Echoes of Anarcho-Tyranny: Britain and Australia’s Slide into Totalitarian Dystopias , By Richard Miller (Londonistan)
In a world where digital voices echo across borders, the erosion of free speech in one nation serves as a stark warning to others. Allister Heath's recent op-ed in The Telegraph paints a grim picture of the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Keir Starmer: a descent into "anarcho-tyranny," where petty crimes go unpunished, while ordinary citizens face persecution for expressing dissenting views. Heath's term, borrowed from conservative thinker Samuel T. Francis, describes a state that fails to enforce basic law and order, but aggressively polices thought and speech. As Britain grapples with this paradox, it's worth examining how similar dynamics are playing out in Australia. Without robust protections akin to those in the United States, Australia risks mirroring the UK's troubling path. This discussion explores the UK's crisis, the philosophical underpinnings of anarcho-tyranny, and why Australia must urgently fortify its free speech defences to preserve its democratic ethos.
The UK's Descent: Chaos Meets Authoritarianism
Britain, long celebrated as the cradle of modern liberty, with its Magna Carta and tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, now finds itself in a precarious bind. Heath argues that the state has abandoned its duty to combat real crimes like shoplifting, benefit fraud, and illegal immigration, citing resource constraints and a lack of political will. Yet, when it comes to "wrongthink," the authorities mobilise with alarming efficiency. High-profile cases underscore this disparity: comedian Graham Linehan arrested at Heathrow over gender-critical tweets; journalist Allison Pearson harassed for her opinions; and even former Labour MP Rosie Duffield facing threats for her views. These aren't isolated incidents but symptoms of a broader shift toward selective enforcement, where non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) are logged en masse, chilling public discourse.
The roots of this malaise, as Heath traces, lie in the Blair-era reforms of the late 1990s. The Human Rights Act (HRA) of 1998 and the establishment of the Supreme Court promised to enshrine liberties, but instead empowered a "Left-wing juristocracy" to prioritise social engineering over individual freedoms. The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), often hailed as a bulwark against tyranny, has paradoxically failed to prevent arrests for speech that would be protected elsewhere. During the COVID-19 era under Conservative rule, this trend accelerated with mass surveillance and crackdowns on dissent. Now, under Starmer's Labour government, the Online Safety Act empowers regulators to censor content deemed harmful, while figures like Green Party leader Zack Polanski openly defend arrests for "unacceptable" tweets.
Heath's invocation of Nigel Farage testifying before the US Congress highlights the international shock. Farage, leader of the Reform UK party, detailed how Britain's free speech erosion alienates allies who view the UK as a beacon of democracy. Yet, as Heath notes, even Farage's testimony couldn't capture the full horror: a society where the process of investigation itself becomes punishment, deterring citizens from speaking out. This isn't mere overreach; it's a deliberate imbalance that erodes trust in institutions and fosters a culture of self-censorship.
Anarcho-Tyranny: A Conceptual Framework
At its core, anarcho-tyranny represents a failure of the social contract. Governments exist to protect citizens from harm while upholding fundamental rights. When they neglect the former, allowing anarchy in the streets, and amplify the latter through tyrannical controls on expression, society fractures. In Britain, this manifests in double standards: leniency for "petty criminals" contrasts with zero tolerance for anti-woke sentiments. The influence of "woke ideology," as Heath describes, reframes speech as violence, justifying suppression in the name of protecting the "oppressed."
This isn't unique to the UK, but Britain's case is exacerbated by its lack of codified free speech protections. Unlike the US First Amendment, which sets a high bar for restrictions, UK law allows broader curbs under public order or hate speech statutes. Heath proposes a radical remedy: adopting a UK equivalent of the US Supreme Court's Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) ruling. This test permits bans only on speech intended to incite imminent lawless action with a likelihood of success. Applying it could have shielded Linehan's provocative tweet or Lucy Connolly's inflammatory post on the Southport riots, both repugnant to some, but not incitements under strict scrutiny.
