TRIGGERnometry - Why Britain Arrests 30 People EVERY DAY For Speech

00:00:00.000 When I first started the free speech union, I didn't think it could get any worse, hopelessly

00:00:06.560 naive. And actually, all we've been able to do is kind of hold back the incoming tide

00:00:11.520 a little bit. So that's over 30 people a day being arrested.

00:00:16.520 Are you worried that this is basically a way of censoring people so that they don't challenge

00:00:21.400 the government?

00:00:22.120 It's a kind of willed naivety and a kind of avoidance of confronting their own policy

00:00:28.500 failures.

00:00:28.920 I think Sir Keir Starmer, Peter Kyle do genuinely think that the Online Safety Act doesn't go

00:00:36.080 nearly far enough. So I think in all likelihood, the Online Safety Act is not going to be repealed.

00:00:42.260 It's not going to be improved. It's just going to get worse and worse.

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00:01:44.880 Lord Young, Director and Founder of the Free Speech Union. Welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:49.660 Good to be here, Congressman.

00:01:50.920 It's good to have you on. Obviously, we want to talk about the Online Safety Act, which has

00:01:54.940 effectively come into force in recent days. To most people's surprise, the impact of it has

00:02:02.480 been to most people's surprise. Let's talk about it. What is it? How is it introduced? And why are

00:02:09.360 people now, you know, you see lots of people talking about using VPNs, and there's lots of

00:02:14.940 online censorship effectively happening in this country. Talk to us about the Online Safety Act.

00:02:19.280 So, the Online Safety Act is a piece of legislation that was partly prompted by a moral panic

00:02:28.360 about children self-harming and, in some cases, committing suicide as a consequence of things

00:02:36.540 they'd seen online. And it was first introduced by Sajid Javid when he was Home Secretary, I think

00:02:44.180 under Theresa May. And he said that his ambition was to make the UK the safest place in the world

00:02:53.160 to go online, which, on the face of it, sounds quite anodyne. But when you think about it, it's

00:02:59.220 like, well, what does that mean? Safer than North Korea? Safer than China? And what does safety mean

00:03:05.520 in this context? Does it mean the most heavily censored? And that was the original way to pitch

00:03:10.740 it, but always linked to child safety. And it became more explicitly about protecting children,

00:03:15.400 or at least the way to sell it became more explicitly about that under Boris's government.

00:03:20.200 Protect them from suicide content and pornography, right?

00:03:24.020 Yeah, protect them from pornography, from self-harming websites, from websites promoting

00:03:31.160 anorexia. The idea was that, or that the premise is that children are at enormous risk from being

00:03:40.980 exposed to unregulated content online, exacerbated by algorithms, and it's leading to a kind of

00:03:50.180 epidemic of self-harm, including suicide. So that was the kind of moral panic which prompted it.

00:03:55.900 And that was very much the way it was sold under Boris's government. This is really a bill about

00:04:03.220 protecting children from the Wild West that is the unregulated social media environment.

00:04:10.460 But Toby, isn't that quite a noble aim, let's be fair? Because you do look at some of the content

00:04:16.540 that kids are accessing. You know, 11-year-olds have got a smartphone, which basically gives

00:04:22.240 unfettered access to however much pornography they want. That's surely not a good thing.

00:04:27.860 Yeah, I think it's hard to object to the ambition of wanting to protect children.

00:04:34.700 When the bill was originally drafted, I mean, it's gone through many iterations, it wasn't just about

00:04:43.480 protecting children from legal but harmful content. It was also about protecting adults

00:04:49.520 from legal but harmful content. And there was this, the words legal but harmful never actually

00:04:53.360 appeared in any of the iterations of the bill. But the form it took was a clause which enabled

00:05:00.560 then the Secretary of State at DCMS to draw up a list of legal but harmful content, which social

00:05:10.040 media companies, search engines, user-to-user providers would be under a particular obligation

00:05:16.580 to remove. So we thought that at the Free Speech Union, we thought that was very dangerous.

00:05:22.480 Why should people, why should adults have to be protected from legal but harmful content? And in

00:05:28.160 particular, why should a senior politician be tasked with designating what content social

00:05:34.540 media companies in particular are under a particular obligation to remove on pain of being fined up to

00:05:40.340 10% of their annual global turnover or 18 million by Ofcom, whichever was the highest. I mean, a pretty

00:05:46.380 savage penalty for non-compliance. So we pushed back hard against that. One reason for pushing back was

00:05:53.720 that seemed to be a breach of a sacrosanct principle of English common law, which is that unless something

00:05:59.820 is explicitly prohibited, then it's permitted. That's a kind of, you know, cornerstone of English

00:06:05.300 liberty and very different from the Napoleonic Code, whereby unless something's explicitly permitted,

00:06:11.880 then it's prohibited, which tends to be the kind of basis for much continental law. So that was one of

00:06:16.640 the fundamental linchpins of English common law, an important foundation of English liberty. And this

00:06:22.360 seemed to be a departure from that, the creation of a new grey area, whereby it's legally permitted,

00:06:27.060 but nevertheless, in some sense prohibited. And the same applies to non-crime hate incidents.

00:06:32.620 So we pushed back hard against that. And so did other kind of free speech advocacy groups. And

00:06:38.700 the Tories, to be fair, dropped that. They dropped that clause. But they kept in the obligation on

00:06:45.900 providers to protect children from legal but harmful content. And what happened recently was that the

00:06:52.560 clause requiring providers to protect children, to put an age gate on their content that they think

00:07:00.940 isn't suitable for children, that came into force. And of course, it led to an enormous amount of

00:07:07.500 over-removal. So social media platforms like X ended up age-gating blog posts about Richard the Lionheart,

00:07:17.200 speeches by Katie Lamb about the grooming gangs, footage of someone being arrested at an anti-migrant

00:07:22.740 protest in Leeds. And the kind of that obviously raised questions. Well, why do you need to be 18 to see this

00:07:29.540 content? And particularly if Labour are going to lower the voting age to 16. I mean, this is kind

00:07:36.200 of democratically important content. How are 16 and 17 year olds going to make informed decisions at the

00:07:40.920 ballot box when they get the vote in 2029, if they're not allowed to access this content until

00:07:45.640 they're 18? It seemed kind of ludicrous. But we always fear that this obligation to protect children

00:07:52.820 from legal but harmful content would lead to over-removal. Companies are very concerned about the

00:07:59.080 penalties they'll face if they don't comply. In some cases, non-compliance can lead to executives

00:08:03.580 going to jail. And that is one of the more kind of authoritarian clauses in the Act. So of course,

00:08:10.940 they're terrified of not complying with all the requirements of the Act. And as you've probably

00:08:17.760 seen, it's almost 300 pages. And it's unbelievably dense and complicated. So for most kind of tech

00:08:25.040 company executives, of course, they're going to kind of err on the side of extreme caution and

00:08:30.260 over-removed content. And that's exactly what's happened.

00:08:32.700 One of the interesting things I found about it is when I was reading up on this, it goes,

00:08:37.600 so they talked about free speech guardrails, didn't they? And implementing it in the Act itself.

00:08:44.460 Yeah.

00:08:45.040 That really hasn't worked out quite the way we expected to.

00:08:49.660 Yes. And one of the free speech guardrails, one of the original guardrails in an earlier iteration

00:08:56.680 of the bill was that social media companies, when deciding what content to remove to comply

00:09:03.220 with the Act, had to have regard for free speech. And talking that over with kind of various MPs,

00:09:11.600 they kind of laughed, said having to have regard for something is like the lowest possible legal

00:09:18.300 duty, which is always trumped by other legal duties. So almost pointless, including that.

