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The plan to silence Britain, with Toby Young
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Free speech is under attack all over the Western world, but the assault may be the most sinister in the United Kingdom. Keir Starmer's authoritarian regime seems intent on chipping away at civil liberties until very few remain standing.
To discuss the state of free speech in the UK today, Will is joined by journalist, commentator, and the Founder of the Free Speech Union, Toby Young.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Join the FSU here.
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Transcript
Opening Remarks
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. If for some reason you are not already following the show on a streaming service, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts to YouTube. If you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a glowing five-star review. If you don't like what you hear here, please forget I said anything.
Global Free Speech Suppression
00:00:46
Speaker
Something ominous is happening.
00:00:49
Speaker
Ireland is trying to ban mean memes. France has just arrested the founder of Telegram. The EU is effectively blackmailing Elon Musk. Australia is trying to censor ex-posts, while Brazil has forced ex out of the country entirely.
00:01:06
Speaker
Free speech is under attack all over the world, but the assault is perhaps most unsettling in the United Kingdom, where Keir Starmer's new regime, and I use the word regime deliberately, seems determined to chip away at civil liberties until few remain standing.
Interview with Toby Young
00:01:25
Speaker
Toby Young is leading the resistance. Toby is the founder of the Free Speech Union, the editor-in-chief of Daily Skeptic, and an associate editor of The Spectator. Toby, welcome to Fire at Will.
00:01:37
Speaker
Thanks, Will. Great to have you on. I'll start with that global context that I referred to in the introduction. This is obviously something which is not just limited to the United Kingdom. This is a global trend. Why do you think there are governments all over the world that seem to be clamping down on civil liberties and on speech?
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's a good question, Will. And I created this organisation called the Free Speech Union almost five years ago now. And now there are free speech unions across the English speaking world. So there's one in Australia, there's one in New Zealand, there's one in South Africa, there's one being set up in Canada. And many of the threats to free speech they're facing are very similar. ah So in almost every country there is an online safety act or an online harms bill which seeks to regulate social media.
Legislation vs Free Speech
00:02:30
Speaker
And in almost every country there is either a hate crime act or a hate speech bill which seeks to criminalize swathes of free speech which were previously legal.
00:02:43
Speaker
There's also seemingly an assault in every English-speaking country on misinformation and an attempt to clamp down on misinformation and disinformation. So there's definitely kind of a pattern across the English-speaking world and beyond. You mentioned Brazil. There's the Digital Services Act in the EU, of course. What's behind it? Well, I think It's partly that radical progressive ideology has taken ah a censorious turn over the past 15 years or so, and used to be that free speech was a value champion by the left. And that's no longer the case. It appears to have been downgraded by certainly most radical left wing activists, most of whom are now in positions of power. um And I think that's been a blow to the free speech cause. I think
00:03:34
Speaker
It's also as a result of the internet and social media and authorities not really knowing how to deal with that.
Social Media's Impact on Free Speech
00:03:42
Speaker
The conventional wisdom amongst educated elites, the political class until fairly recently was the doctrine set out by the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in a famous Supreme Court case in the 1920s in which he articulated what what's become known as the counterspeech doctrine, so the best way to counter false or misleading or even harmful speech, is not in false silence but more and better speech. And that was the prevailing wisdom amongst liberal elites until about 15 years ago. What happened 15 years ago? We saw the explosion of the internet and the emergence of social media and that seems to have
00:04:28
Speaker
partly resulted in the abandonment of the counter speech doctrine. And now the view is that actually there is so much false, misleading, harmful speech that we can't rely on the natural, organic, democratic process to counter it. It's too dangerous. We have to suppress it. um So I think that that's that that that that was a factor too in the abandonment of the liberal commitment to free speech. I think it's there's also something kind of odder going on, which is that amongst governing liberal elites across the world, but particularly the English-speaking world, there's this sense that their policies in key areas are just straightforwardly and obviously right. They're either informed by the science or they're completely morally uncontentious. Their policy is that all right-minded people who are on the right side of history embrace
00:05:25
Speaker
and that any opposition is therefore illegitimate. So they don't regard it as, they don't regard, you know, trans rights as being up for debate. They don't regard the desirability of mass immigration as being up for debate. They don't regard the war in Ukraine as being up for debate. They didn't regard anything connected with the pandemic and the COVID vaccines as being up for debate. There was just the right way or the wrong way. And once they've kind of decided that certain things aren't politically contentious, aren't morally contentious, but are just straightforwardly right for various reasons, then yeah they think the debate's over. There's no point in having a debate. So what is the point of defending free speech? What is the point of allowing people
