full suite of diversity training. I mean, it's ludicrous, but the kind of rationale for this. I mean, I've been arguing with, Labor ministers in the House of Lords. How can you possibly justify the ban to ban? You're going to kind of put every pub in the country out of business. It's not just pubs.

It applies to hotels, restaurants, bars, football stadiums. You know, if a fan says to a linesman, are you blind? And there's a partially cited steward who overhears it. The partially cited steward will be able to sue the club for not doing enough to protect him from being harassed in that way by virtue of his protected characteristic, his partial sight of this. So, you know, if Kirstarmer has his way, every stadium in the country will become a library, not just his fucking, sorry, his beloved arsenal.

And it's ludicrous. But the rationale for it is, well, we have to protect vulnerable people in the workplace. They shouldn't have to overhear offensive or upsetting conversations. We need to make the workplace safe for everybody. That's the argument. It's going to destroy, you know, it's going to destroy a hugely important aspect of our public life. But they think that that's toxic. Bantor's toxic. It's an excuse for being racist and misogynistic and homophobic. Of course people shouldn't be able to tell jokes in pubs. What about comedy?

It's really going to affect, you know, the comedy industry. I mean, already, you know, people who work in comedy clubs essentially have a heckler's veto over what comedians can say. But this will be setting it in stones. Henceforth, you know, if an employee of a comedy club overhears a comedian make a joke that they find offensive or upsetting by virtue of their protected characteristic, they'll be able to sue the owner of the comedy club for not taking all reasonable steps

to protect them from overhearing this joke. So it means that it won't just be you that's required to sign a kind of contract before being hired. It'll be every comedian in the country. And if you have any risky material, if you're straddling that line between what's acceptable and what isn't,

which makes comedy so exciting, you know, you won't be able to perform. It'll just, it'll wipe out a kind of vast swades of our cultural life, at a stroke, the ban to bat. And of course, we've had no success in holding it back. Toby, before we wrap up, speaking of protecting people, one of the things you do at the Free Speech Union is help people who have been punished in some way

for things they've said. What is the bulk of your caseload at the moment? Who are the people that are coming to you for help? Well, since setting it up about five years ago, we fought over 4,000 cases. and where they've come to a conclusion, we've been successful about 80% of the time. And in our case database on Salesforce, by far the largest category is sex and gender. About 40% of those 4,000 plus cases we've fought over the past five years have been defending gender-critical women

who've complained about having to share bathrooms, changing rooms with biological men who think they're women. I mean, when I set up a free speech union, I thought, you know, I'd end up defending people like me for the most part. You know, male, pale and stale Tories. But actually, the front line, the people who find themselves cancelled more often, are people who find it more difficult than anyone else to kind of express how they feel about something, even if it's perfectly lawful, are women of a certain age who... You're going to cancel for that. Not always of a certain age.

But they mainly identify as being on the left. So, you know. That will change. That is changing. But increasingly we find ourselves involved in criminal works. So defending people who are actually being prosecuted and faced jail time. So one big success that I was really proud of is a former Royal Marine called Jamie Michael, who in the immediate

aftermath of the Southport attack, posted a 12-minute Facebook video in which he wrongly blamed the attack on an undocumented migrant, partly because there was a vacuum, as you know, at that time the government didn't say who'd actually committed the attack. And

he urged his followers to protest peacefully about illegal immigration into this country, the small boats in particular. and a local Labour politician complained to the police about this Facebook post and he was prosecuted for intending to stir up racial hatred, the maximum penalty for which is seven years in January. And the Crown Prosecution Service went through with it.

We urged them to drop it. We said, you know, this nowhere, this doesn't meet the threshold for intending to stir up racial hatred. He was urging his followers to protest peacefully about illegal migration. And it took a jury all of, we paid for his defense. There was a proper trial, a jury trial. And it took the jury all of 17 minutes to unanimously acquit him. And we're doing more and more work like that as the authorities become more and more likely to prosecute people for challenging kind of the prevailing government narrative about things like immigration asylum seekers, the small boats.

And so that's been a relatively new departure for us. But one thing to say is that since Labor came to power just over a year ago, we've doubled in size. So we had about 14,000 members on July 4, 2024. We're now up to over 31,000 members. So, Sykeh Starma, bless him, has been a fantastic recruiting sergeant for the Free Speech Union. And we're now averaging 37 new cases every week. and it's often people who are, I think, perfectly reasonably, worried that they're going to have their collars felt

because of something they've said on social media. And, yeah, I mean, we do our best to help every one of them. Well, we've been big supporters of the Free Speech Union from the moment it was founded. It's a really important organization. Toby, you're a very busy guy precisely because there's so much work for you to do. So we won't have time for questions from our audience,

although we have incorporated many of them into this conversation. So we'll wrap up with this. In the context of speech in Britain, the Online Safety Act and all of that, what is the one thing that no one's talking about that they really should be? The one thing people aren't talking about. Well, I'm not sure the extent to which the police are arresting people for supposedly saying something unlawful online. I'm not sure the extent of it has fully sunk in.

I mean, we do read from time to time about, you know, people who are arrested often by, you know, six or seven police officers who then ransack their houses, haul them down to the station, imprison them in cells for eight or nine hours, only to then kind of release them. But I don't think people realize quite the extent of it. So there was this piece in the Times a few months ago, which discovered quite astonishingly, that over, I think it was over 12,000 people in the past year had been arrested under suspicion of having committed just two speech offences, an offence under, I think, Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act

and Section 127 of the Communications Act. That's just two of the many speech offences you can be prosecuted for. I mean, there are at least a dozen. That was just two. Over 12,000 people a year being arrested under suspicion of committing just those two speech offences, which is over 30 a day. So that's over 30 people a day being arrested under suspicion of having just broken two of these laws criminalising what you can say. And invariably, it's stuff they've said online. And even when they conclude, and more often

than not they do, that they don't have sufficient evidence to prosecute this person, it'll be recorded as a non-crime hate incident. So, you know, I don't think people realize quite the scale of non-crime hate incidents being recorded either. So through various Freedom of Information requests, the FSU has established that over the past 11 years, over a quarter of a million NCHIs have been recorded in England and Wales alone. And that's over 62, an average of over 62 a day. I mean, you wonder why if your house is burgled or your car is stolen or your car is stolen or your your child has his phone stolen on the bus, the police will take very little interest.

They'll at best send you a crime report number so you can claim on insurance. The reason they won't come around to your house is because they're far too busy policing our tweets to police our streets. If you want the police, if you get burgled and you want the police to come to your house, get a kind of spray paint before you do anything else. And spray paint on the wall, trans women aren't women. Report it as a hate crime. And literally you have a helicopter overhead.

You'll have six police officers outside. I mean, then they'll investigate. Otherwise, no. Tova Young, thanks for coming on. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality.

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