Why are British people being sacked for their political views?
The latest chapter in Orwellian Britain
MATT GOODWIN
I’ve spent years exposing the rise of cancel culture and efforts to curb free speech across the Western world, including on this very Substack.
The situation in the UK today is particularly dire. Not a day goes go by without somebody losing their job for saying or doing the ‘wrong’ thing.
Just this week, for example, we discovered that a housing officer from one of the largest housing associations in the country is being forced to take a case to the Employment Tribunal after he was fired from his job.
The reason?
He is a candidate for Reform and had previously re-posted a cartoon, by well-known cartoonist Matt, from the Telegraph.
Thankfully, he is now being supported by the Free Speech Union in his litigation.
But to have lost his job over being a candidate for a mainstream party and re-posting content from a broadsheet newspaper is terrifying.
And other recent events suggest this is just the tip of a much larger, a much deeper, and a very sinister iceberg.
What I’m about to share with you goes down as one of the most egregious and ludicrous examples of cancel culture that I have ever come across.
And that’s saying something.
As Elon Musk wrote when he discovered my first post about this on X, this is “insane”. So buckle up for a story which proves that freedom of thought, along with free speech, is now under threat of extinction in modern day Britain.
The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) is the professional membership body for speech and language therapists in the UK.
It has over 20,000 members, who work in both the private sector, as well as the NHS. Its Patron is the Duchess of Cambridge.
The importance of the work of such therapists cannot be overstated, as they assist adults and children with issues relating to speech, language, communication, eating, drinking and swallowing.
Children who have autism, hearing loss, learning difficulties, stammering, and other conditions, may end up being reliant on a speech and language therapist.
But, worryingly, according to the RCSLT, there is a current waiting list of over 76,000 children seeking to see a speech and language therapist across the country.
In fact, the situation is so dire that its CEO recently said: “Speech and language therapy services are close to breaking point”.
One might have hoped, therefore, that the RCSLT’s focus would be on filling posts and reducing backlogs for suffering children. If only.
In late 2024, a group of speech and language therapists, calling themselves the ‘Anti Racism Action Collective’ discovered, after trawling through their CEO, Steve Jamieson’s, X account that he was, shock horror, ‘following’ Tommy Robinson.
To these activists masquerading as clinicians, this was simply unforgivable.
So, they wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees of the RCSLT, demanding an apology but, not only this, demanding that the CEO resign.
They described what had happened as “distressing” and claimed that “a follow from the leader of a responsible professional body becomes an endorsement”.
When I first came across this story, I was in such a state of disbelief that I had to go back and re-read it multiple times, to ensure I’d understood it correctly.
Jamieson had not met with Tommy Robinson. He had not publicly supported Tommy Robinson. He had not re-posted Tommy Robinson. He had not liked a post by Tommy Robinson. He had simply followed Tommy Robinson on X, from a personal account.
Whatever you think about Tommy Robinson, for a group of supposed professionals to be up in arms over their CEO merely following somebody is utterly bonkers.
Here comes the free speech CRACKDOWN –which we must RESIST
We all follow a variety of people, primarily to keep up with important global news, given that so much of our lives are conducted online these days. To follow somebody does not for one second suggest an endorsement of what that person stands for.
At present, Prime Minister Keir Starmer follows several unsavoury characters who hold high-profile positions in global politics. He must do, to keep abreast of what is going on in the world. Should he be kicked out of 10 Downing Street for this?
Of course not.
What this is doing, essentially, is punishing people for thought crimes, without even knowing what they think.
Now, one would have hoped that, being met with such an outlandish complaint, the Board of Trustees would have given it short shrift.
But, unfortunately, they did the complete opposite.
Get this. They instigated an investigation into the ‘actions’ of their CEO.
They established a ‘sub-committee’ of Board members, tasked with conducting “evidence-gathering and fact-finding”.
Following on from this, a barrister from Littleton Chambers was appointed and paid an undisclosed sum of money to conduct an ‘independent investigation’.
These steps were taken, according to the RCSLT, to reflect “the gravity of the situation and our commitment to being an inclusive organisation where all voices deserve to be heard”.
The fact that they cannot see the blatant irony in what they have written is staggering.
