What Comes Next? “We are Banning Every Organisation that Opposes Our Agenda, and There is Nothing You Can Do about It!” Or, So They Say! By Ian Wilson LL.B

There is something refreshingly honest about a government that simply admits what it is doing.

Instead of cloaking things in the language of "community safety", "social cohesion", or "harm prevention," it could just hold a press conference and say:

"We are banning every organisation that opposes our agenda, and there is nothing you can do about it!"

It would save everyone a lot of time.

Unfortunately, modern power no longer works that way. It prefers moral theatre, technocratic language, and the slow administrative repackaging of coercion as compassion. But the substance remains unchanged: law increasingly functions not as a neutral framework governing all equally, but as a political instrument deployed selectively against disfavoured groups. Once that shift occurs, the targets inevitably expand. This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's institutional gravity.

The current enthusiasm for banning "extremist" organisations is a perfect case study. The proposal is always introduced with groups so radioactive that no sane person wants to defend them: neo-Nazis, jihadists, or fringe militants who actively glorify violence. And fair enough. These are not hilltops worth dying on. But the key move isn't who gets banned first. It's the precedent that gets established: that the state may dissolve associations not because they have committed crimes, but because their beliefs are deemed harmful.

Once that principle is accepted, the limiting condition is gone. What remains is only discretion.

Historically, liberal societies didn't rely on banning organisations. They criminalised conduct. You could hold repugnant views, publish odious nonsense, even advocate dreadful ideas — but the moment you crossed into violence, coercion, or conspiracy, the law intervened. The crime was the act, not the belief. The offence was behaviour, not ideology.

The new model reverses this. Now the belief itself becomes actionable. Not because it necessarily causes harm, but because it allegedly contributes to an ecosystem of harm. This is a crucial conceptual shift. Once harm becomes diffuse, probabilistic, and narrative-driven rather than concrete and evidentiary, enforcement becomes unavoidably political. Someone must decide which beliefs are dangerous, which associations are suspect, which ideas corrode cohesion. That someone is always the state with its agendas, and behind it, the deep state, and higher elite controllers, with their own grand plans.

At first, this feels safe. The initial targets are grotesque. Nobody loses sleep over the demise of tasty neo-Nazi microcultures or radical Islamist sects. But this is how all speech-control regimes begin: with enemies no one defends. The point is not that the early bans are unjustified; the point is that they establish the legitimacy of banning itself as a policy tool.

Once the tool exists, bureaucracies do what bureaucracies always do. They expand remit. They develop categories. They refine definitions. They discover adjacent threats. The line between extremist and controversial blurs, then between controversial and inconvenient, then between inconvenient and oppositional.

It is not malice. It is administration.

Every regulatory system exhibits mission creep. Counterterrorism becomes counter-radicalisation. Counter-radicalisation becomes counter-disinformation. Counter-disinformation becomes counter-harmful narratives. Counter-harmful narratives becomes counter-social disruption. And at some point, without anyone formally announcing the transition, counter-social disruption simply becomes counter-opposition. The COVID plandemic perfectly illustrates that.

None of this requires authoritarian intent. It requires only incentives. No minister is punished for banning too much; only for banning too little after an incident. No agency is criticised for overreach if the target group is unpopular. No bureaucrat loses their job for precautionary suppression. The risk gradient runs entirely in one direction.

This is why "slippery slope" arguments, so often dismissed as paranoid, are usually just descriptions of how systems behave over time. The slope is not a fantasy. It is a property of institutional structures.

We've already seen this logic play out in other domains. Consider how lawfare has been normalised against political figures. The Trump cases in New York are instructive not because one needs to admire Trump, but because they illustrate something far more corrosive than any individual scandal: the willingness of legal institutions to modify procedural norms, statutes of limitation, jurisdictional doctrines, and evidentiary standards in order to secure outcomes against a particular person.

In one case, civil liability was revived through retroactive legislative changes. In another, novel interpretations of fraud law were deployed that bore little resemblance to how such statutes had historically been applied in commercial disputes. The message sent wasn't merely "no one is above the law". It was something more dangerous: "law can be reshaped after the fact to target disfavoured individuals."

Once that precedent exists, law ceases to function as a rule-set and becomes a tool-kit. Every future faction inherits it. What is weaponised once is weaponised forever.