00:09:22.120 So the free speech union lobbied to have that change to have particular regard, which is kind

00:09:26.880 of one notch up.

00:09:28.520 This is the most British fight in history, isn't it?

00:09:31.080 It is. One notch up. But that duty currently applies. And we've seen from the over-removal of

00:09:39.880 the last few weeks that clearly that isn't having much impact on deterring platforms like X and

00:09:46.820 Facebook from over-removing. But there's another reason why the safeguards haven't had much

00:09:54.840 impact. So two additional safeguards were that for category one providers and most big social

00:10:01.600 media platforms were going to be designated as category one providers by not the Secretary of State

00:10:07.600 at DCMS, but the Secretary of State now it's changed at the Department of Science, Innovation and

00:10:12.940 Technology. Peter Kyle, good friend of Sir Keir Starmer's. So he was tasked, he's supposed to

00:10:19.540 have said which providers are designated as category one providers. And once that designation has

00:10:26.240 happened, category one providers then have these additional free speech duties. They're not supposed

00:10:30.780 to remove content of democratic importance or journalistic content. But because I think Wikimedia

00:10:38.980 are concerned about Wikipedia being designated as a category one provider, they have legally challenged

00:10:46.440 the criteria that Peter Kyle is going to be using to designate which platforms are category one,

00:10:54.460 which platforms 2A and which platforms 2B. And so for the time being, Peter Kyle hasn't done that.

00:11:01.960 So that designation is yet to take place. Because that hasn't taken place and social media companies don't

00:11:07.380 know what category they're in. Those two additional safeguards to protect content of democratic importance

00:11:13.580 and journalistic content haven't kicked in yet, which is another reason why we've seen so much

00:11:19.000 over-removal in the past few weeks. We can get into this, but the reason Wikimedia is legally challenging

00:11:25.000 the government's criteria for designating what sites are in category one, the reason it doesn't want

00:11:30.820 to be in category one is because when you're in category one, you have to carry out these pretty

00:11:34.960 onerous annual risk assessments. And in the course of doing that, you have to disclose exactly who the

00:11:40.520 content creators are on your particular website. You have to actually share their identity with

00:11:46.640 Ofcom. And Wikipedia doesn't want to do that because a lot of its editors are anonymous. I mean,

00:11:52.640 they have various ways of, you know, making sure that they're respectable, they're not bad actors and

00:11:58.580 so forth. But nevertheless, they don't want to share their identities with Ofcom. So that's why

00:12:04.740 they're legally challenging this set of criteria. They don't want Wikipedia to be designated a category

00:12:11.080 one provider. And they've effectively said that if it is, we might have to geoblock Wikipedia in the UK,

00:12:18.200 or at least limit how often users are able to access Wikipedia, which is one of the many

00:12:24.380 unintended consequences of the online sites. Every cloud, Toby. Right. If you see what's

00:12:29.820 happening to my Wikipedia page, I'm totally on board with this. Mine looks like it was written by

00:12:33.180 Owen Jones. Yeah, exactly. We're joking, of course. But actually, Toby, I think you touched on something

00:12:38.540 very important, which is that I think, as Francis said, I think we'd all want children not to be able

00:12:44.120 to access pornography. I think we'd all want children not to be able to access really harmful content.

00:12:49.580 Although the link between suicide and watching things, I think, is very tenuous. And it's probably

00:12:54.180 quite the other way around. People who are already suicidal seek out content like that to verify and

00:12:59.740 confirm what they already feel, as opposed to, you know, a perfectly happy child suddenly discovering

00:13:04.040 something. But anyway, the issue is, it seems to me, that the problem with all of this is that once

00:13:11.960 you start introducing a mechanism by which people have to prove that they're over 18, then you've

00:13:18.780 effectively removed anonymity from the internet, which has very important uses for people, you know,

00:13:26.180 A, to be able to speak freely, who aren't necessarily able to speak freely. I mean, the Free Speech Union,

00:13:30.940 which you founded, represents many people who've been punished for speaking freely. And this will take

00:13:36.060 that away from them. But it effectively ends anonymity in general on the internet if we are constantly

00:13:41.700 having to prove that we're over 18, especially when, as you say, it currently extends to journalistic

00:13:47.780 content or just covering footage of protests or whatever else it might be. So are you hopeful

00:13:53.860 that once this process has taken its course, these overreaches will be, will go back? Or are you worried

00:14:02.580 that the slippery slope is going to remain slippery?

00:14:04.560 No, I think when I first started the Free Speech Union, back in 2020, I naively thought that things had

00:14:13.900 reached an absolute nadir, and could only get better. And one of the one of the jobs of the Free Speech

00:14:21.860 Union would be to try and repeal the fetters, the legal fetters on our free speech. I didn't think it could get

00:14:28.400 any worse. Hopelessly naive. And actually, all we've been able to do is kind of hold back the incoming

00:14:35.540 tide a little bit. So I think in all likelihood, the Online Safety Act is not going to be repealed.

00:14:41.740 It's not going to be improved. It's just going to get worse and worse. I mean, I think you make a good

00:14:47.300 point about the risks of having to verify your age. And I mean, as you say, anonymity is a really

00:14:57.640 important safeguard. It's a really important safeguard for Muslim apostates, for instance,

00:15:02.480 whose lives will be at risk if they're identified, if they're criticizing Islam or talking about having 0.81

00:15:09.160 left the Islamic religion, you know, the penalty for which is death. People in oppressive countries 1.00

00:15:16.800 like China and North Korea, particularly refugees from those countries, they rely on anonymity to

00:15:23.620 protect themselves from, you know, hostile secret services. So and then the kind of age verification

00:15:30.080 sites say, oh, no, don't worry, you know, we'll keep your information confidential. There's no risk that

00:15:35.680 it'll ever escape our servers. And it's like, you know, the Ministry of Defence, which you'd think would have

00:15:40.320 pretty good secure protocols about protecting privacy, recently inadvertently leaked the names of

00:15:45.520 33,000 people who collaborated with the British Army in Afghanistan to the Taliban. So, you know,

00:15:50.920 I'm not sure how much confidence you should have in these age verification companies, particularly as

00:15:56.300 a lot of them have kind of sprung up in, you know, the last few weeks, because everyone's kind of

00:16:00.920 frantically trying to kind of verify their age so they can access, you know, Katie Lamb's speeches in

00:16:06.260 the House of Commons or whatever it might be. I mean, I think going back to the fear of children being

00:16:15.500 exposed to harmful content. And I think there are the, as you say, I think there is this tendency

00:16:23.060 on the part of the paternalistic authorities to believe that when children do engage in self-destructive

00:16:33.700 behaviour, or when they engage in violent behaviour, particularly sexually violent behaviour, you know,

00:16:39.200 the cause, the fundamental cause is exposure to kind of toxic, harmful content on particularly

00:16:47.840 social media. And that seems to me to be kind of psychologically pretty naive. It's a pretty kind

00:16:54.000 of impoverished analysis. And you saw it in adolescence, you know. I mean, first of all, it was ludicrous

00:17:02.420 to imagine that the greatest threat of sexual violence to young women was posed by white working 0.85

00:17:10.980 class boys brought up in kind of stable, two-parent working class households. I mean, we know that's

00:17:16.780 not true. And in addition, the analysis was, well, the reason he's engaging in this behaviour is because

00:17:22.760 he's been exposed to the manosphere, you know, which is completely, I mean, a pretty threadbare

00:17:28.840 analysis of, of why, you know, women and girls are more and more vulnerable to sexual assaults in

00:17:36.040 contemporary Britain. But there is this kind of naive kind of belief that, you know, the internet,

00:17:46.080 social media, user-to-user services are the main cause of all our problems. And, you know,

00:17:54.160 we didn't have any of these problems 15 years ago, you know, before, before this kind of, before this,

00:17:58.700 this horrible apparatus kind of, uh, got into our souls. I mean, it's, it's just kind of, I guess

00:18:04.820 it's, it's partly a kind of form of avoidance, not wanting to kind of think more deeply about what

00:18:09.520 the real causes of these kind of long-running society. Well, knowing what they are and refusing

00:18:14.080 to address them and then censoring the people who are attempting to address them. Yeah.