Without such reforms, exiting the ECHR, scrapping the HRA, abolishing NCHIs, and reforming the Online Safety Act, Britain risks becoming a "Soviet-lite dystopia," as Heath warns. Literary echoes abound: Orwell's 1984 with its thought police, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and book-burning censorship, or Dick's The Minority Report pre-crime surveillance. These aren't just hypotheticals; they're blueprints for what unchecked anarcho-tyranny could wrought.
Linking to Australia: A Mirror and a Warning
Australia, often seen as a pragmatic middle ground between British tradition and American individualism, faces its own vulnerabilities to anarcho-tyranny. While not yet at the UK's precipice, recent developments suggest a slippery slope. Australia lacks an explicit bill of rights; free speech is protected implicitly through the High Court's recognition of "freedom of political communication" in cases like Lange v. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997). However, this is narrow, focused on political discourse, and doesn't extend to broader expression as robustly as the US First Amendment.
Hate speech laws under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) have sparked controversies, such as the 2011 case against columnist Andrew Bolt, fined for articles deemed offensive to Indigenous Australians. Defamation laws remain among the world's strictest. During the pandemic, state governments imposed draconian lockdowns with little tolerance for protest, echoing UK's COVID-era restrictions. More recently, the 2023 Misinformation and Disinformation Bill (ultimately shelved amid backlash) proposed fining social media platforms for "harmful" content, raising fears of overreach similar to Britain's Online Safety Act.
Australia's immigration policies have faced criticism for human rights lapses, yet petty crime and urban disorder persist in cities like Melbourne and Sydney, where police resources are stretched thin. This mirrors the anarchic element: failure to address street-level issues, while potentially weaponising laws against dissent. Influenced by global woke trends, Australian institutions, from universities to media, have seen cancellations and deplatformings, as in the 2022 case of gender-critical feminist Holly Lawford-Smith facing protests.
To avert a British-style slide, Australia needs proactive reforms. Adopting a J. S. Mill-like test could strengthen implied freedoms, ensuring speech is only restricted if it poses imminent harm. A constitutional amendment or federal free speech act, perhaps modelled on Canada's Charter, but with stronger safeguards, would provide explicit protections. Repealing Section 18C, curbing defamation payouts, and rejecting digital ID schemes (which could enable surveillance) are essential. As in the UK, operational police autonomy must be balanced with accountability to prevent selective enforcement.
Australia's society thrives on open debate; suppressing it risks social fragmentation. With geopolitical tensions rising, like China's influence operations or domestic extremism, robust free speech is a national security imperative, fostering resilience through diverse ideas.
Reclaiming Liberty Across Borders
The UK's anarcho-tyranny isn't an isolated affliction; it's a cautionary tale for democracies worldwide. As Heath urges a "radical break with the past 28 years," Australia must heed the call, fortifying its liberties before similar erosions take hold. True freedom demands vigilance: reading dystopian classics, engaging in civil discourse, and pressuring lawmakers for change. In an interconnected world, the fight for free speech in Britain bolsters it in Australia, and vice versa. Let's ensure science fiction remains on the page, not in our policies. If we fail, the knock on the door could come for any of us, anywhere.
Starmer's Britain is descending into anarcho-tyranny
Even Nigel Farage testifying before the US Congress did not convey the full horror of what is happening in the UK
Britain, once the freest, most democratic country in the world, is descending into anarcho-tyranny. Bereft of a moral compass, contemptuous of public opinion, uninterested in our glorious history of ordered freedom, the British state's nomenklatura are presiding over an intolerable mix of chaos and authoritarianism, failing to tackle genuine criminality while persecuting respectable citizens for their thoughts and speech.
The contradictions, double-standards and selective enforcement are a national scandal. They threaten to turn us into a pariah state, shunned or even sanctioned by true believers in liberty.
Nigel Farage was in Washington, explaining to shocked Anglophile congressmen just how far we have turned our back on free speech, and yet even the Reform leader couldn't fully convey in one session the full extent of Britain's degeneration.
