Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
These are the words of the 1st amendment of the United States of America’s Constitution. Just to be absolutely clear. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, no if’s, no but’s.
According to the fundamental rights of every American citizen they can say exactly what they like and Congress may not in any way prevent them. Most importantly, this is not considered to be a right which Congress gifts to American citizens it is simply an affirmation of the natural rights of every individual to express their thoughts as they see fit and an absolute limit on the power of the state to impinge on that natural right.
In a similar way, in the UK, parliament pretends to protect freedom of speech, but it would seem that with every passing year that that freedom is qualified and qualified again.
Today, there is an ever-growing list of words and phrases that the state has decided are illegal and even punishable by custodial sentences. If the state had made illegal just one single word of the English language then real free speech would no longer exist, but today we’ve become accustomed to having our language controlled by the state.
In addition to the long list of illegal words there are combinations of legal words, which when expressed together can be deemed to represent ‘hate speech’ which have also been made illegal.
There is now a protected right ‘to not be offended’ by someone’s speech, which again consigns a wide spectrum of expressed thoughts into the catch-all of ‘hate speech’. There are no boundaries to these definitions, they are totally subjective and virtually any speech could potentially be deemed to be hateful to someone, somewhere, thus putting all speech potentially at risk of being punishable, potentially even by imprisonment, as we have seen in some recently well publicised cases reviewed on UK Column. The wide swathe of forbidden speech is now huge and any pretence that parliament has any intention of protecting freedom of speech is arrant piffle.
The state now has powers to punish anyone who says or broadcasts anything that it disapproves of. Sometimes it does this at arm’s length, so as not to be seen to get its own hands dirty, by means of Ofcom forcing social media platforms to enforce state rules on illegal and ‘harmful’ speech, whatever the method the state is the final arbiter. Social media platforms perform this censorship by means of moderators or simply locking out people who wish to express themselves freely. Or they may use, as they do in the USA, the ‘chilling method’. This involves identifying individuals who speak out against the state and who carefully avoid the illegal terms, but nonetheless express views anathema to the state. These people may be arrested – then later released without charge, have their houses searched, computers and telephones confiscated etcetera in an attempt to intimidate them into silence. This is known as the ‘chilling’ method.
A variant of the control of expression is the control of freedom to express criticism of the state and legal protests, as tested in Canada by Prime Minister Trudeau, is the expedient of blocking bank accounts of legally protesting truckers. This method has also been tried in the UK (as exposed by Nigel Farage and others), once again at arm’s length using the banks to do the state’s dirty work, though as yet this method does not seem to have become a regular tool of state control of dissension.
The suppression of freedom of expression can become a matter of life and death, one example of which was demonstrated with terrible effects during the Covid-19 Plandemic, when doctors were intimidated into silence across Europe and North America by threats of being disqualified from medical practice by the authorities. Many of those, particularly now retired, have blown the whistle on this practice that has caused potentially hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and the numbers of injured continue to grow.
The more we look around the more examples of this we see. The young girls of Rotherham, the secretive family courts, organ harvesting, paedophilia at the highest levels of society, the banning of protests, the murky secretive dealings of the cabinet office and so on.
James Madison noted in 1788:
There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
From the first tentative beginnings of banning just a few words, the state has established a powerful armoury of weapons repressing freedom of expression on whatever subject it chooses. Thanks to this, the exposure of deep rooted corruption and criminality within the state is virtually impossible. The removal of the freedom of speech has allowed the state to erect great defensive walls behind which it is at liberty to do more or less what it wants. But far from just retaining a relatively defensive posture, the state has gone on the offensive with organisations like MI5 and the 77th Brigade targeting dissension within the country and identifying the whole of the UK population as potential enemies of the state. From these two secretive organisations we get coordinated campaigns uniting the messaging from politicians to the whole of the mainstream media, vilifying people who publicly express opinions counter to state policy and often branding them falsely as extremists, which then makes them the subject of draconian terrorism measures. Just as in the US, with the Patriot Act, legislation supposedly targeting terrorism is used to suppress legitimate opposition to state policies. There is no public scrutiny of these two organisations, they are just arms of the state operating behind closed doors and combatting anyone who dares dissent publicly against the state.
When the state fears the people, that’s freedom, when the people fear the state, that’s tyranny.
An apt quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
The UK has its own version of the legal protection of free speech, it is enshrined in Article 10 of the Human Rights Act:
Article 10 protects your right to hold your own opinions and to express them freely without government interference.
This includes the right to express your views aloud (for example through public protest and demonstrations) or through:
- published articles, books or leaflets
- television or radio broadcasting
- works of art
- the internet and social media
The law also protects your freedom to receive information from other people by, for example, being part of an audience or reading a magazine.
