Not Our Kind of Free Speech

It has been less than a couple of weeks since the release of Lucy Connolly from her prison cell following a 31 month sentence for an incendiary tweet made in the wake of the Southport riots and already we have Starmer's next "Free-speech prisoner" - a term I am coining as of today.

But wait a minute, didn't the pm assure us all that our speech is protected? Here he is next to the American president 5 weeks ago trotting out the usual lies.

The "increasingly insidious and marring machinations" that I alluded to last time out, are becoming realised and manifested each and every day. As Trump's Vice-President JD Vance pointed out in February, "In Britain and in Europe, free speech is in retreat". And he's right of course, because when folks like Graham Linehan et al have a watchful state-sponsored eye trained on them for saying that a man is man and a woman is a woman, ask what kind of values your society has left to cling on to.

A decade or so more ago, you used to be able to say that biology is immutable without facing repercussions, mainly because that was what basically everyone else thought aswell. More so, even the fringes of society who didn't believe that - the preeminent progressives pushing back against age-old facts before it became mainstream - would still, most likely, support your right to say it. This is no longer the case, or at least in Britain. The fact is, you can't have a free society without free speech. They are inseparable. We may have to start realising that Britain is no longer a "free society". Hence the scenes across the country.