If you are a shoplifter, an illegal immigrant, a ne'er-do-well pretending to be disabled to claim benefits or a "petty criminal" no longer deemed worthy of prison, you have little to fear in anarchical Britain, where there is little money and limited policing resources to come after you. If you are a responsible pillar of the community exercising your traditional right to free speech, and have forthright or anti-woke views, you risk trouble from the commissars of authoritarian Britain, who suddenly have endless capacity to track you down, monitor your public and private messages and detain you.
The case of Graham Linehan, the Father Ted creator, was especially shocking: he was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow, interrogated over innocuous gender-critical tweets and ended up in hospital with elevated blood pressure. This is what happens in police-states, not civilised countries.
Nobody who engages in wrongthink is safe: thousands of ordinary people have been harassed, but so have leading journalists such as our own Allison Pearson, the author Julie Bindel and even a former Labour MP. As in all authoritarian regimes, the knock on the door can come at any time, for anyone, for any reason. The process is the punishment. Many stay quiet for an easier life.
The great paradox is that the advent of "human rights" as our secular religion undermined our traditional liberties and coincided with the decline of freedom of expression. Human rights curtailed our real rights, the very opposite of what we were promised. The Blairite revolution, which began in 1997, is to blame.
It is true that free speech was insufficiently protected in the 1980s and 1990s. But the Human Rights Act (HRA), the creation of the Supreme Court, the Left-wing takeover of our institutions, the rise of quangos, the onset of lawfare and the rest not only didn't solve the problem but actually made it, and much else, worse. The public ended up less free to say what it thinks. The rot spread further during the technocratic Tory years of 2010-2024, under whose watch we suffered an explosion in the recording of non-crime hate incidents, further encroachments in freedom and mass monitoring and a war on dissent during Covid.
We keep being told that leaving the ECHR and HRA would turn us into a new Russia, and yet it increasingly feels as if we are already living in a Soviet-lite dystopia. We aren't free to speak out despite these treaties and declarations.
The Left-wing juristocracy doesn't believe in true freedom: it believes in weaponising the law for social engineering. The ECHR is a useful tool to promote open borders, but it won't stop Linehan from being arrested.
Starmer felt obliged to defend Linehan, and Wes Streeting went as far as calling for a change in the law, but nothing meaningful will happen. Lord Hermer, the attorney general, would never allow it. The best we can hope for are tweaks and slightly more liberal guidance for the police.
Yet if the mainstream Left is bad, the far-Left which may soon replace it is worse. Zack Polanski, the Green Party's new Corbynite leader, said on the BBC of Linehan that "these are totally unacceptable tweets… I think it was proportionate to arrest him". This is a new development: the rise of a class of politicians who don't seek to hide their authoritarianism. Many are influenced by woke ideology, which claims that speech is violence, a tool of oppression when in the hands of the "privileged" class of white overlords, and that only the "oppressed" have the right to speak out.
We need a radical break with the past 28 years. The Blairite project must be undone. We need fresh protections for free speech. The police must be retaught liberal values. Its operational autonomy must be curtailed. We must firmly resist digital ID cards as these would further shift power from citizen to state. The Online Safety Act has gone too far, and needs radical reform, as do many other laws. Non-crime hate incidents must be abolished. We need to quit the ECHR, scrap the HRA and return to Law Lords in Parliament.
We need Parliament to legislate for a UK version of Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the US Supreme Court judgment that determined what sort of speech advocating illegal conduct can be restricted under the First Amendment.
Under the Brandenburg test, the criteria are intent – whether the speech aims to incite and generate imminent violence – and likelihood, whether it has a real chance of succeeding in doing so. Only speech meeting both criteria can be banned in the US. There are real downsides: unbridled speech can be horrific, inflammatory and extreme, but that would still beat our slide towards repression.
One of Linehan's posts read: "If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the *****." It would obviously have been protected speech in the US. I found Lucy Connolly's post on the Southport riots repugnant, but US lawyers tell me her case would also have been thrown out.
Last but not least, we must start reading again, if only to know how bad it could get – George Orwell's Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report for a start. Science fiction cannot be allowed to become our new reality."
Comments