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00:19:58.280 And I guess another reason to push back a bit against this kind of argument that we have a kind of

00:20:10.580 the state has a duty to protect children from exposure to harmful content is that, well, isn't

00:20:17.120 OK, maybe the state needs to do a little bit about that, but isn't that really the responsibility of

00:20:21.580 parents? And why should the state be taking on the role that really parents should be discharging?

00:20:29.020 I think there's a technological dimension to this, Toby, which is a lot of parents don't have the

00:20:32.740 first clue of what the internet is or how to use it. And I think I understand why people are concerned.

00:20:38.520 I've told the story before, I think. Last time, not last time, one of the times I was on question time,

00:20:45.040 you know how they don't record the first question. There's a practice question before the full program.

00:20:50.160 And there was a question about Donald Trump being removed from Facebook. This was several years

00:20:55.860 ago. And the Labour representative on the panel, we must have the safest internet in the world,

00:21:02.660 very much speaking to your point earlier. And I think for a lot of people, particularly when it

00:21:06.800 comes to children, look, the safety of children is very important, of course. And I think we're both

00:21:12.820 parents, we'd certainly share that view. But my sense is that this is kind of being used now.

00:21:20.160 To achieve other ends, to suppress dissent. I mean, you had an article on one of your blogs earlier

00:21:27.160 this week talking about the fact that the government is introducing a policing unit to monitor social

00:21:32.820 media for signs of dissent and protest moods. I mean, I think we'd all recognize that the country is kind

00:21:39.720 of a fever pitch at the moment with protests outside migrant hotels and so on. Are you concerned that

00:21:46.400 part of this is simply about preventing people who are expressing their genuine fears and concerns

00:21:53.500 about what's happening in the country? And it's a way of, you know, they will argue it's preventing

00:21:58.420 real world harm. But a lot of people would argue it's a way of preventing the expression of concern

00:22:04.060 about government policy from happening. Are you worried that this is basically a way of censoring

00:22:10.740 people so that they don't challenge the government? Well, I think the government, the, the, the, the,

00:22:17.840 I think, um, Sir Keir Starmer, Peter Kyle, um, other senior members of the government, um,

00:22:23.940 do genuinely think that the online safety act doesn't go nearly far enough that the, um, legal but

00:22:31.040 harmful to adult clause, uh, should never have been removed. Um, and, um, uh, Morgan McSweeney's, um,

00:22:39.900 uh, pro censorship lobby group, um, the center for countering digital hate. I say Morgan McSweeney's,

00:22:45.540 he's Keir Starmer's chief of staff, uh, because he was the founding director. I don't think he's any

00:22:50.040 longer involved, but, um, they held a special summit, uh, during the riots that followed the

00:22:55.780 Southport attack last summer. And they concluded the online safety act needs to be toughened up.

00:23:02.000 We need to reinsert the clauses that were removed, uh, when it was going through parliament. Um,

00:23:07.300 Ofcom needs more powers, uh, to censor legal but harmful content, which adults are exposed to.

00:23:13.900 And Peter Kyle in particular needs to be able to stipulate. Um, it, I think the, the, the,

00:23:19.180 the, the kind of safeguard was in an emergency, in an emergency, Peter Kyle needs these special

00:23:24.860 powers to direct Ofcom to remove legal but harmful content, uh, uh, from being able to be seen by

00:23:31.360 adults. But of course, you know, in an emergency, I mean, as far as the left is concerned, there's

00:23:36.220 always an emergency of one kind or another. Emergencies are always being invoked to kind of

00:23:40.600 justify the suspension of democratic norms.

00:23:43.260 Toby, before you go on, one thing I will just interject is, uh, we interviewed the director,

00:23:49.560 uh, then director, I don't know if he's still there, of the Center for Countering Digital. Hey,

00:23:52.980 it was one of the most bizarre interviews that we've ever done. What's his name? I keep forgetting.

00:23:56.500 Imran.

00:23:57.120 Imran Ahmed.

00:23:58.440 Imran Ahmed.

00:23:59.000 We interviewed him. Uh, people can go and watch that interview. It is one of the most,

00:24:03.420 like, weird interviews we've ever done because for 50 minutes, we had a very reasonable discussion.

00:24:08.920 But then the moment we started to test some of his arguments, he just became bitterly, personally

00:24:13.780 antagonistic and rude. Uh, and it kind of showed you where some of these people are coming from.

00:24:19.020 Yeah. Well, I think that was, that, that interview was revealing and his reaction to being challenged

00:24:23.600 was revealing and we'll get onto that in a second. Um, but, um, uh, I think, I think, uh, the government

00:24:31.200 were probably pleasantly surprised that lots of, um, content, um, uh, uh, which, which fuels

00:24:39.160 an anti-immigration narrative, such as Katie Lamb talking about the grooming gangs, um, uh,

00:24:45.160 uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, an X account, which, um, published transcripts of the grooming gang

00:24:50.640 trials, footage of an anti-immigration protester being arrested in Leeds. Government was probably

00:24:55.860 pleasantly surprised that that stuff was suppressed by X just on the grounds that it needed to verify

00:25:02.860 that you were 18 before you were able to see it. And until you could, you couldn't see it.

00:25:05.960 But I think they do want to increase the, uh, powers that Peter Kyle, that Ofcom has to suppress

00:25:13.680 legal but harmful content that supposedly fuels an anti-immigration narrative. Because I think,

00:25:19.920 um, I think on one level, they actually believe that the Southport disturbances, the social disorder

00:25:28.960 that followed the Southport attack last year, um, wasn't caused by roiling public anger about mass

00:25:38.480 uncontrolled immigration and, um, unhappiness that successive governments have promised to do 0.91

00:25:45.840 something to reduce overall migration and have done the opposite. Um, Boris being the prime example,

00:25:53.260 the Boris wave, you know, take back control of our borders. No, he didn't do that. So I think

00:25:57.460 there's this sense of distrust, betrayal, loss of faith in British institutions, uh, this feeling

00:26:05.420 that we need to, we need to take the law into our own hands. We need direct action if we're going to do

00:26:11.140 anything about this because successive governments have ignored us. Um, I think that there is this kind of

00:26:15.840 belief, I think on the part of the authorities, particularly the kind of, uh, pan-gendrums of

00:26:22.320 the Labour Party, um, that, that, that these disturbances, social disorder, the fact that we

00:26:28.360 are kind of seemingly kind of, um, sitting on an unexploded bomb that various towns and cities

00:26:34.740 have become tinderboxes. I think they think it's got nothing to do with mass uncontrolled immigration,

00:26:40.160 nothing to do with multiculturalism, all the policies we've been advocating for, cheerleading 0.87

00:26:46.020 for, for the past decades, you know, rather than admit that they got anything wrong or that they

00:26:52.000 failed the public in some way or betrayed their own manifesto promises. No, no confrontation about

00:26:58.500 that at all. No acceptance of that. No, it's all to do with bad actors on social media spreading

