Can Free Speech Survive Keir Starmer?

TOBY YOUNG

I’ve written a piece for Spiked about the attacks on free speech by the Labour Government we can expect in 2025. Here’s how it begins:

The unrelenting assault on this essential human right since Sir Keir Starmer entered Downing Street in July has shocked even the most jaundiced of observers. Who could have predicted this time last year that scores of people would be prosecuted for offensive speech on social media following a brutal knife attack? That two police officers would turn up at the door of an award-winning journalist on Remembrance Sunday to interview her about a year-old tweet that she’d deleted within hours? That Britain’s record on freedom of expression would be so bad that it has turned us into a global laughing stock? All of which means that when speculating about what will become of free speech in 2025, we should assume the worst.

Let’s start with the threats already in the pipeline. The Employment Rights Bill, which will almost certainly receive royal assent next year, contains a clause that will extend employers’ liability under the Equality Act to third-party harassment – i.e., the harassment of employees by customers and the like. That means that owners of pubs, bars, restaurants, hotels, sports stadia, concert venues, etc., will have a legal obligation to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to protect their employees from ‘harassment’ by anyone they come into contact with in the course of doing their jobs.

When you bear in mind that under the Equality Act ‘harassment’ includes overheard conversations that might upset or offend someone with a protected characteristic, the implications of this are deeply sinister. Pubs will have to employ ‘banter bouncers’ to police the conversations of customers to make sure no one is saying anything risqué that could be overheard by a member of staff. Hotels will have to stop anyone entering the lobby wearing a “Woman: Adult Human Female” t-shirt. Football clubs will have to ban anyone who shouts “Are you blind?” at a linesman, in case they’re overheard by a partially sighted steward. In short, the chilling effect that the Equality Act has had on workplaces, in which everyone is constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure they’re not overheard, will be extended to every area of our lives.

Then there’s the Football Governance Bill, another piece of legislation bound to go through next year. It includes several clauses that will require football clubs to promote equality, diversity and inclusion even more aggressively than they do at present. When you consider that Newcastle FC has already given a gender-critical feminist a two-season ban for saying on X that she doesn’t think transwomen are women, the mind boggles.

We already have Kick It Out and Rainbow Laces. Stonewall hovers over every boardroom in the Premier League. Not long ago, footballers would religiously take the knee before each match. Does the Labour government want fans to produce a certificate proving they’ve had unconscious-bias training before being allowed into a stadium? In future, when visiting fans at the Emirates chant “Is this a library?”, Arsenal supporters will be able to point to Sir Keir in his executive box and then put their fingers to their lips. If Starmer has his way, every stadium in the country will be a library.

Labour also promised a “full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices” in its manifesto and it’s a racing certainty that this will happen in 2025 as well. What does that mean, given that what’s commonly thought of as ‘conversion therapy’ is already illegal in Britain and, in any event, all but disappeared about 25 years ago? The answer is that Labour wants to criminalise parents and health professionals who deviate in any way from the ‘gender-affirming care’ approach, whereby any adolescent suffering from gender confusion is encouraged to embark on an irreversible medical pathway rather than pause and reflect, or undergo a course of psychotherapy.

Finally, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said she wants to lower the threshold for the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs). Yes, you read that correctly. Police forces in England and Wales have recorded about a quarter of a million of these since the concept was introduced by the College of Policing in 2014, which is an average of 65 a day. Already they have been recorded against playground taunts, un-PC jokes and political speeches about immigration. But Cooper thinks this isn’t nearly enough. By the time Labour is turfed out in 2029 – please God! – newspapers will be running news stories about those rare and exotic creatures who haven’t had an NCHI recorded against them.

Okay, so those are the anti-free-speech measures we know are heading towards us next year. What about the stuff that wasn’t in Labour’s manifesto?

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sir Keir takes steps to criminalise Islamophobia, something he hinted at when answering a question from Tahir Ali MP during PMQs in November, about what ‘measures’ he’d take to ‘prohibit’ the ‘desecration’ of the Koran. Instead of ruling out any new blasphemy laws, Sir Keir replied: ‘I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.’

Worth reading in full.

Via The Daily Sceptic