00:06:11
Speaker
to express dissenting or heretical points of view about those key policy areas on social media. And I don't think that that that policy is sensible. I mean, one of the arguments for the campus speech doctrine, it wasn't just that we have a right to free speech and in democratic societies, open discussion and debate is the best way to resolve contentious issues and come to a kind of settled conclusion about them, which everyone can sign up to. It's also that actually trying to suppress speech you disapprove of or disagree with is counterproductive. It has the opposite of its
Political Shifts and Populism
00:06:44
Speaker
intended effect. So in the Weimar Republic in Germany, there was a concerted effort to suppress Nazism. So anti-Semitism was criminalized. Hitler was prevented from speaking in various German states. Various Nazi newspapers were banned at various stages. But as a tool for suppressing Nazism, it didn't work. It enabled
00:07:05
Speaker
various Nazi leaders to portray themselves as free speech martyrs, as people who the state regarded as public enemies and so forth. And, you know, it gave them a kind of glamour and enabled them to promote themselves. I think, um you know, Goebbels used to boast that his newspaper was the most banned newspaper in Germany, and that gave it a kind of cachet. So try to force these disagreeable, unpleasant,
00:07:31
Speaker
supposedly harmful viewpoints underground, ah seems to be counterproductive. And that that seems to be what's happening across the Western world. The attempt to suppress criticism, for instance, of mass em immigration doesn't seem to be working as a way of kind of manufacturing consensus behind that policy. And we see more and more pushback, and that's why we saw various populist insurgent parties do well in the recent European Parliament elections. It's why Marine Le Pen is posing such a challenge to Emmanuel Macron. It's why reform did better than expected in the last general election in the UK.
00:08:07
Speaker
So, you know, you would hope that at some point the authorities would realise that constantly trying to suppress criticism of the policies they're pursuing as a way to defend those policies isn't working. and Actually, if they want to continue to pursue those policies and if they want the public to support them and if they want to continue winning electoral contests, they're going to have to make a better fist of making the argument for those policies in the public square and persuading people that they're actually in their best interests. But they seem really reluctant to do that. They don't want to have these public debates. They would much prefer to kind of um suppress criticism. But it it just seems to me to be fundamentally misguided, even for their own self-interested reasons. Great.
00:08:53
Speaker
global summary. and What I've just heard are first principles arguments for free speech, which I think liberals used to be very good at making. There obviously are still some that are, but my instinct is that we have forgotten how to argue for free speech on first principles as a society. You mentioned the the turn on the left, but I think the right has a lot to answer for because the right hasn't been able to make the argument for free speech in countries like the United Kingdom. The Tory party towards the end of of their term in power were getting somewhat censorious themselves.
00:09:32
Speaker
So, I agree with you that the left has changed, but why is the right struggling to fight back and make persuasive arguments for free speech in countries like the United Kingdom? Yeah, that's that's a good question. Everyone complained that the Tories didn't do nearly enough to defend free speech during their, you know, 14 years in office in the UK, admittedly five of those sharing power with the Liberal Democrats.
00:09:58
Speaker
And I don't think they did nothing, but they certainly didn't do enough. But I think what we've seen in you know since Keir Starmer became Prime Minister has been a deterioration in support for free speech and an assault on free speech on an unprecedented scale.
00:10:20
Speaker
So, bad though the Tories were, they were nothing like as bad as Labour is proving to be. But why weren't the Tories more robust in their defence of free speech? I think, to a great extent, right of centre governing parties, not just in the UK but across Europe and also in Australia and New Zealand, have kind of signed up to this kind of technocratic managerialist agenda. They too quite like the idea that certain key
Centre-Right Politics and Free Speech
00:10:52
Speaker
issues are no longer politically contentious and a new kind of consensus has emerged. So they're not particularly keen
00:11:00
Speaker
on challenging or ah like enabling other people to challenge more easily, kind of key pillars of this consensus. And you know when it comes to LGBTQ plus rights, I think right of centre parties are very paranoid about being portrayed as anti-diluvian on the wrong side of history. They're concerned about losing university educated metropolitan Elite voters younger voters and yeah they've been persuaded that any challenge to you know some of the more. Excessive aspects of the trans rights agenda would just be seen as being similar to being on the wrong side of the gay marriage issue.
00:11:42
Speaker
and that you know it's inevitable that um eventually society will embrace every jot and tittle of the trans rights agenda. So to seem to be opposing it or to be supporting those opposing it or to be enabling those opposing it to oppose it more easily would be to be on the wrong side of history and would risk kind of losing young people bull and university educated voters and so forth.