00:27:04.360 myths and disinformation and hate speech about asylum seekers. So all we need to do to solve the

00:27:10.620 problem is suppress that. If we can suppress that, the problem goes away. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a

00:27:16.060 kind of willed naivety and a kind of avoidance of confronting their own policy failures over the past

00:27:23.680 decades. And I think, I think there's a degree of self-deception involved. Um, uh, they don't want to

00:27:29.080 have an argument. They don't want to be forced to defend those policies in the public square because

00:27:35.160 they recognize, you know, at some level that they haven't been a success and that they've, they've

00:27:39.840 created this legacy of distrust, this kind of crisis of democratic legitimacy. Um, but rather than

00:27:47.500 defend those policies in the public square, better to just suppress anyone criticizing them, demonize

00:27:54.900 them as far right, uh, xenophobic, et cetera. And I think it's partly avoidance. It's partly an unwillingness

00:28:01.920 to confront their own failures. It's partly a kind of crisis of faith in liberalism itself. And you can see

00:28:07.580 that in the kind of curdling of their faith in multiculturalism. Um, you know, from thinking diversity

00:28:14.220 was our strength, multiculturalism has, you know, improved our cuisine, enriched our cultural life, et cetera,

00:28:20.120 et cetera, to suddenly thinking, crikey, you know, we're sitting on a powder keg, which is going to

00:28:25.280 blow at any moment we need to. But, but, but I think it's also about, um, one of the reasons they

00:28:30.160 don't want to have an argument, defend their policies in the public square, um, is because

00:28:35.100 they've lost the kind of ability to argue those muscles of atrophy. So when they're confronted,

00:28:40.140 like when you confronted, um, um, uh, when you confronted the, the, the, the CEO of the center of

00:28:46.860 countering digital hate, instead of kind of having an argument, instead of defending his

00:28:52.200 position, he just gets angry and just launches into ad hominem attacks because they've lost the

00:28:57.360 ability to argue that muscle has atrophied. And that's another reason I think the impulse to

00:29:03.380 suppress rather than engage is so powerful. If you kept interrupting me during the course of

00:29:09.500 this conversation, which you have, and I perceive that to be motivated by the fact that you're from a

00:29:14.300 Muslim background, I'm from a Jewish background, would that make that hate speech? No. But I,

00:29:20.060 my self-perception is that. No, it's just that you're really slow at talking and my brain's

00:29:25.040 already finished your sentence. But my perception isn't that you walked out of the room and when

00:29:29.300 you walk out of here, I'm going to turn to these guys and say, well, that was a lot of hate speech.

00:29:33.120 That's fine. You can say that that's hate speech. And then you can be prosecuted. It's absolutely fine 0.64

00:29:36.760 for you to say that's hate speech if you want. And then you can be prosecuted. If me interrupting you

00:29:40.600 hate speech, and that's your definition of it, I tell you what, you are being disrespectful

00:29:45.260 to the people who do receive hate speech. Like me. The enormous number of people who receive hate

00:29:51.600 speech. Real, clear. So do I. Undeniable hate speech. So do I. And your sophistry right now

00:29:58.960 is both transparent and deeply disrespectful. And I warn you that most of your listeners will think

00:30:04.900 themselves, actually, Constantine's being a bit of a dickhead right now. 0.91

00:30:09.560 That's interesting that you say that, because what I'm doing is I'm stress testing your argument. 0.92

00:30:13.380 And the point I'm making to you is a person's self-perception can be manipulated. People can lie

00:30:18.980 about how they perceive the things that they experience. And sometimes people will use the law

00:30:24.620 against other people when it's badly written. Don't you think that's true?

00:30:27.340 I do think it's true.

00:30:28.240 That's what I'm saying. So I'm not really being a dickhead. I'm stress testing your argument. 0.83

00:30:31.700 And calling me a dickhead might be considered a hate speech. 0.85

00:30:35.020 No, no, it's not hate speech. It's just good observation. 0.94

00:30:39.240 Fine.

00:30:40.160 Toby, I actually think as well, if we put a good faith spin on this, I think that's kind

00:30:45.060 of how the left look at it, in that they have quite a paternalistic attitude to people.

00:30:50.100 And their instinct is to protect, is to keep people safe. And the people who tend to vote

00:30:57.600 for these kind of policies or governments want to be kept safe. So for these types of people,

00:31:03.300 it is actually quite a mutually beneficial relationship, isn't it?

00:31:08.600 Well, I think, yeah, we saw that kind of dynamic at work during the pandemic with the, to my mind,

00:31:16.900 surprisingly wide public acceptance of the lockdown policy. People were willing to have their liberties

00:31:23.180 temporarily suspended in order to keep, keep themselves safe, keep vulnerable people safe.

00:31:30.320 Very different to the reaction to previous pandemics in the kind of second half of the 20th century.

00:31:36.680 And it does feel as though, as we've become a kind of more comfortable, affluent society,

00:31:42.000 so people have begun to prioritise safety over liberty. And I think people are willing to kind

00:31:49.900 of make that trade often, because they don't think it will affect their liberties, or if it will,

00:31:55.960 it will only affect their liberties temporarily. I mean, a lot of the restrictions that were imposed

00:32:01.020 during the lockdown weren't lifted, you know, when the lockdown was lifted. So it turned out not to be

00:32:06.080 temporary suspension of liberties at all. But I think one of the impacts of the Online Safety Act in

00:32:12.760 the past few weeks is that people are beginning to realise that, you know, when they make this

00:32:18.760 Faustian pact, and agree to sacrifice some liberty for safety, they don't think of their own liberties 0.93

00:32:26.000 as being kind of sacrificed. But now they're beginning to discover that actually, it does involve their

00:32:31.840 own liberties. I think people are waking up to the fact that actually, this is, this is a kind of harder trade

00:32:37.500 than they imagine, because, you know, it isn't just affecting the liberty of people on the kind of

00:32:42.820 far right to rabble rouse and disseminate myths and disinformation and hate speech on social media

00:32:48.640 platforms. It's actually affecting their ability to access content that they want to see, like people

00:32:54.860 being arrested at anti-immigration protests. Well, I have to take issue with both of you making this

00:32:59.340 about the left. Let's just go back to where we started this. This bill was brought in by the last

00:33:05.180 conservative government. Let's just be honest about it, right? So this isn't about the left. This is

00:33:10.360 about, as you say, the country is becoming more pro-restrictions. The country is, and you mentioned

00:33:17.900 the public supported it during COVID. I don't know if they support this. I imagine at the surface level,

00:33:23.000 without delving into it, a lot of people will support this as well. And so I don't think it's about

00:33:27.340 the left at all. I think we just live in a country that's pro-censorship.

00:33:30.240 Well, if you look at surveys, people's attitude towards censorship obviously depends on how the

00:33:41.700 questions are phrased. Yeah, there's a massive part of it.

00:33:43.960 A massive part of it. But when you ask people whether, you know, people are too sensitive,

00:33:49.920 people are too easily offended, people should be able to kind of speak more freely without being

00:33:55.260 worried about jeopardizing their livelihoods. Generally, there seems to be a lot of public

00:33:58.840 support for free speech. I'm sure.

00:34:00.700 So have we become more pro-censorship? I mean, yes, I think we have.

00:34:06.160 And our elites certainly are more pro-censorship.