Perhaps this should come as no great surprise, given the make-up of senior leaders at the RCSLT. Many of them use pronouns in their emails. Some have blue hair. There is much talk about ‘Pride Networks’. The Chair of the Board, Irma Donaldson, speaks of her work with ‘NHS Ready to Rise’ – “a collective of senior staff working to influence change in the NHS for staff from a minoritised ethnic background.”
Anyway, earlier this month, the RCSLT published its ‘findings’, which are laughable. Read them for yourself:
“The CEO’s personal account was following Tommy Robinson on X. With the information and data available, it was not technically possible to determine exactly how, why, or when the follow occurred, but on the balance of probabilities it was deemed that this was an accidental follow (as opposed to a hack) of which the CEO was unaware.”
I dread to think how much time and money this cost, in an organisation that is already complaining about stretched funding and resources.
Most chilling of all – even though they deemed the ‘following’ to be purely accidental, along with much self-flagellation, they ordered the CEO, Steve Jamieson, to “apologise for his actions”. This is truly Orwellian.
Free speech on campus RIP
What did Mr. Jamieson do?
He capitulated, in the worst way possible.
He published a public apology to all members of his organisation for the “upset, distress, fear and anger that this caused”. He finished by stating: “I recognise I have let you down and I am truly sorry.”
Reading this without knowing the full picture, one might have assumed that Mr. Jamieson had engaged in fraud, or sexual assault, or something of that nature. But all he had done is followed somebody on X.
I feel a great deal of empathy towards Mr Jamieson and the position he was put in by his own organisation. However, this empathy quickly dissipates when I consider the impact that his caving-in will have on more junior staff, when the baying mob eventually comes for them —which, inevitably, they will do.
How I wish he had held his head high, proclaimed he had done nothing wrong and threatened to see them before the Employment Tribunal if they tried to pull any more of this funny business.
The fact that Mr Jamieson tried to explain away his ‘following’ of Tommy Robinson with a concocted story that his X account must have been “hacked”, tells us the lengths he was prepared to go to rid the mob from his front door.
He has since deleted his personal account on X.
When I broke the story on X, public outrage ensued. Over 10 million people viewed my writing and thousands upon thousands of angry comments followed.
I was heartened to see the British public reject this form of cancel culture, including those who are diametrically opposed to everything Tommy Robinson says or does.
Yet, the RCSLT doubled down.
In response to the uproar, they attempted to justify the investigation, on the basis that the “associated costs were tightly controlled and deemed necessary to ensure the investigation was properly conducted.”
It is truly pathetic. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists exists to facilitate the speech of others, not to police it.
Make no mistake.
Free thought and free speech are genuinely under threat in the UK, spurred on by our trigger-happy Labour government and authoritarian prime minister.
We must do something about this and fast, before we lose them forever.
This article (Why are British people being sacked for their political views?) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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RELATED
Why Europe fears free speech
A war of repression is under way
WOLFGANG MANCHAU
We all know the old joke: when a European referendum delivers the “wrong” outcome, the country votes again until they get it “right”. The EU thought this would be the case after Brexit. But so far, no one’s laughing.
If anything, things have got worse. Take Romania, which recently cancelled its presidential election when Călin Georgescu, leader of a nationalist Right coalition, won the first round. Thierry Breton, former French European Commissioner, revealed the EU’s mindset during a damning recent TV interview. “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary,” he said. In other words, if you can’t beat the far-Right, ban them.
I disagree with almost everything Breton has ever said, but I am grateful to him for stating his case with such revealing clarity. During his time as industry commissioner in Brussels, from 2019 until last summer, when Emmanuel Macron replaced him with a more compliant figure, he was the driving force behind a series of laws designed to keep Europe in the digital dark ages. The most extreme of which is the Digital Services Act (DSA) which compels “very large online platforms”, such as X and Meta, to check facts and filter out fake news.
“In the pecking order of democratic rights, freedom of speech has a relatively low priority in Europe.”
But, thanks to Breton, the truth is out there. Europe’s ultimate aim isn’t to save public discourse, it is to suffocate far-Right parties by depriving them of the oxygen of information. The DSA isn’t even the last word in the EU’s anti-digital jihad. One of Ursula von der Leyen’s big ideas last year during the European election was the so-called “democracy shield” — effectively launching even more legislation to prevent outside interference in EU affairs. This notion conjures up images of laser beams and light-sabre fights. And in some respects it’s not far from the truth: a frightened bloc needs a shield to protect itself from the encroaching enemy.