The same structural logic applies to banning organisations. At first, it's framed as a narrow exception: only for the worst groups, only for extraordinary threats, only for safety. But once the state acquires the power to dissolve associations on ideological grounds, that power does not remain inert. It cannot. Every future crisis, moral panic, election cycle, or social rupture becomes an opportunity for expansion.

Today's extremist organisation becomes tomorrow's misinformation network. Tomorrow's misinformation network becomes next decade's social harm hub. And eventually, what was once political opposition becomes reframed as destabilisation.

Notice the pattern. The language shifts first. The categories widen next. The enforcement follows last.

Defenders of these measures often reply: "But we trust this government." That misses the point. No legal structure should rely on trusting the current government. The entire purpose of law is to bind the future. A system that works only when good people hold power is not a system; it's a prayer.

Others argue: "These laws target only behaviour, not belief." But this is increasingly untrue. The modern regulatory architecture targets associative identity, expressive alignment, and ideological proximity. You may not have committed a crime, but your organisation allegedly contributes to an ecosystem in which harmful conduct becomes more likely. At that point, causality becomes narrative. And narrative is political.

Still others reply: "But these groups are dangerous." Sometimes they are. That doesn't resolve the structural problem. A legal principle that works only when the targets deserve it is not a principle. It is a convenience.

There is a deeper issue here that few people want to name. Liberal societies historically distinguished between enemies and criminals. Enemies were dealt with politically. Criminals were dealt with legally. What we are witnessing is the collapse of that distinction. Political enemies are increasingly treated as criminal risks, and criminal frameworks are increasingly used to manage political dissent.

That is not how free societies collapse. They do not fall to jackboots. They decay into administrative control.

And once law becomes an instrument of narrative enforcement rather than behavioural constraint, it loses its core legitimating function. It ceases to protect citizens from power and instead protects power from citizens.

The most dangerous thing about banning organisations for ideological harm is not that some bad groups will be dissolved. It is that the conceptual firewall separating politics from criminal law will be breached. Once breached, it does not get repaired. Every crisis pushes further through the opening.

What begins as counter-extremism ends as counter-opposition.

And this isn't speculation. It is historical pattern. Every society that has granted the state the authority to suppress associations based on belief, identity, or perceived social harm has eventually discovered that those categories expand until they include the regime's critics. Always. Without exception. The names change. The rhetoric changes. The mechanism does not.

That is why the only defensible principle is boring and unfashionable: punish conduct, not belief. Prosecute crimes, not ideas. Disband criminal conspiracies, not political movements. This framework is imperfect. It tolerates ugliness. It allows fools to organise. It permits obnoxious speech. But it preserves something far more valuable: the structural neutrality of law.

Once law loses neutrality, everything else follows.

Perhaps the most corrosive feature of the current moment is that many people who once understood this now cheer its abandonment, so long as the targets are unfashionable. They imagine that power will remain in friendly hands. They imagine that norms only erode in one direction. They imagine that instruments of suppression remain loyal to their creators.

History has not been kind to such imaginations.

If one wanted to be honest about the legislative trajectory, the government could skip the euphemisms and introduce something like the Totally Do You Over Act:

Section 1: Any organisation, association, publication, online forum, dinner conversation, or facial expression deemed inconsistent with the Narrative Objectives of the Commonwealth may be declared unlawful by ministerial satisfaction.

Section 2: Ministerial satisfaction shall not be subject to evidentiary standards, judicial review, or public explanation, as these may cause harm.

Section 3: Retrospective enforcement shall be permitted where future moral insight reveals past wrongdoing.

Section 4: Any resemblance between this Act and authoritarian governance is coincidental and will be investigated.

It would at least be honest.

But of course, the real system will never look like that. It will look reasonable. It will look cautious. It will look targeted. It will look like common sense. It will be justified by safety, by protection, by harm prevention, by cohesion, by dignity, by resilience, by democracy itself.

And that is precisely why it works.

The tragedy is that this isn't primarily a Left-Right issue. It is an institutional one. The same machinery that bans today's extremists will ban tomorrow's dissenters. The same logic used against fringe militants will be used against mainstream critics. The same precedents that justify dissolving one association will justify dissolving others. Not because anyone planned it. Because no one stopped it.

Power does not need evil intent to grow dangerous. It only needs permission.

Once the state claims authority over which beliefs may be organised, law stops being a shield and becomes a weapon. And once that transformation occurs, the question is no longer "Who deserves to be banned?" but "Who decides?"

History's answer is grimly consistent: whoever happens to be in charge.

And that, more than any extremist group, is the real threat to a free society.