‘Restrictions to the right to freedom of expression
Although you have freedom of expression, you also have a duty to behave responsibly and to respect other people’s rights.
Public authorities may restrict this right if they can show that their action is lawful, necessary and proportionate in order to:
- protect national security, territorial integrity (the borders of the state) or public safety
- prevent disorder or crime
- protect health or morals
- protect the rights and reputations of other people
- prevent the disclosure of information received in confidence
- maintain the authority and impartiality of judges
An authority may be allowed to restrict your freedom of expression if, for example, you express views that encourage racial or religious hatred.
However, the relevant public authority must show that the restriction is ‘proportionate’, in other words that it is appropriate and no more than necessary to address the issue concerned.
Writing in the vanguard of the fight against tyranny George Orwell wrote in 1945:
“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear…” The restrictions to freedom of speech in Article10 would have been anathema to him. It proudly announces the protection of free speech, then goes on to list a whole series of open ended exceptions to that freedom, making it no freedom at all, simply controlled speech, the trademark of a tyranny.
If someone were, for example, to expose corruption within the government, which might bring the government down, this could be construed as a threat to national security (specifically outlawed in Article 10), as the country would theoretically be at a heightened risk without a functional government, in which case there could be a blanket ban on all forms of expression that would lead to seriously compromising the government, for example by exposing corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels.
In short Article 10 of the Human Rights Act enshrines the state’s ability to silence the population whenever it sees fit and to punish severely those offenders it deems of a particular threat, such as Julian Assange, while attempting to pretend the opposite. Protests at these and many other infringements of people’s basic rights is also being quashed by the state, to maintain its hold on power.
Increasingly the police backed by ministers are directed to break up perfectly legal, peaceful protests against the state or state interests and arrest the organisers, leading to the intervention of Liberty UK, arguing in the courts that the government itself no longer respects the rule of law:
The human rights organisation Liberty has questioned the new Government’s behaviour: “concerning disregard for the rule of law” as the Home Office has instructed lawyers to proceed with an appeal against a recent High Court ruling that anti-protest legislation had been created unlawfully.
The legislation, which significantly reduced the threshold at which the police could impose almost-unlimited conditions on protests to anything that they deemed caused ‘more than minor disruption’, had been brought in by then Home Secretary Suella Braverman in June 2023. Previously the threshold had been set at anything that caused ‘serious disruption.
Liberty challenged the legislation in court, arguing that it was unlawful since it had already been democratically rejected by Parliament just a few months earlier, and was subsequently brought in “via the back door” through ‘secondary legislation’, which required less Parliamentary scrutiny and debate.
In May 2024, the High Court agreed with Liberty’s arguments, ruling that “more than minor cannot mean serious”. The Court also found that the Government had failed to undertake a fair consultation period, instead only inviting thoughts from those it knew would be supportive of its proposals, such as the police but not protest groups.’
To further underline their concern, Katy Watts, Lawyer at Liberty, said:
We brought this case to court to defend democracy and to ensure that a government is not allowed to wilfully [sic] ignore the rules at the expense of our fundamental human rights. The Home Secretary’s decision to appeal the Court’s decision shows a concerning disregard for the rule of law.
In other words the state is willing to use both ‘fair’ means and foul to suppress the expression of thoughts that it finds disagreeable.
Furthermore, the UK Column has gone to great lengths to warn people of the insidious nature of the Online Safety Act and the effects that it will have on free speech so there’s no need to cover all that ground again here. But in passing it is however worth mentioning that the bill is another parliamentary master class in pretending to legislate in favour of people’s rights while mostly focusing on limiting them.
Liberty agrees with the UK Column; some of its legal evaluation of the Online Safety Bill (OSB) include:
We are concerned by the way that ‘illegal content’ has been defined and the risks this definition and related duties pose to the rights to freedom of expression.
…the OSB gives the Secretary of State the power to amend Schedules 5, 6, and 7, including to add offences to the list. Notably, the Secretary of State may add offences to Schedule 7.
…the SoS’s wide power to designate additional categories of content as ‘illegal’, including ‘priority illegal’, remains highly concerning.
Clause 52, which sets out situations in which content can ‘amount to’ a relevant offence, is also worryingly vague.
Ultimately, we are concerned that the illegal content duties might lead private companies to pre-emptively take down significant amounts of content that appear to be ‘illegal’ even if it is not, in order to avoid being penalised. This will not only have negative ramifications for freedom of expression online but may also have knock-on effects for the rights of those who currently suffer the brunt of different forms of Criminalisation.