00:12:05
Speaker
I think there's an element of that. It's a kind of paranoia that they'll be portrayed as kind of reactionary and old fashioned and somehow low status if they don't get on board with, I mean, the the consensus I'm talking about, which which, you know, it's a kind of centrist consensus, but with some woke radical progressive dimensions. It's like a kind of weird hybrid of technocratic managerialism and radical progressive ideology. It's why Macron was able to tweet, this is France during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, you know which included things like that kind of grotesque pastiche of the Last Supper involving drag queens and so forth. It's this weird hybrid, but that kind of new ideology seems to not only have captured centre-left parties like the British Labour Party, but also to a great extent centre-right parties like the British Conservative Party.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yes, this is why we hear the term the uni party more and more, which is something which RFK in the US would say. It's something which team it spiked in the UK would would talk about a lot. I agree. You mentioned Keir Starmer in that answer and I want to understand Starmer.
00:13:18
Speaker
better This is a question I asked of your weekly sc skeptic co-host, Nick Dixon, only a couple of weeks ago. Help me understand Starmer the Man, because I think he is important in this, or he is the central figure in this agenda. I thought he was just a bit of a nothing technocrat before he came to power. I obviously hadn't been looking closely enough. The reality appears to be somewhat more sinister. What is your reflections on Starmer the Man?
00:13:43
Speaker
Someone described the speech he made in the Downing Street Rose Garden earlier this week in which he set out the Labour's policy agenda as vacuous authoritarianism.
00:13:59
Speaker
And that struck me as quite a good phrase to capture Keir Starmer. I mean, i I know that people think that he has married authoritarianism to a hard left agenda and that he secretly has a hard left agenda, which he concealed from the public during the general election campaign.
00:14:19
Speaker
He used to be a Trotskyist. He spent time in, I think, the Czech Republic um as a young man when it was still a communist country. But I'm slightly skeptical of that. I think that sort of makes him seem more interesting than he really is. I think i think he he's a natural Puritan. He likes the idea of banning smoking, of, you know, ah stopping people having fun. He's not a fan of free speech. That's becoming clearer and clearer by the day.
00:14:48
Speaker
but I'm not sure he has a kind of, I'm not sure his agenda is anything beyond a kind of slightly more radical version of that ideology I've referred to already. I mean it's a kind of, ah one way i described I've described it before is some technocratic theocracy. So it's it's this kind of, what's kind of odd?
00:15:12
Speaker
and seemingly incoherent about this ideology is that it marries what appears to be a kind of scientistic technocratic managerialism in which policies are supposedly rooted in evidence. They're not dictated by doctrine, Keir Starmer said in his speech outside Downing Street.
00:15:33
Speaker
when he won the election campaign that his government would be unburdened by doctrine. So they think of themselves as, in some sense, post-ideological, that the policies they're pursuing, whether on climate change or tackling pandemics is informed by settled science. And there's nothing remotely contentious or political about these policies. And yet, and and then they embrace these kind of radical progressive policies as well, such as, you know, one of the things Keir Starmer's government said it's going to do is to introduce a full trans-inclusive ban on gender conversion practices, which we think will mean
00:16:12
Speaker
criminalizing conversations between parents and health professionals and gender-confused adolescents if those conversations try and steer those adolescents away from having life-changing surgery or taking B2B blockers and so forth. So there's this is kind of radical dimension to it and it's it's a kind of it almost got a theocratic aspect like these are the sacred values of our society which you mustn't trespass upon. And and that was very much the way Keir Starmer tried to portray the recent public disorder following the murder of three schoolgirls in Southport. He tried to portray it as far right. These were knuckle-dragging troglodytes from the far right who rejected the fundamental values of our society, multiculturalism. They were anti-Muslim. They were racist.
00:17:00
Speaker
they have no sympathy for asylum seekers fleeing their countries fleeing persecution very much trying to portray them as beyond the pale as people who didn't embrace all the values the moral values that all right-minded people embrace so it's a kind of theocratic dimension to it it's a bit like you know the legitimacy of the regime depends not just on this notion that it's its policies are informed by science, that the politicians and their advisors are experts and members of the cognitive elite and just know much more and understand much more about how to make things work and how to make the economy run and so forth. It's not just their superior expertise and their intellectual academic credentials that gives them their legitimacy. It's also that they
00:17:50
Speaker
subscribe to this kind of these sacred values and we'll and will fight off anyone who tries to trespass upon those sacred values. So there's a kind of it's a kind of weird combination of these kind of the sort of radical, progressive, theocratic values and um and kind of technocratic, scientific values. But Keir Starmer, to me, just seems to completely embody that kind of ideology and is no different really from Macron, even though Macron is centre right and he's centre
Authoritarian Governance under Starmer
00:18:21
Speaker
to left. I don't think he's a kind of
00:18:23
Speaker
a trotskiest i think he's he's he's he he's whatever this new thing is which which you know we're still grappling to understand but which is now the dominant ideology of the governing class across the rest of western world, return to the response to the rights in a moment but there was a ah light bulb moment for me in that answer.
