Rarely has freedom of speech on this island, or in the West, approached the precipice that it now teeters on. In the U.K., in 2023 alone, more than 12,000 people were arrested for messages they posted online, a figure that any tyrannical regime would envy but an abject disgrace for a democracy. A troubling share of these cases involved nothing more than dissenting opinions. This has poured fuel on a growing public fury over "two-tier" policing, in which law enforcement is seen as indulgent toward violent or sexual offenders—especially those of favored political or social standing—while coming down far harder on the perceived wrongthink of outspoken citizens.
It is startling to scan through suspended sentences and see the reprieved in possession of child rape images, or guilty of an assault on an emergency responder or the torture of a cat, or to discover an assailant who stamped on his victim's head 20 times; whereas a social-media post, even if hastily deleted, can bring a prison sentence of several years. There are growing suspicions that the police and judiciary have been turned against the "wrong" kind of protesters, with such defendants rushed through an otherwise sluggish legal process. As the old saying goes, "For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law."
The law is a confusing realm. In 2026, British jails are anticipated to reach "total gridlock," a crisis used to justify early releases and reduced sentences for many serious offenders. Perhaps the newly emptied cells will be filled by unlucky online scribes guilty of expressing disapproved ideas. (It's a prospect imaginable in New York, too, where the city's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has dismissed the rationale for jails, asking, "What purpose do they serve?" while proposing an 800 percent increase in funding for hate-crime prevention.) Since its inception, the bar for hate crimes in the U.K. has steadily fallen, now encompassing subjective "insults," "inconvenience," "annoyance," or even silent prayer—offenses that can result in a home raid or imprisonment. Meantime, those filmed urging throat-cutting or shouting "kill them all" often walk free or go uncharged. When a man who swings a knife at someone burning a Koran receives no custodial sentence and is even praised by the judge for his character, we have moved beyond confusion into intent. Such rulings set an alarming precedent, effectively reintroducing blasphemy law by proxy. Those wielding these intoxicating powers fail to see that the same powers and inequities, once unleashed, could one day be used against them. Tyranny is often described as systematic, but it can just as easily be exercised through arbitrariness.
At times, these proceedings verge on the absurd, resembling a Monty Python sketch: a man hauled off to a police station for calling someone a "muppet." Such episodes unfold in the unreliable, bad-faith realm of online signs, where videos can be edited, photos doctored, contexts rearranged, and truth endlessly disputed. What stands out is the condescending dismissal by the mainstream media—once the fourth estate charged with speaking truth to power, now too often an establishment mouthpiece. Taste and decorum are elevated above principle, yet free speech depends on defending tasteless fools and rogues, for these easy scapegoats become the precedents that justify what the state can do to everyone else.
There comes a point when the joke isn't funny anymore. In Brazil, a comedian who "jokes about everything and everyone" gets eight years in jail. In Germany, many shrugged when a journalist was sentenced for sharing a meme mocking the nation's lack of free speech, thus proving his point. This is the same country where a rape victim received a longer sentence than her rapist after calling him a pig. The notion that such things could never happen in England has long been disproven by the Muslim grooming-gang scandals, where institutional fear and negligence led police, the mainstream media, and civil authorities to erase thousands of rape victims. It took centuries of struggle to establish the social contract; it takes very little time to destroy it.
These foul deeds tend to fall on those long discarded, far from the well-insulated and well-remunerated intellectual classes. When the working classes failed to meet bourgeois left-liberal expectations, seeking better lives rather than serving as compliant mascots, Labour and its allies embraced the Brechtian solution: to elect a new people. They chose impressionable students, the echo-chambered chattering class, and migrants—the last courted for votes just as the Tories had once embraced them for cheap labor. Labour's "Red Wall" working-class backbone was recast almost overnight as a bloc of racist deplorables, much like the residents of America's Rust Belt, giving license for latent snobbery to be directed at those on whom the party had long depended. The cost of maintaining an elite class is borne by the public through lower living standards and rising crime—realities whose honest description is punished and stigmatized, both professionally and personally. Having once pledged to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime," Labour has instead become tough on the reporting of crime. The resulting protests are then slandered by the press and political parties alike.
… If the past decade teaches us anything, it is that, for all the talk of the decline of religion, we haven't lost our habit of theological thinking. We merely create new theocracies, however secular they claim to be, with a new elect, priests, rituals, heresies, compelled and forbidden speech, demons, catechisms, icons, and iconoclasts. We are living through a godless, redemptionless, graceless puritan revival. The teleological "right side of history" is invoked like the divine right of kings. Sin is everywhere: everything from mathematics to rural life is periodically declared problematic, though crime itself is often not. Through the return of essentialism, original sin has reappeared in secular form.