00:34:08.120 Our elites, certainly. I mean, one curious change in the attitude of the elites is that

00:34:13.860 until about 15 years ago, the kind of prevailing orthodoxy when it came to censorship was what's

00:34:21.100 known as the counterspeech doctrine. So the Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, in a landmark

00:34:26.160 First Amendment case in the early part of the 20th century, said, and I'm paraphrasing,

00:34:31.040 the best way of countering misleading and harmful speech is not enforced silence, but more and better

00:34:37.860 speech. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Suppression doesn't work. You know, we need, if you're concerned

00:34:45.760 about, you know, various narratives kind of getting abroad and having a kind of toxic effect on public

00:34:53.160 life, on the functioning of democracy, the best way to respond to that is not, is not enforced

00:34:59.000 silence, but to actually engage with the people making these arguments. And that was the kind of

00:35:05.800 prevailing orthodoxy amongst our elites till about 15 years ago. But suddenly they seem to have come

00:35:11.160 back around to censorship as the best way of dealing with, of countering kind of harmful and

00:35:18.120 misleading speech. And I think that's a, it's a huge mistake, not least because it's always

00:35:22.580 counterproductive. I mean, the kind of paradigmatic example is the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, the early

00:35:29.260 1930s, banning Nazis, banning Nazi propaganda in various German states. Hitler was banned from speaking

00:35:36.960 in various German states. Antisemitism was a criminal offence in various German states. And this was thought

00:35:43.280 to be the best way to kind of suppress the rise of the Nazis. Didn't work. And you can see that 0.60

00:35:49.300 these various efforts to censor social media in particular, not just here, but in Australia,

00:35:55.180 in New Zealand, across the continent, as a way of kind of countering kind of populist insurgence,

00:36:01.740 has been just completely ineffective. The rise of populism continues unabated. In this country,

00:36:09.520 I don't think that suppressing anti-immigration content on social media is going to in any way

00:36:16.200 impede the progress of Reform UK. I mean, they're topping the polls and the efforts of the authorities

00:36:22.900 to kind of suppress, you know, public anger about mass uncontrolled immigration, about the small boats,

00:36:31.660 et cetera, et cetera. It's having the opposite of its intended effect. You think kind of,

00:36:34.860 when are they going to learn that suppression, censorship doesn't work? Sunlight is the best

00:36:40.820 disinfectant. If they want to defend their policies, if they want to cling on to power,

00:36:44.880 then, you know, get out there in the public square, make as good a fist as you can of defending

00:36:50.700 these policies. Don't just try and smear your opponents as kind of far-right kind of lunatics,

00:36:56.660 because that doesn't work.

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00:38:47.840 We're talking about this. And then a couple of days ago, you had Peter Kyle, who we said,

00:38:54.560 the science minister for Labour. He made the argument on national television that

00:39:00.640 Nigel Farage, who criticised this bill, is on the side of paedopholes and most pertinently of all,

00:39:09.020 Jimmy Savile. And you're just watching him make this argument. I mean, have you lost your mind?

00:39:15.940 As I said, if you want to overturn the Online Safety Act, you are on the side of predators

00:39:23.760 and paedophiles. Nigel Farage wants to overturn the Online Safety Act that puts in it the duty

00:39:30.020 to prevent children from being groomed by paedophiles, that prevents adults from contacting

00:39:36.700 children who don't know each other, strangers contacting children.

00:39:40.680 This is an act that is the biggest step forward in the experience that children have online since

00:39:46.720 the creation of the internet, the biggest step forward in the safety of children across Britain

00:39:50.960 since the internet was created. And Nigel Farage wants to overturn all of that,

00:39:55.620 to send it back to the days when predators and paedophiles could contact children.

00:40:00.200 So I am not going to apologise for pointing out the obvious. He wants to overturn those measures.

00:40:05.520 I will stay steadfast to make sure that children are kept safe in the digital age, just as we

00:40:10.760 strive to keep children safe in the online world, offline world as well.

00:40:15.140 I think, Peter Kyle, what Nigel Farage is asking you to apologise for is saying earlier this morning

00:40:21.500 that if Jimmy Savile were still alive, he would be perpetrating his terrible crimes online.

00:40:27.080 And that you're saying Nigel Farage is on the side of Jimmy Savile and people like him.

00:40:35.460 There are people like Jimmy Savile who are trying to get access to children online that will be

00:40:41.160 prevented from doing so by the Online Safety Act. Nigel Farage wants to overturn the very laws that

00:40:48.440 are preventing that from happening. He is on the side of people like Jimmy Savile and I'm not going to

00:40:53.740 apologise for saying so. It is about time that Nigel Farage was held to account for the words

00:40:59.060 that he says, the actions that he takes, because this is politics. We have taken the action to

00:41:04.660 prevent those things happening to children in our country. And Nigel Farage wants to throw all of

00:41:10.040 that away, to turn the clock back. I will not apologise for pointing it out. Nigel Farage needs to be

00:41:15.500 held to account for the dangerous policies that he is trying to impose on children across our country.

00:41:20.440 It was, I mean, quite a bold argument to make, given, you know, that Keir Starmer's track record

00:41:28.460 as director of public prosecutions when it came to prosecuting Jimmy Savile isn't, you know,

00:41:33.380 completely unblemished that we could get into that. But yeah, and you initially thought that he's

00:41:40.020 overreaching here. This is a political blunder. But actually, various other senior Labour ministers

00:41:48.640 have doubled down on it. I think, is it Angela Rayner, the most recent one? Yeah, it's such a tenuous

00:41:56.200 argument. I mean, the idea being that, I suppose that modern day groomers, the kind of contemporary

00:42:06.380 equivalents of Jimmy Savile, are going to use unregulated kind of, I don't know, user to user

00:42:12.120 services on the internet to kind of groom children and find their victims. So if you're opposed to

00:42:19.020 age-gating content and protecting under 18-year-olds, then you're basically on the same

00:42:24.840 side of Jimmy Savile. I mean, a real stretch. And I just can't imagine that argument is landing with

00:42:29.680 the public and making them think, oh, well, crikey, yeah, Nigel Farage, if he repeals the

00:42:35.620 online safety app, we're going to have a kind of tsunami of Jimmy Savile's kind of stalking our

00:42:40.240 children on the web. What it shows to me, I find it very interesting, actually, because I was watching

00:42:45.980 an episode of the News Agents where they were talking about this, and even they were saying

00:42:51.760 that this is completely ludicrous. Wow. If even they're saying it, then, yeah. 0.62

00:42:56.560 And you just look at it, and to me, it looks like a government that is completely rattled,

00:43:03.160 doesn't have any answers, and like you said before, is just resorting to ad hominems. And I'm thinking,

00:43:09.400 guys, you haven't even been in power for, what, barely a year? And you already look like you're

00:43:13.820 losing the plot massively. I mean, I think one of the reasons various governments, not just

00:43:21.020 our government, are so quick to press the censorship button, is because they are becoming more and more

00:43:29.880 brittle, less and less confident. You know, you see, I think it's a historical fact that as regimes

00:43:38.800 become more fragile, as they begin to lose authority, so they become more repressive. And that seems to be

00:43:46.320 what's happening here. And they're becoming further from the people as well. I mean, your point about

00:43:50.080 I mean, anyone who thinks that you're going to suppress people's concerns about illegal 0.99

00:43:56.200 immigration in Britain in August of 2025 is a moron. I mean, the entire country is concerned 0.98

00:44:03.580 about illegal immigration. It's not because of online content. It's because they experience it

00:44:09.220 on a daily basis. There's no suppressing that. And that will backfire, don't you think?