And so Liberty goes on in its condemnations for 28 pages. The OSA, while paying lip service to freedom of expression for public consumption, at the same time gives immense power of control over the ability of the UK population to express itself, either using direct state intervention or preferably at arm’s length using the service providers to do their dirty work for them. An increasingly popular method for the state to have others do their dirty work under the comfortable and familiar term ‘public private partnership’, a term which the UKColumn considers as de facto fascism.
The accumulation of all this legislation is not accidental. Together it forms a vast legal framework for exerting state control of both the mainstream media, social media and individual’s ability to express their thoughts freely.
Jacinda Ardern, the NZ prime minister during the covid plandemic summed it up succinctly:
We will continue to be your single source of truth, everything else; a pinch of salt.
The state controls the truth and the dialogue. Western governments and the mainstream media have coined new words to attempt to discredit criticism of the state and its policies; misinformation and disinformation. Ironically and revealingly the earliest definitions in Webster’s New College Dictionary in 1985 (shortly after the words started to come into common usage) defines disinformation as:
any government communication (either overt or covert) containing intentionally false and misleading material, often combined selectively with true information, which seeks to mislead and manipulate either elites or a mass audience.
One might be hard put to find one major ministerial statement in the last five years that didn’t contain some form of disinformation or misinformation. And not to put too fine a point on it, most people who are paying attention probably expect UK politicians to lie through their teeth as a matter of routine.
With astounding chutzpah they continuously accuse alternative media and so-called far-right organisations as purveyors of misinformation and disinformation. Because they have the mainstream media to back them up, their blatant hypocrisy is somewhat disguised.
It may not be obvious at first sight, particularly for those people not steeped in the roots of democracy, constitutions and philosophy, but freedom of speech is absolutely fundamental to our freedom as human beings. This was understood by the writers of the United States constitution, and summarised by their Supreme Court:
The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
Even if many living in the UK believe that they live in a democracy today, because they place a vote in an urn, the reality is that they don’t. Democracies cannot possibly exist without freedom of speech. According to the Principles of Democracy:
Democracy depends upon a literate, knowledgeable citizenry whose access to information enables it to participate as fully as possible in the public life of their society and to criticize unwise or tyrannical government officials or policies. Citizens and their elected representatives recognize that democracy depends upon the widest possible access to uncensored ideas, data, and opinions.
Abraham Lincoln expressed it in a slightly different way:
Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people.
But ideas, data and opinions are censored by the state in the UK today. The Principles of Democracy continues:
The principle of free speech should be protected by a democracy's constitution, preventing the legislative or executive branches of government from imposing censorship.
The protection of free speech is a so-called negative right, simply requiring that government refrain from limiting speech, unlike the direct action required of other so-called affirmative rights.
This harks back to the American First Amendment, that freedom of speech is an inherent right to human beings, some might even express it as ‘god-given’.
Finally:
Protests serve as a testing ground for any democracy -- thus the right to peaceful assembly is essential and plays an integral part in facilitating the use of free speech. A civil society allows for spirited debate among those in deep disagreement over the issues.
As we have already seen the government has recently quietly altered the threshold allowing police intervention to preventing ‘serious disturbance’ to ‘minor disturbance’, a threshold so low that it allows the police to break up any protest that the state finds threatening or unpalatable. Thus democracy is denied not only by the censorship of thoughts and ideas, the stifling of free speech but also by the testing ground of free and peaceful protests against unacceptable state behaviour. None of the UK population should be in any doubt any longer that the UK is no longer a democracy. If ever we wanted to return to living in a democracy we would need to retrieve in its entirety, unqualified freedom of speech, including and above all to the media in all its manifestations.
Tyranny suppressing dissent to maintain its grip on power is no new phenomenon, it’s been going on for thousands of years, as tyrants and defenders of freedom have battled it out.
Euripides wrote:
This is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.” And in 46BC: “I, who have been brought up in freedom, with the right of free speech, cannot in my old age change and learn slavery instead.
– attributed to Cato the Younger
One and half millennia later St Catherine of Siena wrote:
Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.”
And a quote often enunciated on the UK Column, attributed originally to Voltaire:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
But most tellingly from Benjamin Franklin in the 1720’s:
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
Sadly, we now find ourselves in a country controlled by a state which has subdued, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, the freeness of speech, and in the words of Cato the Younger we have become slaves to that state, even while it blushes with innocence and pretends otherwise. The steel fist within the velvet glove, or the tyrant wearing the benevolent mask of democracy.
I’ll leave the last words to George Washington which resonate down the ages:
If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