All this pseudo-religious fervor is supercharged by social media and economics. We live in turbulent times, with younger generations facing greater precarity and uncertainty than their parents, fuelling the generational warfare seen online and on campuses. At the same time, they use every available means to survive in an ever more competitive world; hence the rise of a kind of LinkedIn identitarianism and the impulse to take down high-profile figures. This makes them easy prey for older cynics—few of them genuine Marxists, but rather establishment liberals convinced of their own benevolence—who believe that an elite, their elite, can remedy every social ill through the universal application of Human Resources principles to life itself. The need to punish and censor reveals their complete lack of faith in the persuasive power of their own beliefs—rigging a game that they do not believe they could otherwise win.
For all the social engineering, there is little sign of any utopian outcomes amid the managed decline and workplace struggle sessions, fiscal black holes, and sensitivity readers. In this brave new world, everything is contentious, purity spirals abound, and anything older than a mayfly must be crushed or hollowed out. Cosmopolitanism has given way to balkanization. Authoritarianism now arrives cloaked in Nurse Ratched–like tones of "concern." Progress has lurched not toward a better world but toward an untrue one—hence, the apparent need to arrest 12,000 people a year for deviations or simple honesty. Social justice has become personal rather than structural, demanding ever more sacrificial victims for the rain and harvest that never come. The road to hell is the road to hell, no matter what it is paved with.
To the progenitors of this realm, any criticism of protected groups is phobia or hate. Any divergence, even to their left, is fascism. While practicing the acrobatics of moral relativism to excuse their own behavior, they apply a rigid moral absolutism to their opponents, for whom words and actions are not merely wrong but evil. Language is deemed violence, yet violence itself is not—at least when directed at the "right" targets. Words lose their meaning, serving only as weapons or camouflage, and are deployed to justify the unjustifiable, as in the orchestrated trawling through Charlie Kirk's speeches used to legitimize his murder.
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, now X, many intellectuals have fled to the echo chamber of Bluesky, where they indulge nostalgia for the old Twitter of shadow bans and active censorship. X may be a snake pit, but it remains one of the few places where unpalatable truths can be spoken and raw footage shared. History shows that free speech—and more of it—is the most powerful tool of the truly marginalized, as the campaigns of Ida B. Wells demonstrated. Without such avenues, truth is determined by the mainstream media, whose biases are not just active but passive: controlling what you can and can't see. Without social media, it is debatable whether the senseless murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska allegedly by a repeat offender would have become nationally visible. Without X, the news would be left to the likes of CNN, whose commentator Van Jones revealed his sympathies when he said of Zarutska's accused killer, "This man was hurting." Yet, astonishingly, many intellectuals now yearn for a world without this public square.
The trade-off is protection in exchange for freedom of speech; yet the state is incapable and unwilling to deliver the first and all too eager to remove the second. Some governments have lapsed into Orwellian satire with the appointment of "truth tsars." Much hysteria surrounds "misinformation," the etymology of which derives not from "untrue" or "wrong" but from "divergent." The problem is that truth is always inconvenient for someone in power. In the U.K., we have a state that effectively ran death squads in Northern Ireland, allowed the security services to infiltrate activist groups (impregnating women therein), sent armed police to arrest a television comedy writer at an airport for his tweets, arrested (among others) an Irish hip-hop musician and an Oxford professor of poetry under legislation designed for terrorists, and takes out super-injunctions against its own citizenry to hide its ineptness and corruption. This is a state that judges itself worthy of controlling the words of the people whom it is supposed to serve, a state keen to introduce digital IDs as it dreams of a CCP-style social credit system.
To silence is to make reality disappear. Yet reality persists. Ideologues merely blind themselves in the process of censoring—hence why book bans are not only egregious but also futile and self-defeating. The more that ideologues engineer the world to fit their delusions, the greater the gap between illusion and reality becomes, until it can no longer be sustained. That is their fatal flaw, though they can do immense damage in the meantime.
Freedom of speech is not a lone right. It is the common denominator of all the others. It is the freedom to be different, to disagree, to doubt and question, to notice, to cry out, to insult and annoy, to be a whistleblower, to grieve, to be autonomous, to deviate, to exist. Writers can betray literature (and the Socratic and scientific methods) by stunting free speech, but they cannot destroy literature, which exists beyond one life span. In the future, such strictures will be seen as stifling, conformist, and boring to younger generations. For literature, like life, is drama, conflict, surprise, dialectical tension, asymmetry, transgression, glamour, danger—all the imperfections and differences that make us human. Earth keeps moving, and no priest or philosopher can halt it, even for a moment. There will always be an outside, where the sun never betrays us, no matter how much we betray ourselves.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/free-speech-online-arrests-censorship