Keir Starmer's War on Free Speech

Free speech is about to get a much-needed shot in the arm. Thanks to the reinauguration of Donald Trump, even arch-suppressors of free speech like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook appear to have had a Damascene conversion. So it’s out with the algorithms and the fact-checkers, and in with the X-style community notes. Sounds good doesn’t it? Until you remember that Zuckerberg has denied censorship for years and is now posing as the good guy, blaming it all on ‘pressure’ from the Biden administration. Certainly, free speech in any guise is welcome - but it’s important to note that commitment to free speech and being able to detect which way the wind is blowing are hardly the same thing.

Cross the pond to Britain however, and the situation is markedly worse. The Labour Party’s authoritarian regime (which clears the prisons of violent criminals to make room for social media users the government does not approve of), has already placed considerable restrictions on free speech - a tenuous concept at best, in a nation which to its shame does not have an equivalent of the First Amendment.

In his short, petulant tenure as Prime Minister, Keir Starmer has done his very best to cover-up the truth regarding the Southport massacre, with media reporting restrictions, MPs banned from discussing the matter in Parliament, and a warning to social media firms to remove ‘misinformation’. Just a week ago, he held a three-line whip forcing his MPs to vote against an inquiry into the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal - an inquiry three quarters of the British public demand, now that Elon Musk has helped raise global awareness of the phenomenon. Even the quintessential English pub may soon be a place where free speech is banned.

Freedom of expression is clearly an anathema for the Left, as its core message is founded upon a lie. Forgive my paraphrasing here, but the key distinction in modern politics appears to be something along these lines:

Conservatism: People are not equal - it’s your responsibility to ensure your own success.

Progressivism: Everyone’s equal - if you’re not succeeding, it’s someone else’s fault.

In Keir Starmer’s eyes, the addendum to this maxim is ‘… and no doubt, we can lock them up for it’.

Starmer, a multimillionaire ‘socialist’, is the perfect embodiment of leftwing hypocrisy in this regard: a case of rules for thee, not for me. Indeed, as a former Chief Prosecutor of the Crown Prosecution Service, Starmer appears to believe the rules only exist as a tool to wield against political opponents. He demanded an inquiry into Boris Johnson’s ‘cakegate’, when caught drinking beer in breach of lockdown restrictions himself. Critical of the Tory acceptance of gifts when they were in power, his own party’s stock response to rampant freeloading, is that it was all ‘within the rules’. Best of all however, was his tetchy response to questions regarding his access to Lord Alli’s £18million Covent Garden penthouse - his son needed somewhere to study ‘peacefully’.

So you’ll forgive me if I’m not overly impressed with Starmer’s concerns about social media. Even before Starmer’s well-documented spat with X CEO Elon Musk, the Labour Party was unenthusiastic about Twitter (as it was then). When running for the leadership in 2020, many within Starmer’s inner circle were considering leaving the platform for good, but of course they needed to get their message out. Now however, it seems Starmer is more focussed on not getting the message out!

It is true that Musk’s political endorsements can be somewhat fickle and erratic. While his support for Donald Trump remains strong, Musk did a volte-face in his support for Nigel Farage - saying the Reform leader did ‘not have what it takes’. Farage shrugged the criticism off reasonably well, but the same cannot be said of the Labour leader. Having famously called Home Office ‘Safeguarding Minister’ Jess Phillips a ‘rape genocide apologist’, Musk recently condemned Starmer as a ‘national embarrassment’ who should resign; even suggesting he should be in jail for his failure to deal with the ‘grooming gangs’.

Musk is not only the world’s richest man, but boasts 212 million X followers - clearly then, he cannot be dismissed as a mere troll. Faced with such unwelcome exposure, Starmer has a simple choice available to him: A) bask in the sunlight and heroically provide the counter-argument, B) attempt to ban sunlight itself. True to form, Sir Keir has opted for the latter.

The Home Office (which cannot puncture the flow of dinghies washing up along the south coast) is currently employing its counter-extremism unit to ‘probe’ Musk’s tweets. Labour MPs meanwhile are already on manoeuvres, looking into the possibility of banning X outright across Britain. Here, for instance, is Darlington MP Lola McEvoy, who seriously deployed the case for ‘democracy’ and ‘protecting children’ as justification for censorship:

“We are the oldest democracy in the world. We are committed to protecting our children, and if there’s a breach of the law then we’ll use the full force of the law to deliver on that.”

When asked whether that meant banning social media which did not comply, she replied:

“I think that’s what it’s about, right? It’s about saying that if these big platforms that have huge users don’t comply with the Online Safety Act, then they have no right to be accessed in this country.”

https://x.com/PoliticsJOE_UK/status/1877759451853107689

Musk should perhaps count himself lucky he’s not a British citizen, otherwise Starmer would almost certainly have jailed him for his ‘far-right’ posts.

MPs like McEvoy can witter on all they like about ‘democracy’, but does she not realise that such a ban would place Britain in rather extreme company? That’s a move the likes of Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin would be proud of. And the only democracy which has banned X (Brazil), restored access a mere month later.

Starmer would laugh at the comparison to North Korea and Russia, but his actions are very much in sync. If you refuse an inquiry into child rape gangs; if you are considering outlawing free speech - not just in pubs, but across the entire nation; and if you routinely jail political opponents for social media posts you consider ‘far-right’, it might just be you that’s the extremist.

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Frank Haviland is the Editor of The New Conservative, and the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West.

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