UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s hypocrisy on free speech is exposed amid Trump meeting and online “safety” crackdown.
CAM WAKEFIELD
The mist rolls in across the Ayrshire coast. A bagpiper bellows into the wind, and standing there at his Turnberry Hotel and Resort is President Donald Trump.
Alongside him: Keir Starmer, the UK’s Prime Minister and his wife, Victoria, looking stern while her husband drifts into platitudes like a GPS sending you down a dead-end street.
The two leaders shared a moment. Flags flapped. Bagpipes wailed. And somewhere between the shortbread and the sycophancy, Bev Turner of GB News had the temerity to bring up free speech, one of Starmer’s most dreaded topics.
“Well, free speech is very important and I don’t know if you’re referring to any place in particular,” said Trump, in a tone that suggested he absolutely knew where the question was pointing, as he turned toward Starmer.
Starmer, ever the lawyer with a brief to obfuscate, chimed in with, “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time here, so, er, we’re very proud about that.
It was the same phrase he used on Vice President JD Vance earlier this year, and this touching tribute to Britain’s historic commitment to free speech might have carried more weight had it not landed right after the public had just learned that the government had launched a National Internet Intelligence Investigations team.
The new unit will trawl social media looking for “anti-migrant sentiment.” Nothing says “we love liberty” quite like a taxpayer-funded digital Thought Police checking whether you used the wrong emoji under a news article.
This was rolled out under Starmer’s watch. The same Starmer who, just one day later, was sitting across from Trump, declaring Britain’s sacred love affair with free speech like a man who had just Googled “Enlightenment values” over breakfast.
And while we’re on the topic of breakfast, here’s the cherry on top of this flaming waffle: mothers are being jailed for what they post online.
In Starmer’s Britain, if your tweet causes discomfort to the wrong department, you might just find officers knocking on your door, as we’ve documented many times recently.
It’s all part of a much grander project, wrapped up in the Online Safety Act; legislation so densely authoritarian it makes the Patriot Act look like a leaflet from Amnesty International.
When questioned about its Orwellian overtones (because of course, it has them), Starmer offered this gem: “We’re not censoring anyone.”
Starmer insists the Online Safety Act is about protecting kids. Which is noble. Who could object to saving children from harm? But that’s the trick, isn’t it? Wrap your censorship in the language of compassion, and suddenly anyone who questions it becomes a monster.
“We’ve had too many cases in the United Kingdom of young children taking their own lives,” Starmer said. “They’ve been accessing sites which talk about suicide and encourage children down that road. That is what we want to stop.”
Most people want to stop that. But what they don’t want is to burn down the whole digital village to save the cyber-child. The Online Safety Act doesn’t only put suicide forums in the crosshairs, it has very broad definitions of legal but “harmful” speech.
It mandates digital ID schemes that tie every online word to a real-world name, stripping away anonymity. And if your online account isn’t verified? Well, enjoy being quietly locked out of the national conversation.
Meanwhile, protest footage, inconvenient, unsanctioned, and occasionally messy, is being throttled, suppressed, or algorithmically shoved into a digital dungeon where no one can see it.
So while Starmer poses in front of bagpipes and tartan, murmuring about the virtues of free speech, the government under his stewardship is building a sleek new surveillance state.
What makes it all the more unbearable is the sanctimony. Starmer isn’t twirling a villainous mustache and cackling about censorship. No, he’s doing it with a frown of concerned leadership, like a substitute teacher confiscating your phone “for your own good.”
The truth is simple: either you believe in free speech, or you don’t. And if you’re launching digital Gestapo and throwing mothers in jail for Facebook posts, you’re not the champion of liberty you claim to be. You’re just another polished hypocrite with a PR team and a tenuous grip on irony.
Britain has not had free speech for a very long time. And what little protections it did have are quietly being eroded by the day.
This article (Tea, Tartan, and Thought Police: Starmer Smiles While Liberty Dies) was created and published by Reclaim the Net and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Cam Wakefield
See Related Article Below
UK Introduces Online Speech Monitoring Police
Free speech in the UK reaches dire new lows.
CAM WAKEFIELD
If you’re in the UK and you’ve ever dared to type a mildly spicy opinion about immigration into the vast and idiotic circus that is social media, you might now be under surveillance by a shiny new government outfit with a name so Orwellian it sounds like it was cooked up during a slow afternoon in North Korea’s Ministry of Truth.
The UK has officially launched a National Internet Intelligence Investigations team, a title that manages to be both comically vague and terrifyingly specific.
This is the stuff that authors of dystopian novels have been warning people about for decades.
