RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/05/dont-let-free-speech-be-a-victim-of-these-riots/

Here comes the crackdown. After days of rioting and disorder across England, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to get tough – and not just on those criminal and far-right elements directly involved in the despicable violence that followed the horrendous murder of three young girls in Southport last Monday. The thuggish and racist behaviour of the few has rapidly become a pretext for constraining the liberties of the many.

The UK prime minister, in two Downing Street press conferences last week, unveiled a suite of proposals to try to quell the rioting. He vowed to impose criminal-behaviour orders on certain agitators. He threatened to roll out facial-recognition software and AI to help track people’s movements. Most striking of all, he damned the supposedly malign influence of ‘large social-media firms and those who run them’, and demanded that they get a firmer grip on the posting of misinformation. He also warned that there would be consequences for those who ‘whip up’ disorder by spreading rumours or speculation online.

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, went further this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She declared social-media companies to be responsible for both the ‘shocking misinformation that has escalated’ the riots, as well as ‘the deliberate organisation of violence’ on these platforms.

It is entirely possible to loathe the actions of these rioters, while also being alarmed by the government’s response and its implications for free speech. Any crackdown on so-called misinformation, or even on the ‘whipping up of hatred’, is not going to be confined to those who are directly participating in or inciting violence. It will inevitably be wielded against dissenting views more broadly. This is always what happens.

Just look at the McCarthyite climate that is raging at the moment. There are widespread demands to have Nigel Farage either arrested or booted out of parliament in the wake of the riots. The Reform UK leader released an ill-advised video last week suggesting that the authorities might have been withholding information from the public about the identity of the Southport suspect and his possible motives. Farage did not repeat any of the false claims swirling around the internet about the suspect supposedly being a Muslim asylum seeker. (We now know he was born and raised in Britain and has no known links to Islam.) Nevertheless, #FarageRiots and #ArrestFarage have trended for much of the past week. LBC’s James O’Brien, for his part, has accused Farage of directly ‘inciting’ the riots. Another prominent commentator has called for parliament to take ‘urgent action’ against those ‘extremist’ MPs that have ‘fan[ned] the flames of far-right hatred and violence’ – a thinly veiled demand to have Farage and his colleagues in Reform expelled from the House of Commons.

Four-time failed Labour candidate Paul Mason has called for broadcasters and social-media platforms to be shut down. There needs to be ‘immediate action’ against ‘any platform whose algorithm is promoting incendiary content and disinformation’, he said. ‘Ofcom must revoke the licence of GB News’, too, he adds. Mason seems to think the way to fight fascism and save democracy is to shut down critical media outlets and purge the internet of dissent. (Who’s going to tell him?)

When Elon Musk chimed in on X, to say that ‘civil war is inevitable’ in Britain following disturbances in Liverpool, the New European newspaper accused Musk and his platform of ‘fanning the flames’ – there’s that cliché again – ‘of the UK’s civil unrest’. Guy Verhofstadt, a leading member of the European Parliament, similarly proclaimed that Musk’s comments showed the need for a ‘deep examination of the role of social media in the proliferation of political extremism and misinformation in the EU and UK’. Many want X, practically the only big social-media platform that tries to uphold freedom of speech, to be brought to heel.

Suspended Labour MP Zarah Sultana won the adulation of thousands of tabloid-bashing centrists by laying the blame for the riots with the Daily Mail, claiming that its headlines have, you guessed it, ‘fanned the flames of hate and normalised Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric’. (They really need another metaphor…) Apparently, the Mail, with its mainly Middle England, middle-aged and female audience, is the chief instigator of the violent disorder we’ve seen in England’s deprived northern towns.

Sultana is also among those demanding a tougher government response to so-called Islamophobia. The ruling Labour Party has previously signalled its support for an anti-Islamophobia law. In 2019, Labour adopted the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims’ controversial definition of Islamophobia for internal party matters, and promised ‘in principle and in solidarity’ to embed it into law should it return to power. To be clear, such a law would make it illegal not just to express bigotry towards Muslims as a group, which is despicable and can already be a crime under the UK’s race-hate laws, but also to criticise Islam and potentially even Islamist extremism – criticism which is totally legitimate. This would be an Islamic blasphemy law in all but name.

As the cultural elites’ response to the rioting shows, it’s unlikely to be only outright fascists and racists who are condemned to any digital gulag. Populist politicians, right-leaning journalists and those with commonly held political views could soon find themselves being lumped in with rioters and extremists. In the wake of the Southport atrocity, campaign group Hope Not Hate warned that ‘far-right narratives’ are being normalised. The main example it gives of a ‘far-right narrative’? That ‘multiculturalism isn’t working’ – an entirely mainstream view which, according to Hope Not Hate’s own polling, is shared by 52 per cent of the population.

The grim irony here is that any crackdown on free expression – online or off, through state sanction or cancellation – risks galvanising the very forces that Starmer and Co claim they are trying to contain. If concerns about immigration, multiculturalism and sectarianism are banished from mainstream media and major platforms, they will not simply disappear. Instead, they will find expression only on the fringes. No one benefits more from the ever-expanding definition of the ‘far right’, and the censorship that always comes with it, than the far right itself. The censoriousness of the establishment is a gift to those grifters who claim to speak truth to power and pose as the silenced voice of the majority.

Violence, rioting and vandalism must be punished. Speech, on the other hand, must be protected from clampdowns at all costs. Censorship will only make martyrs out of bigots while curtailing all of our rights. Free speech isn’t the problem here. In fact, it is a big part of the solution. It is our only way to thrash out the issues that confront us – to expose the failings of the establishment and the lies of the hard right. These riots have done enough damage to our nation. We can’t let them be used to trash our precious liberties, too.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.