00:18:43
Speaker
if party-like labor is going to be or to present themselves as post-ideological. If they're going to say we are non-political, we follow the science, we follow facts, that relies on a suppression of speech because politics is about debate. Politics is about a contest of ideas. You can only say you're non-ideological if you're going to stop different ideologies from putting forward alternative viewpoints. In that sense, a suppression of speech is central to their governing ethos.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yes. and and And one way in which that becomes extremely clear is in the ongoing war against misinformation and disinformation and hate speech. So often when people criticise the UNI party's policy in a particular area, energy policy, for instance, their commitment to net zero, even though the people making the criticisms are doing so, you know, often in a scientifically informed way and actually engaging in what they think of as a perfectly legitimate debate.
00:19:54
Speaker
They are typically smeared by defenders of that policy as climate denialists, as people trafficking in misinformation in the pay of big oil, et cetera. There's a real unwillingness to enter into any kind of discussion about that policy. and it's There's a kind of cluster of policies, you know which are not really allowed to challenge. And if you do, you're often accused of trafficking in misinformation or disinformation or hate speech. and And it's it's often hard to tell, Will, whether this is just a kind of tactic to discredit and delegitimize any opposition to the kind of uni-party's policies in these key areas, or whether they genuinely believe
00:20:38
Speaker
that the issue is beyond dispute and anyone challenging it therefore must be a bad actor of some kind who's either you know misinformed or deliberately trying to misinform other people because they're in the pay of these kind of evil profiteers. Maybe they don't know themselves either, whether whether it's a kind of Machiavellian tactic or something they sincerely believe. i mean I know from experience that it's very easy for people in power to persuade themselves that something which is in their interest to believe is actually true. I mean, clever people are ah very capable of of convincing themselves that whatever it's in their self interest to believe, ah to believe it. Yeah, there's a great Michael Sherman quote, which I'm going to butcher, but I think it it goes along the lines of intelligent people are uniquely capable of coming up with
00:21:26
Speaker
bad ideas because they can rationalize bad ideas in an intelligent way. ah it's It's very, very true. You mentioned the online sphere there. I actually have in mind doing a a free speech audit across different domains in the United Kingdom, education, media, corporate, so on. Let's start with online. You wrote a really good article for The Spectator yesterday. Tell me about the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. Who are they? What are they up to?
00:21:50
Speaker
So the the the Center for Countering Digital Hate is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of NGOs um ah across the Western world, which is advocating for more online censorship, supposedly to defend the integrity of democracy from bad actors on social media. And they've been, even though they they've got the name the word hate in there in their kind of self-description. It's quite broadly defined. so
00:22:24
Speaker
The Center for Countering Digital Hate campaigned against misinformation about the lockdowns and the COVID vaccines. They've also campaigned against ah climate denialism. And the reason I was writing about them in the Spectator, ah incidentally, the the portraying climate denialism and lockdown skepticism as kind of species of hate.
00:22:48
Speaker
is very typical of the way in which the regime and its outliers defend their particular policies. But the reason I was writing about them in The Spectator this week is because they held an emergency summit a couple of weeks ago ah to try and come up with some policy recommendations to deal with the fact that the disorder was supposedly fueled by misinformation and disinformation on social media. and that That's been Keir Starmer's go-to explanation for why we had outbreaks of civil disorder over the summer in England's major cities.
00:23:28
Speaker
nothing to do with kind of roiling public anger over mass uncontrolled immigration, only very tenuously related to the brutal murder of three schoolgirls ah in Southport. In fact, in his eyes, it was something whipped up by far right activists on social media um who were organizing these protests. um And, you know, it's it's social media misinformation. It's a convenient scapegoat and it's a way of avoiding confronting any kind of public debate about mass immigration, which, of course, people like Keir Starmer desperately want to avoid. And um the recommendations that the Senate... Oh, for first of all, at this meeting, there were various luminaries. The Center for Countering Digital Hate was actually founded by Morgan McSweeney, who is now
00:24:16
Speaker
Probably the most powerful person in Downing Street. He's some head of
Censorship During Crises
00:24:20
Speaker
political strategy for Keir Starmer and is engaged in a kind of battle royal with Sue Grey, you know, the other contender for the title, most powerful Keir Starmer advisor. They seem to be kind of battling it out behind the scenes. This is a Dominic Cummings style role. Yes, he's Keir Starmer's Dominic Cummings. And um anyway, he founded the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and was the first director. Obviously, it has great connections to the current regime. And they had kind of senior officials from various Whitehall departments. They had senior officials from Ofcom, our broadcast regulator, which has now been given the role of regulating social media by our Online Safety Act, various politicians. And um and they come up with a series of policy recommendations. And the most kind of sinister of these is they want
00:25:08
Speaker
at times of national crisis they want offcom to be able to apply to a judge for emergency powers to do even more to censor dissent on social media and exactly what. Offcom should be using these emergency powers to censor would be essentially decided by.