The Frankenstein of a task force, stitched together from officers across the country and headquartered in Westminster’s National Police Coordination Centre, has been given the noble mission of snooping through your posts, likes, and digital mutterings for any whiff of “anti-migrant sentiment.”
The government has decided that free thought is a public safety risk.
Gone are the days when bobbies on the beat focussed on burglaries, stabbings, or the occasional drunken scuffle. Now, they’ve been upgraded, or rather, downloaded, into an era where your keyboard is the weapon and your opinion the crime.
The Home Office insists this is all very necessary. According to a leaked letter, the Telegraph obtained, from Dame Diana Johnson, Policing Minister and part-time press-release poet, the squad will focus on “exploiting internet intelligence” to help local police forces anticipate unrest.
“Exploit.” Not “monitor,” not “observe,” but exploit.
It’s all part of a grand, techno-utopian fantasy where public order is maintained not by policing actual crimes, but by interpreting emojis and out-of-context Facebook posts.
Supporters of this initiative are quick to remind us that tensions are rising over immigration. Protests have flared up from Norwich to Bournemouth, with citizens wondering why their local hotels now resemble temporary refugee camps paid for with their tax funds.
Many Brits are asking uncomfortable questions, questions that the current government would apparently prefer whispered, if not deleted altogether.
Which brings us neatly to the absurd theatre of this whole operation: the idea that public discontent can be managed not by addressing policy failures, but by stalking Instagram stories and dispatching undercover agents to Nextdoor forums.
Essex Police actually sent officers to the home of journalist Allison Pearson over something she posted online. Meanwhile, a mother named Lucy Connolly received a prison sentence longer than some violent offenders after sharing a message deemed offensive following the Southport attacks.
Naturally, the political opposition is smelling blood. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp has weighed in.
“Two-tier Keir can’t police the streets,” he fumed, “so he’s trying to police opinions instead.”
He’s not wrong. This isn’t law enforcement; it’s law enforcement theatre, a stage production in which your tweets are the script and the cops are the critics.
Nigel Farage, Reform Party leader, ever the populist thundercloud, put it in even starker terms: “This is the beginning of the state controlling free speech. It is sinister, dangerous, and must be fought.”
Let’s rewind for a moment. During the pandemic, the government rolled out “disinformation teams” that quietly monitored online content and flagged anything that strayed too far from the Approved Messaging Bible. They assured people it was for their safety. They always do.
Now, in what appears to be the spiritual sequel to that damp squib of a policy, we’re being served a reheated version, garnished with civil unrest panic and a dash of woke paranoia. And it arrives just as the Online Safety Act lumbers into force, a lumbering beast of a bill that seems hellbent on turning the UK into a digital kindergarten, where only soft voices and pre-approved opinions are allowed.
The Free Speech Union has already sounded the alarm after users discovered protest videos involving asylum hotels were mysteriously unavailable in the UK. Not removed by the platform. Not censored by other users. Just: poof, gone, as if reality itself had been deemed problematic.
Where does this all end? Are we one government memo away from officers arresting people for sarcastic memes? Will sarcasm itself soon be listed as a hate crime?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a state that polices speech will eventually police thought. And a government that fears its people’s opinions is a government that knows it has failed them.
This article (UK Introduces Online Speech Monitoring Police) was created and published by Reclaim the Net and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Cam Wakefield
Labour could ban the use of Virtual Private Networks after their use has skyrocketed to avoid the restrictions imposed by the Online Safety Act. Logical next step for the authoritarians…
A VPN reroutes a device’s internet traffic through another country. Swiss Proton VPN became the UK’s top free app on Apple’s app store over the weekend with downloads up 1,800%. Nord VPN reported a 1,000% spike in purchases from the UK. Half of the top ten free apps on the store are VPNs now. Well done lads…
Labour has previously supported moves to restrict VPN usage when the Online Safety Act was first going through parliament. Prominent backbench MP Sarah Champion launched a campaign against them:
“My new clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to publish, within six months of the Bill’s passage, a report on the effect of VPN use on Ofcom’s ability to enforce the requirements under clause 112. If VPNs cause significant issues, the Government must identify those issues and find solutions, rather than avoiding difficult problems.”
Champion was supported by the Labour frontbench – the party said there were “gaps” in the bill that needed to be amended. Shadow digital minister Alex Davies-Jones said at the time that the clause “touches on the issue of future-proofing, which Labour has raised repeatedly in debates on the Bill.” VPNs currently destroy the operation of the badly-designed legislation…
Under the terms of the act platforms are not allowed to promote VPNs as an alternative to ID checks. Labour will be minded to go much further. If China can’t do it…
SOURCE: Guido Fawkes
Featured image: x.com
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