Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” wrote John Milton in his Areopagitica of 1644. “Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopoliz’d and traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards.” He was arguing against the British state, then led by King Charles I, and its policy of forbidding the printing of books and pamphlets unless the printer was licensed by Parliament first. Milton’s loathing of censorship would become a cornerstone of English liberalism, and three centuries later, George Orwell would quote the Areopagitica in his own essays on “The Freedom of the Press.” But it seems Britain’s present-day rulers, Sir Keir Starmer foremost among them, have forgotten Milton’s lesson. Like Charles I, they believe theyought to decide what’s acceptable for Britons to read, write, and say, and what’s not. From dictatorial “proscriptions” of protest groups, to anti-terrorism investigations of rap artists, to sweeping censorship of the Internet, they’re taking a shredder to the concept of free speech itself, and with it all other civil rights and liberties. Across the Atlantic, there are plenty of U.S. politicians who would happily do the same if we let them. If we’re going to have anything resembling a free society, these people have to be fought. 
The Brits are losing their free speech in a lot of ways. But the one that’s drawn the most attention recently is how they now have to enter an ID to use websites like Twitter, Bluesky, Discord, YouTube, Spotify, and potentially even Wikipedia. This is because their government has enacted something called the “Online Safety Act,” allegedly for the public’s protection. The legislation was originally passed in 2023, under the short-lived Conservative government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—but because Sir Keir Starmer is essentially a Conservative himself, he kept it around when hebecame PM, and last week it came into full effect.
The Act, which you can read in full here, is intended to control both “illegal content and activity” and “content and activity that is harmful to children” online. To that end, it “confers new functions and powers on the regulator, OFCOM”—essentially the British version of the FCC—and imposes “duties” on social media companies and other online “providers” to ensure that “a higher standard of protection is provided for children than for adults.” Of course, this means those companies have to know who is a legal minor and who’s an adult, and so the ID requirements come in. Starting on July 25, British internet users started to notice intrusive pop-up screens when they tried to use various apps and websites, all demanding that they “verify” or “assure” their age by scanning an ID, entering a credit card, or taking a selfie for an AI to “estimate” their age. For porn websites, you have to “verify” to access the site at all. For social media sites, particular posts or sub-forums that are flagged as “harmful” may be blocked off unless you’ve identified yourself.
When he was challenged by reporters about the possible free-speech implications of the Online Safety Act, Starmer said that “we don’t believe in censoring speech, but of course, we do need to deal with terrorism. We need to deal with paedophiles and issues like that.” This is how government censorship is always sold to the public. In fact, there’s a famous political cartoon from the U.S. that illustrates the same idea. It shows Uncle Sam wrapping a package marked “Control of Internet Speech,” unsure whether he should use the “ANTI-TERRORISM” or “PROTECT KIDS” wrapping paper. For a politician like Starmer, it’s a canny strategy. Nobody wants to be associated with terrorism or child endangerment, so they’ll probably be reluctant to oppose your censorship bill too loudly, lest they be accused of supporting those things.
But in the first place, it’s highly questionable whether censoring the internet actually does prevent harm the way Starmer says. Consider the requirement for age verification on porn sites. At first glance, this seems uncontroversial. Back in the pre-internet days, you often had to show ID to buy a copy of Playboy or enter an adult theater, and that was reasonable enough. Then, too, there’s evidence that watching a lot of internet porn at an early age is psychologically damaging, from addiction to normalizing misogyny. So an age-based lockscreen is certainly well-intentioned. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in practice. As plenty of people have pointed out, it may paradoxically lead young people to more dangerous websites. No legislation in the world will stop teenagers from being interested in sex and wanting to watch it onscreen—and they say socialism goes against human nature! But a law like the Online Safety Act will block off more reputable sites, while leaving sketchier ones that host more extreme content, and don’t care about U.K. law, accessible. It’s the same principle we see with abortions. Ban or restrict them, and people just go to back-alley providers where they’re more likely to get infections and die.
Besides which, enforcing age checks requires having everyone’s personal informationuploaded somewhere and attached to a record of their viewing habits. This presents a staggering privacy problem, because if any of the companies involved have a data breach, everyone’s porn use with their name attached would suddenly be public. Or, if hackers get ahold of the data, it can easily be used to blackmail users and “out” closeted LGBTQ people on a massive scale. This isn’t theoretical. Just this month an app called “Tea,” which lets women share confidential information about awful men they’ve dated, got hacked, and because the app made its users prove they are women, “13,000 verification photos and images of government IDs” were leaked. And even if the data doesn’t leak, porn companies aren’t always scrupulous, and users could be tracked, monetized, and exploited in all kinds of unethical ways. So at best, any potential benefit to keeping “adult” websites away from minors is offset by a whole array of downsides.