00:25:31
Speaker
a the Secretary of State of the Department for Innovation, Science and Technology. So effectively, the recommendation of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which I imagine will be taken up and will shortly become policy, is that the Online Safety Act be amended to give a Labour Secretary of State, who incidentally is a very close confidant of Keir Starmer's, the ability to direct Ofcom during a time of national crisis or emergency to remove specific content from social media, which in his view is posing a threat to public safety. And we know, you know, for I don't think we should take any, we shouldn't take, we shouldn't be in any way comforted by the notion that these emergency powers would only be used at a time of national crisis or in an emergency, because as we know, those are very flexible terms, which often expand to suit the agenda of the would be census. I wouldn't be at all surprised if if the Online Safety Act is amended to grant the Secretary of State and off-con these new powers, they'll declare that there is an ongoing climate emergency and therefore we can invoke these emergency powers to cleanse social media of any challenge to Labour's net zero agenda.
00:26:46
Speaker
Sometimes wonder whether these people are ignorant of history or even worse, they fully comprehend history and take tips from it. the The first trick in the toolbox of the authoritarian throughout history has been to pull the in times of national emergency card and then to hand yourself greater powers in in the fear that follows. its It really is quite scary, the echoes that you can see from authoritarians in the past, albeit in slightly different applications.
00:27:15
Speaker
Yeah, there's definitely a playbook that they follow. um And Keir Starmer's regime is following that playbook to the letter. I imagine someone from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate would have listened to your first principal's arguments for free speech and said, well, they may have said, that's all very well and good. But we don't live in the age of John Stuart Mill anymore, where free speech being yelled out to the town square goes to 100 odd people maximum.
00:27:43
Speaker
The internet and social media have changed the game. You can now spew disinformation and and inverted commas hate to millions and millions of people. Therefore, we need to treat speech in a different way. How do you respond to that line of argument? Well, I think um i mean that that i think that that that that is their argument. and they And they dispute that they aren't in favor of free speech. So they claim to be as passionately supportive of free speech as you and I, but they don't think the right to free speech includes the right to ah ferment hatred.
00:28:22
Speaker
of various sacralized minority groups or to spew misinformation and disinformation, which will mislead people and lead them to making poor choices, particularly during electoral contests. I think the the the counter argument is, well, who gets to decide what's misinformation, disinformation and hate speech?
00:28:44
Speaker
those are apparently uncontentious terms. they give the illusion i mean When someone talks about misinformation or disinformation or even hate speech, it kind of creates the illusion that you know there's no disagreement about what these things are. It's perfectly obvious you know when something is factually inaccurate, when when someone's spewing hatred. you know um ah so so So so we don't need to kind of we we don't need to worry about who's going to be tasked with deciding what is and isn't misinformation, disinformation and hate speech and should be removed and shouldn't enjoy free speech protections. It's perfectly obvious to all right thinking people. But it turns out invariably that what what gets classified as misinformation, disinformation or hate speech is more or less any challenge
00:29:26
Speaker
the kind of uni-party's policy agenda in these key areas. and i mean you know i mean There are so many examples of this. i mean it's almost It's hard to know where to start, but but ah miss take misinformation. The Biden regime's response to various people on the right, but not exclusively on the right, raising the alarm about Biden's cognitive decline before the now famous debate between him and Donald Trump. The Biden regime's response to people saying he's not fit to be president. he's he's He's just not. He's losing his marbles for one reason or another. We'll say that's misinformation.
00:30:07
Speaker
That's misinformation and the video evidence that you keep producing, showing Biden you know wandering around in circles, tripping up, falling over. Those are those are deep fakes. and yeah That's the way in which misinformation is used. It's used to try and discredit any opposition, however factually based it is. Hate speech, another example. so I mean it's it's an incredibly poorly defined and flexible term which is often used to describe any point of view that the radical progressive left.
00:30:39
Speaker
disapproves of or disagrees with. But I'll give you an example of that. So Kelly J. Keene, the women's rights campaigner, she put up a petition on Change.org in which she asked the Oxford English Dictionary to keep its definition of woman as adult human female. It was in response to another petition asking the OED to come up with a more trans-inclusive definition. And Kelly J. Keene's petition was removed by Change dot.org, and we contacted them on her behalf, the Free Speech Union did, to find out why. And they they said it's because defining a woman as an adult human female is hate speech, and that's a breach of our community standards. We won't tolerate hate speech on our platform. And you know, hate speech is often, yeah it's it's incredibly contentious as to what what constitutes hate speech, as it is
00:31:24
Speaker
what constitutes misinformation and disinformation. And you know the idea that we can just trust the authorities to make these calls correctly is ludicrous. And of course, you know it they they are just weapons that the unit party will use to try and smear and discredit any opposition. We spoke about that with Kelly J. Kane when she was on the show last year.