00:44:14.340 Absolutely. I mean, even in the past few days, there have been a couple of cases

00:44:19.980 one, I think, brought to light by the Mail on Sunday, another by The Sun of asylum seekers 0.74

00:44:26.520 sexually assaulting, kidnapping minors, efforts by the police to suppress the fact that these

00:44:34.300 crimes were committed by asylum seekers, only for it to then come out. I mean, talk about 0.89

00:44:40.000 fueling anti-immigration sentiment. I mean, I think people are incredibly suspicious.

00:44:46.440 Whenever there is a terrorist incident, whenever there's an attack on a sexual assault on children,

00:44:55.820 people just automatically assume now it must have been carried out by an asylum seeker,

00:45:01.540 probably from a Muslim-majority country. Not because that's more likely to be the case

00:45:07.140 than not, but because we know there have been just so many occasions on which the government

00:45:11.920 have tried to cover up the fact that one of these attacks, one of these episodes has been carried

00:45:16.600 out by an asylum seeker from a Muslim-majority country. Suppressing this information just has

00:45:22.580 the opposite of its intended effect. It's crazy.

00:45:24.680 And there's one other thing I wanted to touch on with you as well. One of the things I've read is

00:45:28.420 that WhatsApp and Signal, I think, are two of the companies, but I'm sure others as well,

00:45:32.980 who are saying it hasn't happened yet, but the government is effectively attempting to force

00:45:37.620 these companies to give access to the government to up encrypted private messages. And this may be

00:45:43.720 another consequence of the introduction of the online safety act. Can you talk a little bit about that?

00:45:47.740 There's one threat to encrypted messaging apps is linked to a crime and terrorism act whereby,

00:46:01.220 which granted the British police and security services access if the government issues a special

00:46:09.600 notice to encrypted data on encrypted messaging apps. And that's currently being contested by Apple

00:46:18.540 amongst other companies. And it meant that Apple said they could no longer offer the highest level

00:46:23.240 of encryption to users of Apple services in the UK. But the online safety act requires category one

00:46:33.900 providers, I think. So when they finally, when Peter Carl finally gets around to designating them

00:46:37.800 to do these risk assessments and annual risk assessments that they need to provide Ofcom with.

00:46:43.020 And that will mean disclosing some of the, or being in a position to disclose some of the messaging

00:46:52.860 on their apps. And the argument is that groomers, the Jimmy Savills of today, are using encrypted

00:47:02.660 messaging apps to kind of groom children undetected. So Ofcom has to have access to this content if it's

00:47:09.760 going to protect children. But what it means is that unless, unless Ofcom backs down, it could well

00:47:17.380 mean that apps like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram are just geo-blocked in the UK.

00:47:23.040 But, you know, you know, when the more I read this act, because I sat down and God bless my little

00:47:31.500 brain, I sat down and I tried to read this act. Now, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert, but I was

00:47:36.880 trying to go through it. And the thing that kept jumping out to me as I was reading through it, I

00:47:42.320 was just trying to make sense of it, was A, it's incredibly difficult to read. It's incredibly opaque.

00:47:48.260 Now, maybe that might be because I'm not legally trained. I'm not bright enough. But the thing that

00:47:52.060 also kept jumping out to me was the use of nebulous terms. Safety. I have a very particular

00:47:58.980 issue with safety. Because the past couple of years, when everybody said the words,

00:48:03.820 I need to feel safe, or you've compromised my safety, they're not talking about safety. What

00:48:08.740 they've said is, I don't want my ideas to be challenged. You make me feel uncomfortable

00:48:13.040 because you've challenged my ideas. Significant psychological harm. Well, who judges that?

00:48:19.100 What does that actually mean? Does that mean that you get a form of PTSD? And that makes me feel

00:48:24.600 profoundly uncomfortable.

00:48:26.480 Yeah. I mean, I think, to your first point, it isn't just you. I mean, the Online Safety Act

00:48:31.940 is an incredibly dense, voluminous piece of legislation, really hard to understand. I mean,

00:48:37.120 we've got a team of lawyers at the Free Speech Union going through it, trying to summarise it,

00:48:42.520 trying to see what parts of it are legally challengeable. And, you know, our Chief Legal

00:48:46.640 Counsel has a PhD in classics from Oxford, and he's struggling with it. I mean, it is an unbelievably

00:48:52.860 opaque and dense document. On the kind of frequency with which these kind of nebulous terms occur,

00:49:00.980 you're quite right. And that seems to be a kind of recurring feature of kind of sensorial legislation.

00:49:08.420 So Section 127 of the Communications Act makes it a criminal offence to communicate messages which

00:49:17.000 are grossly offensive. Well, how to define grossly offensive? Section 179 of the Online Safety Act

00:49:23.340 criminalises disinformation. So if you knowingly disseminate information which you know to be

00:49:32.800 false, and it's likely to cause psychological harm to a likely audience, then you can go to prison for

00:49:39.420 two years. And, you know, how do you define psychological harm? I mean, could you be prosecuted

00:49:45.100 for causing psychological harm to someone who's particularly psychologically vulnerable because

00:49:49.320 they're suffering from mental illness? Do we have to take their possible reaction into account? Could

00:49:54.680 you be prosecuted for that? And as you say, the concept of safety, the concept of harm have been

00:50:00.800 just stretched to breaking point, particularly in the last decade or so. It's no longer just about

00:50:06.480 physical harm, about protecting people's physical safety. It's about protecting people from

00:50:11.480 psychological harm. It's about protecting their psychological well-being. And as you say, that

00:50:15.700 can include not challenging people. I mean, we see it again and again in university students claiming

00:50:21.600 they need safe spaces. They need trigger warnings and so on and so forth, because if their ideas are

00:50:27.580 challenged, they find that psychologically traumatising. They find that undermines their

00:50:32.780 psychological well-being. I mean, that's taking the concept of safety and harm to ludicrous lengths.

00:50:38.540 And it's also as well, they go, oh, they were talking about truth and something that may not

00:50:43.420 be true. And I was thinking, and I think Nigel Farage made this point, what about humour? Humour and

00:50:48.740 satire is taking something that we know to be true and then exaggerating it. And you're going, what?

00:50:54.360 So are we now going to get rid of humour because you made a satirical joke and somebody would say, 0.97

00:50:59.380 well, actually, if you look at it, maybe David Cameron didn't have intimate relations with the pig. 0.83

00:51:04.380 And the reality is that David Cameron would find that particularly upsetting. 0.79

00:51:08.380 Yeah. One way of looking at this is to distinguish between tolerance and respect.

00:51:16.980 So when it comes to different religious faiths, being able to practice in the UK,

00:51:27.840 we pride ourselves on religious tolerance. It's why the UK is such an attractive country

00:51:32.340 for migrants from other countries, particularly Muslim majority countries, because we have this

00:51:37.560 tradition dating back, you know, more than 100 years of tolerating people of different religious

00:51:44.060 faiths, of tolerating the practice of different religious faiths in our midst. And that applies

00:51:50.220 to all kinds of beliefs, all kinds of traditions, customs, communities. We have this great tradition

00:51:56.740 of which we're rightly proud of tolerance. But that in the past few decades has somehow

00:52:02.460 segued into respect. So now it's not enough to tolerate people with different beliefs to the

00:52:09.680 mainstream, various minority groups practicing their own customs and religions. Now they demand 1.00

00:52:14.620 to be respected. And I'll give you just two examples. One obvious example is Muslims wanting 1.00

00:52:21.740 their blasphemy codes to be respected by non-believers. And one of the Free Speech Union's 0.92

00:52:26.940 big cases recently was defending Hamit Koskan, a Turkish political refugee who was prosecuted for

00:52:32.700 burning a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge. And unfortunately,

00:52:37.660 that prosecution was successful. We're now going to appeal it. But we don't want to see the

00:52:42.200 reintroduction of blasphemy codes via the back door, particularly blasphemy codes that only protect

00:52:46.760 people of one particular faith. But Islamophobia, another example, the government is currently

00:52:51.800 tasked this group with coming up with a definition of Islamophobia slash anti-Muslim hatred, which seems

00:52:57.260 to be a way of embedding and forcing non-believers to respect Islamic blasphemy codes in the public 0.97

00:53:03.580 square. But the other example I'm thinking of is trans rights activists and trans people. It's not enough 1.00

00:53:10.940 that they should be tolerated. They also want to be respected. And that means they want to compel

00:53:16.180 people to use their preferred gender pronouns. I mean, that's one of the forms it takes.