And that’s if you take Starmer at his word that preventing “terrorism”—a term that’s so overused it’s all but meaningless—and regulating pornography are all the Online Safety Act does. There’s no reason to believe that’s true. Right now, Spotify says it may delete users’ accounts in the U.K. if they fail an age-check, and Spotify is not exactly a hotbed of hardcore porn or terrorist networks. Instead, the music streamer is putting blocks on what it deems to be “18+ content,” which mostly means heavy metal and rap songs with swear words in the lyrics. (Ironically, Immortal Technique’s “Freedom of Speech” falls in this category.) On Reddit, the Act has already blocked pages that aren’t remotely pornographic or terroristic, but are instead politically controversial, including r/UkraineWarFootage and r/IsraelCrimes. The site has also age-gated pages that are beneficial for young people to access, including r/StopSmoking, r/StopDrinking, and r/SexualAssault, the last of which provides resources for victims. The Wikimedia Foundation is currently challenging the law in court, because they worry it could even be applied to their informational pages. Meanwhile on Twitter, Spiked! editor Fraser Mysers reports that “UK users of X have been blocked from viewing footage of an anti-asylum protest, a tweet calling for single-sex spaces and a video of a speech in parliament,” along with Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring his Son and facts about the life of Richard the Lionheart. Spiked! is a right-leaning website—note the complaint about “single-sex spaces,” a nod to transphobia—but Myers is right when he says that “a ‘safe’ internet is an unfree internet,” and even lefties like Owen Jones agree.
Already, over 380,000 people have signed a parliamentary petition to repeal the Online Safety Act, which is more than the membership of Starmer’s flailing incarnation of the Labour Party (roughly 309,000). But Sir Keir Starmer believes he knows better than the British people. In response to the petition, the Labour government says it has “no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible.” In fact, some reports suggest the government is now considering additional laws to ban Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), in order to prevent anyone from circumventing the first round of bans and blocks. And all of this is especially ironic because Starmer is simultaneouslyplanning to give 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in the next election. Apparently he thinks British teenagers should have a voice in government, but shouldn’t be able to see footage of a protest or a war, or even listen to a song that uses rude language, before they exercise it.
The censorship push is coming offline, too. It has already reached the point where rappers are being investigated as terrorists for their political speech. The British government has had a rough relationship with hip-hop for a while now; back in 2018, then-Home Secretary Theresa May banned Tyler, the Creator from visiting the U.K. because of some violent and homophobic lyrics on his 2011 album Goblin, citing a list of “unacceptable behaviours” drawn up in 2005 to curb terrorism. (Importantly, Tyler came out as bisexual in 2017, which puts the homophobic language in a new context, but May completely ignored that.) But the censorship has kicked into high gear with Kneecap, the marvelously foul-mouthed punk rock/rap hybrid act from Northern Ireland.
The British government has had a vendetta against Kneecap for a few years now, and it’s not hard to see why. They’re named after the Irish Republican Army’s tendency to shoot its enemies in the kneecaps, they rap in Gaelic in an effort to revive the Irish language after centuries of British colonialism and cultural erasure, and one of their 2020 concert posters depicted Boris Johnson getting burned at the stake. In her time as Business Secretary, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch tried to deny the group a government arts and culture grant on the basis that they “oppose the United Kingdom itself,” only to lose the ensuing lawsuit spectacularly in court. (Never the savviest politician, Badenoch’s culture-war record also includes declaring that “lunch is for wimps” and she is “not afraid of Doctor Who.”) But in a striking case of bipartisanship, Keir Starmer also hates Kneecap, mostly for the group’s uncompromising stance on Palestine.
Like a lot of Irish people, the Kneecap rappers—DJ Próvaí, Móglaí Bap, and Mo Chara—recognize the parallels between English colonialism in Ireland and Israeli apartheid in Palestine, and they aren’t shy about saying so. So after the group unveiled a “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine” banner onstage at Coachella, Keir Starmer took to the airwaves to declare that he didn’t think it “appropriate” for them to play the Glastonbury music festival. When the organizers ignored his scolding, the BBC refused to broadcast Kneecap’s set live, and a random fan named Helen had to stream it from the crowd instead. Now, the BBC is a state-owned broadcaster, and they went out of their way to exclude one group of artists from a festival they’d already agreed to broadcast, based almost exclusively on those artists’ politics. You couldn’t ask for a more clear-cut case of government censorship. But it was totally futile, because a bit later, the Beeb did show a performance by Bob Vylan—an act which confusingly consists of two guys, both of whom are named Bob Vylan. One of the Bobs introduced a protest chant that went further than any of Kneecap’s, following up the familiar “Free, free Palestine” with “Death, death to the IDF.” So now, Bob Vylan are being investigated by the U.K.’s Metropolitan Police, and their U.S. visas have been revoked. Meanwhile, Mo Chara has actually been charged with a “terrorism offense” for an earlier incident where he allegedly waved the flag of Hezbollah around onstage. In both cases, there’s no suggestion the artists are responsible for any actual violence. It’s purely about speech.