00:31:45
Speaker
You mentioned the example of Biden's age and how the Biden administration used misinformation and disinformation as a cover for reality. But of course, it wasn't just the administration. Too many in the media were parroting the exact same arguments. And it's the media I want to turn to next. One of the saddest developments, I think, when it comes to speech over the last decade, two decades.
00:32:10
Speaker
has been that joint many journalists, not all, many journalists have gone from being the primary defenders of free speech to being at best apathetic, or it was very skeptical of free speech, when, in my view, one of the primary responsibilities of a journalist should be to vigorously defend free speech. Why has the media become so suspicious of something that they should be championing?
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. And it was something that really shocked me during the pandemic, the willingness of the media to simply parrot the line of various public authorities, including leading politicians and their demonisation of anyone who expressed scepticism about the efficacy of the lockdowns or in due course the safety and efficacy of the Covid vaccines. But yeah, that's not the only area in which um they prove themselves to be less than robust when it comes to defending free speech. It's a combination of things. I think it's partly that the media, like a lot of other
00:33:16
Speaker
institutions has become infected by the woke mind virus. So there's a lot of group think. And I think because the media has often been styled itself in opposition to various ruling elites, we think of that as the kind of default position of the media to be in opposition, championing dissent,
00:33:38
Speaker
and so forth, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, to use Mencken's phrase. But actually, maybe it isn't. Maybe that was just an aberration. Maybe that was true in the 1960s and 70s. Maybe true when you know the media was less respectable, and wasn't a profession more of it journalism wasn't a profession more of a trade, and people felt more like outsiders and enjoyed throwing stones at the windows of the rich and powerful.
00:34:05
Speaker
But as it's become kind of professionalized, as the status of various media panjandrums has been elevated, they seem to very much enjoy cozying up to the powerful. ah they like They like kind of aligning themselves with the authorities and becoming kind of enforcers of whatever the prevailing dogma is.
00:34:25
Speaker
And there's a kind of status dimension to it as well. Certainly during the pandemic, being skeptical about the lockdown was a low status point of view, partly because it was embraced by various figures on the right and any any position, any point of view which can be stigmatized as far right or populist.
00:34:46
Speaker
is ipso facto low status. So being in favor of the lockdowns, being supportive of the rollout of the COVID vaccines, that was a kind of way of signaling your membership of the kind of Brahmin class. And, um you know, journalists ah ah sort of status obsessed and insecure anyway, so any opportunity to kind of status signal is irresistible. It's also I think among there's sort of been this kind of weird, weird phenomenon amongst kind of um educated upper middle class white men too where they desperately want to differentiate themselves from kind of lower status white people and one way to do that is to kind of racially self-flagellate to align themselves with various members of the grievance industrial complex and so forth to promote kind of woke gobbledygook in all its manifestations. It's incredibly disappointing and and and makes me kind of um despair of my own profession.
Media's Role in Free Speech
00:35:44
Speaker
But on the plus side, Will, the mainstream media now isn't the only game in town. um yeah There are all kinds of alternative
00:35:51
Speaker
media out there. And, you know, the technology that enables that alternative media to thrive has been a kind of godsend. And we now have this kind of alternative ecosystem where people who, you know, have lost trust, lost faith in the mainstream media can turn to. ah But part of the kind of assault on ah social media and the attempt to regulate social media and cleanse it of misinformation and disinformation is partly a response, which by the kind of um powers that be to kind of shut down this kind of alternative ecosystem which they find very uncomfortable because that's where you know the challenges to their power are kind of articulated and the mainstream media is kind of has a common interest with you know senior political figures and senior officials to suppress that alternative ecosystem because it's posing such a threat to their kind of economic well-being so you see you know the
00:36:50
Speaker
you see kind of various kind of manifestations of what I think Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi call the um censorship industrial complex. And often it um it it manifests itself in kind of committees kind of um convened by governing parties. And on those committees, you get not just kind of officials and politicians you know discussing how to suppress dangerous dissent on social media. You also get representatives from organizations like the BBC, as well as kind of senior media
00:37:20
Speaker
academics. you know It's as though they have a common interest in fighting off alt-media because you know it it threatens their status, it threatens their prosperity, it threatens their kind of business model. I don't know. um Do you have any theories about why why the what why journalists have kind of, for the most part, gone along with these authoritarian anti-free speech measures and and and not been good champions of free speech, even though it's ultimately not in their interest to neglect it?