Mark Zuckerberg is certainly on the attack. Last week he announced that he is abandoning fact-checking on his platforms — effectively defying the DSA. And he is betting on Donald Trump to protect him from the legal consequences. Given that J.D. Vance, the Vice President-elect, has already threatened to end US support for Nato if Europe tries to censor Elon Musk’s X, surely the same will apply to Facebook. And the EU is far too dependent on the US to be able to mount an effective campaign against any of America’s social media platforms once Trump is president. The DSA, hastily drawn up during the pandemic, not only misjudges the nature of the social media, it misjudges political power. It exposes Europe’s essential weakness before America.
This isn’t just a geopolitical battle, though. It is also a European one. The attempted clampdown reveals that there is something the bloc fears more than free speech: populism. MEPs found it hard enough to stomach Nigel Farage’s brutal outbursts when he was a member of the European Parliament. Now they have Musk breathing down their neck, endorsing candidates from the AfD, a party that sits on the far-Right in the European Parliament’s benches and which supports German withdrawal from the EU.
The German media had a collective breakdown when Musk tweeted an endorsement for the AfD, interviewed Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader, on X, and then endorsed her in an article for Die Welt. The op-ed editor of the German daily resigned in protest. And an article in another newspaper hysterically described Musk’s intervention as unconstitutional. That journalists would advocate censorship seems shocking, until one understands the role of journalism in continental European society. It operates firmly inside a narrow centrist political consensus, which spans all the parties from the centre-left to the centre-right. Naturally, the AfD does not get much airtime in the German media.
But while marginalised by traditional media, the AfD thrives on TikTok, where it has large following. So what irks the German media, and politicians from other parties, is that the censorship cartel is no longer functioning as well as it once did. In the US and in the UK, the once mighty legacy media have already lost their power. Hillary Clinton expressed the frustration perhaps most clearly when she said that social media companies must fact check, or else “we lose total control”. But Europe still lives in a twilight zone where the traditional media still basks in the dwindling sunset of power, trying to ignore social media rising on the other horizon. Like all the modern political battles in Europe, this is about protecting vested interests.
The Romanian case demonstrates how these restrictions on freedom of speech are the first salvos in a greater war of repression. The presidential elections there were cancelled on the grounds that a Russian-infested TikTok had misinformed voters. I am sure that the Russians were active. But it is shocking to think that an election was cancelled because someone lied on TikTok.
Let’s be clear, there was no suggestion of any vote rigging. Georgescu won the first round of the election fair and square. But as with the laughable misperception in Brussels after the Brexit vote, the presumption behind the EU’s support for the nullification of the result, was that voters were too stupid to make up their own mind. The rerun is to take place on 4 May, followed by a run-off between the most successful candidate two weeks later. Georgescu is still the most likely candidate to win according to opinion polls, but the Romanian political establishment is still determined to find ways to disbar him, the most promising of which is the hope that he may have received undeclared funds.
There are similar patterns elsewhere. Marine Le Pen faces potential disqualification from the 2027 presidential elections following accusations of irregularities regarding her assistants in the European Parliament. More recently, Brussels was spooked by the victory in Austria of the Freedom Party, which managed to obtain 28.8% of the vote in the September general election. It surpassed a threshold at which point it became politically impossible for the other parties to form coalitions. Herbert Kickl, the FPÖ’s leader, is now likely to become Austria’s next chancellor. Meanwhile, in Germany, a group of 113 MPs has ganged up to ban the AfD. Their story is that the far-Right wants to destroy democracy. While the party is not yet polling high enough to frustrate yet another centrist coalition in Berlin after next month’s elections, Germany may only be a few percentage points away from an Austrian-style impasse.
Surely, though, the sensible approach to the rise of the AfD, the FPÖ and other parties of the Right is not to censor them, but to address the underlying problem that has made them so strong: persistent economic uncertainty, loss of purchasing power, and dysfunctional policies on migration. Failing that, why not co-opt parties of the far-Right as junior coalition partners as they did in Sweden and Finland? If Weidel were suddenly thrust into the job of economics minister, we would see whether she could defend her record in government. But the centrist parties in Germany and France do neither. They have erected political firewalls against the far-Right. And they are doubling down with the same old policies.
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