00:53:20.700 So I think we've gone from a society which was very tolerant of all these different communities,

00:53:26.320 these different religions, and we prided ourselves on being tolerant. But that didn't mean that

00:53:31.340 non-believers had to respect them. We might tolerate people of different faiths. That doesn't mean,

00:53:37.420 particularly if you're an atheist, that you have to respect people of different faiths or respect their

00:53:41.360 religious beliefs. But we seem to have segued into a society in which everyone is required to

00:53:46.280 respect everyone else. And that means tiptoeing around. It means biting our tongues, not saying

00:53:51.900 what we think, for fear of offending someone by disrespecting them. And that's a recipe for disaster.

00:53:58.820 That's not a recipe for making a multicultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic society work. The way to make 1.00

00:54:04.520 a society like ours work is to promote the value of tolerance, not to demand that every different

00:54:09.560 identity group respect what are in effect the blasphemy codes, the sacred values of every

00:54:15.680 other identity group. That just means a society in which no one talks to each other. I mean, if you

00:54:19.760 look at these communities like Leicester, where there are these kind of sectarian religious conflicts

00:54:26.580 which currently break out into the open, not just Leicester. I mean, virtually every town and city in

00:54:30.480 the UK. But the way to resolve this, the way to bring about a kind of lasting kind of peace and

00:54:40.180 tranquility in these communities to avoid these kind of sectarian conflicts breaking out is not to force

00:54:46.080 everyone to kind of tiptoe around, tread on eggshells, respect each other's blasphemy codes, not trespass on

00:54:53.060 each other's sacred values. The way to make sure these communities get along, to forge some sense of

00:54:59.600 common identity and common purpose, some new sense of kind of Britishness rooted in our multicultural,

00:55:05.540 multi-ethnic, multi-faith society, is for these people to talk to each other, to argue, to negotiate,

00:55:11.260 you know, to promote free speech, not to suppress it. Look, starting a business is exciting, but it isn't

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00:56:23.300 that's shopify.co.uk slash trigger. And it's a great point because you think, let's take the example

00:56:31.140 of blasphemy laws. If Labour implements blasphemy laws, which some Labour MPs want to do, like Tahir

00:56:38.280 Ali, is it that really far of a stretch to go, well, you can't make a joke about this religion

00:56:44.280 because I find this psychologically damaging? And then, so what you have is just a censorship

00:56:49.980 industrial complex, don't you? You do, yeah. And another argument for why we shouldn't be forced

00:56:58.740 to respect the blasphemy codes of different religions is that, what about our tradition in

00:57:05.860 this country, of humour, of taking the mickey, you know, of deliberately disrespecting, you know,

00:57:14.200 the sacred values of different identity groups, which creates a kind of good-humoured atmosphere?

00:57:20.980 What about that? Why not? Don't our traditions deserve to be tolerated as well? I mean, you probably

00:57:29.020 know about this, but one of the big campaigning issues that the Free Speech Union and me and the

00:57:33.600 House of Lords have been kind of engaged in over the past six months or so is the banter ban. So

00:57:39.040 clause 20 of the Employment Rights Bill extends employer liability for the harassment of their

00:57:47.140 employees to third parties. And I'm not talking about third-party sexual harassment of employers,

00:57:53.120 I'm talking about that's already, you know, employers are already liable for that. I'm talking about

00:57:57.420 the non-sexual harassment of employees by third parties. Employers are now liable for that,

00:58:02.660 meaning they could be sued by their employees for not taking all reasonable steps to protect them

00:58:08.220 from non-sexual harassment by customers, by members of the public. And what do we mean by

00:58:13.560 harassment? Well, it's one of these nebulous terms that just seems to be becoming more and more

00:58:18.320 capacious. So in the Employment Tribunal, harassment has evolved to include now overheard conversations.

00:58:24.920 So if a blue-haired barmaid in a pub overhears a couple of gender-critical feminists talking about 1.00

00:58:32.220 how unfair they think it is that biological men who identify as women should be able to compete

00:58:38.380 against women in women's sports like boxing and football, she could claim, 0.97

00:58:44.540 I feel harassed. And I feel harassed in virtue of one of my protected characteristics. You as my employer,

00:58:50.200 Mr. Publican, should have done more to protect me from that. And I'm going to sue you because you didn't.

00:58:54.160 How will publicans react to this? They'll employ banter bouncers to eavesdrop on people's 0.84

00:58:59.120 conversations to make sure they're not saying anything likely to offend or upset the kind of

00:59:03.180 pink-haired barmaid. There'll be notices on the wall saying, don't assume my pronouns. You know,

00:59:07.680 before you can buy a pint of beer, you'll be able to have to show you've had kind of the full suite

00:59:11.940 of diversity training. I mean, it's ludicrous, but the kind of rationale for this, I mean, I've been

00:59:16.740 arguing with Labour ministers in the House of Lords. How can you possibly justify the banter ban?

00:59:22.300 You're going to kind of put every pub in the country out of business. It's not just pubs. It applies to

00:59:26.060 hotels, restaurants, bars, football stadiums. You know, if a fan says to a linesman, are you blind?

00:59:33.380 And there's a partially sighted steward who overhears it. The partially sighted steward will be able to sue

00:59:37.560 the club for not doing enough to protect him from being harassed in that way by virtue of his protected

00:59:42.240 characteristic, his partial sightedness. So, you know, if Keir Starmer has his way, every stadium in the country

00:59:46.820 will become a library, not just his fucking, sorry, his beloved arsenal. And it's ludicrous. 0.99

00:59:52.960 But the rationale for it is, well, we have to protect vulnerable people in the workplace. They

00:59:58.140 shouldn't have to overhear offensive or upsetting conversations. We need to make the workplace safe

01:00:04.180 for everybody. That's the argument. It's going to destroy, you know, it's going to destroy a hugely

01:00:09.740 important aspect of our public life. But they think that that's toxic, banter's toxic. It's an

01:00:18.060 excuse for being racist and misogynistic and homophobic. Of course, people shouldn't be able

01:00:23.020 to tell jokes in pubs. What about comedy? It's really going to affect, you know, the comedy

01:00:28.280 industry. I mean, already, you know, people who work in comedy clubs essentially have a heckler's veto

01:00:34.200 over what comedians can say. But this will be setting it in stone. Henceforth, you know, if an

01:00:39.840 employee of a comedy club overhears a comedian make a joke that they find offensive or upsetting by

01:00:44.920 virtue of their protected characteristic, they'll be able to sue the owner of the comedy club for not

01:00:49.020 taking all reasonable steps to protect them from overhearing this joke. So it means that, you know,

01:00:54.460 it won't just be you that's required to sign a kind of contract before being hired. It'll be every

01:01:01.020 comedian in the country. And if you have any risky material, if you're, if you're straddling that line

01:01:06.680 between what's acceptable and what isn't, which makes comedy so exciting, you know, you won't be

01:01:10.840 able to perform. It'll just, it'll wipe out a kind of vast swathes of our cultural life at a stroke,

01:01:17.760 the banter ban. And of course, we've had no success in holding it back.