00:37:48
Speaker
I think everything you've said plus the commercial model for media today is driven by clicks and it's driven by pushing to the extremes. So the old school Walter Cronkite style of journalism playing it down the middle is unfortunately not as profitable for um a media business. And so it's pushed.
00:38:12
Speaker
more and more journalists into opinion journalism. And unfortunately, I think less and less journalists understand the distinction between news reporting and opinion journalism. In the past, there's been really clear dividing lines between being an opinion journalist and being a news reporter. And now I think a lot of news reporters see themselves as opinion journalists and opinion journalists see themselves as activists. And unfortunately, that is in part a reflection on the consumer. Yeah, I'm less troubled by you than polarization, you know, infecting the media. my ah ah I'm more troubled by the fact that the mainstream media skews so much to the left and kind of all media so much to the right. So it's as though they're kind of almost
00:39:03
Speaker
in opposite camps now and at war with each other on political grounds. It would be nice to see a more balanced representation of different points of view in both the alt media and the mainstream media. I want to go back to status because I think that's such an interesting part of this broader phenomena of wokeism.
00:39:23
Speaker
You mentioned status is now a way for one middle class white bloke to distinguish himself from another middle class white bloke. ah Sorry, viewpoints are a way for them to demonstrate status. In the 1980s, the way that you demonstrate status as a middle class white bloke or upper middle class white bloke was Ferrari, a big house, trophy wife, that sort of thing. Yeah. How have we gone from diverting a tad from speech, but how have we gone from a point where status was materialistic to status now being around the viewpoints that you hold? It's partly that as societies have become more affluent and as those luxury goods have become more widely available, so their value as high status as indicators has been diluted. And so now
00:40:13
Speaker
luxury beliefs have replaced luxury goods as a way of signaling that you are a member of a high status group and it's also it coincides with more and more people participating in higher education go to university so you know that the the people have become kind of um increasingly aware of the link between certain points of view and status, with some points of view signaling low status and some points of view signaling high status. and often you know you i think I think the um radical progressive left is has a kind of instinctive grasp
00:40:51
Speaker
of how to use this to promote their ideology. So they're very good at smearing any of their opponents as low status, ah uneducated, ignorant on the wrong side of history. And they're also good at portraying their own agenda as high status, often by getting high status people to embrace it, movie stars, actors, celebrities. But it's extraordinary the extent to which, you know, these days people's position they take on a range of issues, particularly, you know, who they're going to vote for.
00:41:29
Speaker
isn't dictated by any kind of engagement with the issues or reflecting on how this agenda will impact them and their communities. it's just They just automatically gravitate to whatever they perceive to be the high status position and then embrace it. And curiously, you'd expect you know more intelligent, more educated people to be more independent minded.
00:41:52
Speaker
and less influenced by something as trivial as whether other high status people embrace this position or not. But actually, the the higher up you go, the kind of cognitive food chain, the more likely people are to be influenced by what sends the correct status signal rather than any kind of independent intellectual analysis of the issues.
00:42:12
Speaker
I want to finish on education. So, Labour is trying to scrap the freedom of speech, higher education legislation that was introduced by the previous government. Why is the Free Speech Union fighting against that?
Legal Battles for Free Speech on Campuses
00:42:24
Speaker
Well, the Free Speech Union was involved in getting that legislation through Parliament, so we were involved in drafting what eventually became the higher education freedom of speech bill and and then we agitated for it, brief parliamentarians tried to fight off attempts to dilute it and eventually you know
00:42:48
Speaker
The act which ended up on the statute books, which got Royal Assent last year, I think was pretty good. and it was it was um What made it good, I think, was was not that it introduced much more robust protections for academic freedom and free speech on campus. and it's Just English university campuses, incidentally, because education's a devolved area of administration. What was good about it is that it created a couple of enforcement mechanisms. so an education act was passed in nineteen eighty six which created a duty for universities to uphold academic freedom and free speech but that was more honored in the breach than the observance because it was incredibly hard to force universities to honor that free speech commitments you needed to kind of you bring a judicial review or
00:43:28
Speaker
you know If someone was fired for saying something unfashionable, you needed to bring a case in the employment tribunal, incredibly expensive, cumbersome, time consuming. What was great about the new act was that it created these two much easier to access enforcement mechanisms. One was a complaint scheme. um So there's now a ah free speech czar at the Office for Students, the Higher Education Regulator in England.