01:01:23.420 Toby, before we wrap up, speaking of protecting people, one of the things you do at the Free Speech

01:01:27.720 Union is help people who have been punished in some way for things they've said. What is,

01:01:34.280 what is the bulk of your caseload at the moment? Who, who are the people that are coming to you for

01:01:38.220 help? Well, since setting it up about five years ago, we fought over 4,000 cases and where they've

01:01:45.100 come to a conclusion, we've been successful about 80% of the time. And in our case database on Salesforce,

01:01:51.040 by far the largest category is sex and gender. About 40% of those 4,000 plus cases we fought over

01:01:59.000 the past five years have been defending gender critical women who've complained about having to 1.00

01:02:07.000 share bathrooms, changing rooms with biological men who think they're women. I mean, when I set up 0.88

01:02:14.440 the Free Speech Union, I thought, you know, um, I'd end up defending people like me for the most part,

01:02:20.500 um, you know, male, pale and stale Tories. Um, uh, but actually the front line, the people who find

01:02:28.260 themselves cancelled more often, the people who find it more difficult than anyone else to kind of,

01:02:33.060 uh, express how they feel about something, um, even if it's perfectly lawful, um, are women of a 0.98

01:02:39.540 certain age, um, uh, uh, who, who, who, you're going to cancel for that one. Not always of a certain

01:02:45.920 age. I mean, uh, but, uh, but, but they're mainly, they mainly identify as being on the left. Um,

01:02:50.680 so, you know, that will change. That is changing. Um, uh, but, um, increasingly we, we, we find

01:02:57.980 ourselves involved in, uh, criminal work. So defending people who are actually being prosecuted and face

01:03:04.980 jail time. So, um, one big success that I was really proud of is, um, a former Royal Marine

01:03:11.260 called Jamie Michael, um, who in the immediate aftermath of the Southport attack posted a 12

01:03:16.940 minute Facebook video, um, in which he wrongly blamed the attack on, um, uh, an undocumented

01:03:23.960 migrant. Um, uh, uh, partly because there was a vacuum, as you know, at that time, the government

01:03:29.280 didn't say he'd actually committed the attack. Um, and, um, and he urged his followers to protest

01:03:34.660 peacefully about, um, uh, um, illegal immigration into this country, the small boats in particular,

01:03:41.320 and a local labor politician complained to the police about this Facebook post, and he

01:03:46.760 was prosecuted for intending to stir up racial hatred. The maximum penalty for which is seven

01:03:52.840 years in jail. Um, and the, the Crown Prosecution Service went through with it. We urged them to

01:03:58.300 drop it. We said, you know, there's nowhere, this doesn't meet the threshold for intending to

01:04:03.440 stir up racial hatred. He was urging his protesters, his followers to protest peacefully, um, uh, about,

01:04:09.260 uh, illegal migration. And, um, uh, it took a jury all of, we paid for his defense. There was a,

01:04:14.900 there was a, there was a proper trial, a jury trial, and it took the jury all of 17 minutes to

01:04:19.520 unanimously acquit him. Uh, and we're doing more and more work like that, um, as the authorities become

01:04:26.160 more and more, uh, likely to prosecute people for challenging kind of, uh, the prevailing, um, uh,

01:04:34.460 government narrative about things like immigration, asylum seekers, the small boats. Um, and, uh, so

01:04:41.160 that, that, that, that's been a relatively new departure for us. But one thing to say is that since

01:04:45.700 labor came to power, um, just over a year ago, um, we've doubled in size. So we had about 14,000 members

01:04:53.240 on July 4th, 2024. We're now up to over 31,000 members. So Sir Keir Starmer, bless him, has been

01:05:00.500 a fantastic recruiting sergeant for the free speech union. Um, and we're now averaging 37 new cases

01:05:07.660 every week. Um, and, um, it's, it's often people who are, I think, um, perfectly reasonably worried

01:05:15.580 that they're going to have their collars felt because of something they've said on social media.

01:05:19.020 Um, and, um, yeah, I mean, we, we, we do our best to help every one of them.

01:05:24.060 Well, we've been big supporters of the free speech union from the moment it was founded. It's a really

01:05:27.780 important organization. Toby, we don't have, you, you're a very busy guy precisely because

01:05:31.780 there's so much work for you to do. So we won't have time for questions from our audience, although

01:05:35.580 we have incorporated many of them into this conversation. So we'll wrap up with this in the

01:05:40.420 context of speech in Britain, the online safety act and all of that. What is the one thing that no one's

01:05:45.100 talking about that they really should be? Um, the one thing people aren't talking about, well, um,

01:05:52.440 I'm not sure, um, the extent to which the police are arresting people for, um, supposedly, um, uh, saying

01:06:05.340 something unlawful online. I'm not sure the extent of it has fully sunk in. I mean, we do read from time

01:06:11.360 to time about, you know, people who are arrested often by, you know, six or seven police officers

01:06:18.060 who then ransack their houses, haul them down to the station, imprison them in cells for eight or

01:06:22.600 nine hours only to then kind of release them. Um, but I don't think people realize quite the extent

01:06:28.000 of it. So there was this, um, uh, piece in the times a few months ago, uh, which discovered, um,

01:06:34.940 quite astonishingly, um, that over, I think it was over, um, 12,000 people, um, uh, in the past year

01:06:43.760 had been arrested under suspicion of having committed just two speech offenses, uh, an offense

01:06:49.560 under, I think, section one of the malicious communications act and section one, two, seven

01:06:53.180 of the communications act. That's just two of the many speech offenses you can be prosecuted for.

01:06:58.600 I mean, there are, there are at least a dozen. That was just two over 12,000 people a year

01:07:03.600 being arrested, um, under suspicion of committing just those two speech offenses, which is over 30 a

01:07:10.480 day. So that's over 30 people a day being arrested, um, under suspicion of having just broken two of

01:07:18.640 these laws, uh, criminalizing what you can say. And invariably it's, it's stuff they've said online.

01:07:24.360 Um, and even when they conclude, and more often than not they do, that, uh, they don't have sufficient

01:07:30.080 evidence to prosecute this person, uh, it'll be recorded as a non-crime hate incident. So,

01:07:35.440 you know, I don't think people realize quite the scale, um, of, uh, non-crime hate incidents being

01:07:40.520 recorded either. So through various freedom of information requests, um, the FSU has established

01:07:45.420 that over the past 11 years, over a quarter of a million NCHIs have been recorded in England and

01:07:52.120 Wales alone. Um, and that's over 62, an average of over 62 a day. I mean, you wonder why if your

01:07:59.180 house is burgled or your car is stolen or your child has his phone stolen on the bus, the police

01:08:04.420 will take very little interest. They'll at best send you a crime report number so you can claim on

01:08:09.480 insurance. The reason they won't come around to your house is because they're far too busy

01:08:13.300 policing our tweets to police our streets. If you want the police, if you get burgled and you want the

01:08:17.800 police to come to your house, get a, get a can of spray paint, uh, before you do anything else and 0.97

01:08:22.280 spray paint on the wall, trans women aren't women. Report it as a hate crime and literally have a 1.00

01:08:27.240 helicopter overhead, you'll have six police officers outside. I mean, then they'll investigate.

01:08:31.300 Otherwise, no. Toby Young, thanks for coming on. Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - August 06, 2025

Why Britain Arrests 30 People EVERY DAY For Speech

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