00:43:48
Speaker
And if you think under the act, the idea was that if you think your speech has been breached by a university, you can complain to this free speech czar. And if he upholds your complaint, he'll impose a fine on the institution in question. And it also introduced this new statutory talk whereby you could bring a case relatively easily if you felt your speech had been speech rights had been breached by university in the county court. And what what Bridget Phillips and the Higher Education Secretary did a few weeks ago was to pause the commencement of some of the final clauses of the Act. So it's it's um it's now sort of in stasis. And we think that, I mean, obviously, we we think the Act should be um ah implemented in full. And we think that what she's done is just an underhand way of trying to kill it off. And it's now kind of a stillborn.
00:44:35
Speaker
Act of Parliament, thanks to what she's done. And we think that that's unlawful, that she's acted ultra-virus, that if ah an Act of Parliament has been passed by both Houses of Parliament, enjoyed cross-party support, you can't just decide you know as a success as a member of a successor government not to implement it. You have to repeal it if you don't like it. um And that takes up parliamentary time and seemingly Labour don't want to do that. they They seem to want to prefer Across the across the board, there's this pattern that that the the new government's assault on free speech and is not via primary legislation, or at least not exclusively. They seem to prefer these kind of slightly underhand, behind the scenes ways of undermining free speech, so not commencing you know the um Freedom of Speech Act with non-crime hate incidents. They've said they want to
00:45:22
Speaker
give the College of Policing more latitude about drawing up operational guidance when it comes to the police recording non-crime hate incidents. which I don't know if your listeners are familiar with this Orwellian concept, but in 2014 the College of Policing in England and Wales came up with this concept that some if someone is accused of a hate crime and the police investigate them and conclude that no crime has been committed,
00:45:47
Speaker
they'll record it as a non-crime hate incident. And that can then show up if you apply for a job as a teacher or working with vulnerable people um on your enhanced criminal records check and prevent you from getting the job. And it's extraordinary how many non-crime hate incidents have actually been recorded now by police forces in England and Wales. So in England and Wales alone, we think about a quarter of a million have been recorded since 2014, which is an average of about 65 a day. And you people wonder why the police aren't doing a great job of so solving burglaries or auto theft. And it's because they're you know too busy policing our tweets to police our streets. And the government wants to encourage the police to record even more non-crime hate incidents, um but not by passing legislation, but but just by giving this arm's length body kind of more latitude to kind of you know
00:46:40
Speaker
behave as it likes. And that seems to be the kind of general pattern. They don't want to attack free speech directly via parliament, they want to do it behind the scenes. And that seems to be exactly what's happening with the Higher Education ah Freedom of Speech Act and the Free Speech Union has um is mounting a legal challenge. against Bridget Phillips, and we think her decision is unlawful, and we're hoping the High Court will agree with us. We hope to have um a hearing about that in the autumn. But if anyone listening to this um ah wants to defend academic freedom and freedom of speech on English university campuses and thinks it's important to challenge the government when we suspect they've acted unlawfully, please do support our crowd-funda. We've got a crowd-justice fundraiser because
00:47:19
Speaker
judicial reviews can be incredibly expensive. If you lose, you have to pay the other side's costs and, you know, it could be ah upwards of a quarter of a million pounds. So yeah, you can find that fundraiser on our website on the donate page, freespeechunion.org slash donate bottom of page. There's a link to our crowd justice fundraiser for that particular legal challenge. A link is also in the show notes to this episode. Finally, Toby, how can people get involved in the free speech union more generally?
00:47:45
Speaker
So we're a membership organisation and the way to get involved is to join. And it's not very expensive. um If you're a student or a veteran, it's only £29.99 a year, full price is £59.99. Or if you're a really enthusiastic supporter, you can become a gold member for £250 a year. And if you then get into trouble, you know we'll have your back. And that can include wheeling out the big legal guns, which we've done often. um We fought over 2,700 cases since we were set up almost five years ago now. And where those cases have reached a conclusion, we've been successful about 75% of the time. We've now got 23 members of staff. We've got a
00:48:22
Speaker
five person case team, a four person legal team, including two qualified lawyers. And not surprisingly, will membership has just exploded since Labour was elected. So it's grown, our membership has grown by 25%. In the past four weeks, we had more people join in one hour on one day a couple of weeks ago than joined in the whole of June. So I think, you know, people are understandably becoming more and more frightened that they're going to get into trouble.
00:48:50
Speaker
ah for something they've said on social media, something criticizing the government, one of the government's key policies. and They want the peace of mind that being a member of the FSU can bring them. um and it's you know It's cheap at the price. and We also organize events. We engage in legislative work. We mount these legal challenges and so forth. We do whatever we can to defend free speech more widely. I joined myself this morning. I could not recommend it more highly to everyone listening. Toby Young, thank you for coming on Fire at Will. Thanks, Will.
00:49:18
Speaker
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00:49:33
Speaker
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