Now, you can take issue with the language these musicians use. It’s provocative, certainly; that’s the whole point of being a punk act. You can argue plenty of it is in bad taste, or goes too far. (Although, as the mass starvation of children in Gaza continues—a major act of terrorism by any definition—plenty of people might also find “death, death to the IDF” a perfectly reasonable sentiment.) But what you can’t do is conflate offensive or even violent speech with actual terrorism, and attempt to punish one as the other. That’s what the British government is trying to do in Mo Chara’s case. The legal argument is that Hezbollah is a “proscribed organization,” meaning, it’s on a list of organizations the British Home Secretary has deemed unacceptably terroristic. Therefore, any expression of support for Hezbollah is considered a “terrorism offense” in and of itself. In this framework, “I like Hezbollah” is literally an illegal opinion. If he’s found guilty of expressing it, Chara—whose real name is Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh—could face “up to six months in prison and a fine.” Never mind that Hezbollah, along with having a militant wing, is a duly elected political party in Lebanon. Or that Israel has committed horrifying acts of terrorism, but you’re still allowed to wave their flag. There’s not even an attempt at consistency here.
It’s the same with Bob Vylan, who are now facing two different police investigations into whether their IDF chants “amounted to a criminal offence.” If the Bobs are eventually prosecuted, there’s no telling who couldn’t be. You could use the same logic to arrest the Dead Kennedys for “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” or Ice-T for “Cop Killer.” (Actually, maybe Keir Starmer would do that. I shouldn’t give him ideas.) Whenever you make the government the arbiter of what speech is acceptable, and what speech is “too far” or “too dangerous,” you also give them the power to enforce those decisions by putting people in concrete-and-metal cages when they speak the wrong words. You no longer have a free society in any meaningful way.
But even if you don’t have much sympathy for edgy pro-Palestinian rappers, you’ve got to raise an eyebrow when the police arrest an 83-year-old priest for protesting. That’s exactly what happened to Sue Parfitt, a retired minister from Bristol, earlier this month. The Metropolitan Police handcuffed her and hauled her away, simply because she was sitting in a folding chair holding a sign. She’s not the only one, either. They’ve also arrested an 80-year old retired teacher named Marianne Sorrell, an 81-year-old magistrate named Deborah Hinton, and several other miscellaneous senior citizens, all for protesting.
Once again, it’s that ridiculous concept of a “proscribed organization” to blame. On July 1, the U.K. Home Secretary (currently Yvette Cooper, who’s also known for launching ICE-style immigration raids on nail salons and car washes) announced that a new “dangerous, terrorist group” would be added to the “proscribed” list: Palestine Action. This description was a lie. Palestine Action is not a terrorist group, and they’re not particularly “dangerous.” As far as any reliable source has been able to tell, they’ve never killed or even injured anyone; certainly Cooper cited no such evidence. She said only that they “caused over £1 million worth of damage to parts essential for submarines” when “pyrotechnics and smoke bombs were thrown” at a “defence factory in Glasgow.” This gets closer to the truth: that Palestine Action are an anti-war protest group who sometimes commit mild-to-moderate acts of vandalism. In another high-profile case, they broke into a Royal Air Force airstrip and sprayed bright red paint on two military planes. But spraying paint is not terrorism, and neither is chucking smoke bombs around. Cooper, and by extension Starmer, have simply abused their power to ban a group they dislike. Volker Türk, the human rights chief for the United Nations, says the ban was “disproportionate and unnecessary” and likely violates international law. That’s also why Reverend Parfitt, Marianne Sorrel, and their compatriots came out in protest, all with some form of “I support Palestine Action” sign—and got summarily arrested for holding it.
Believe it or not, it gets worse. It’s not just that “I support Palestine Action” has become an illegal opinion. You don’t even have to express the opinion for the police to hassle you. Under the law as written, it’s also a “proscription offense” to “wear clothing or carry or display articles in public in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that the individual is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.” So even if a cop just thinks you look like someone who might support Palestine Action, you can be arrested, even if you don’t say anything about the group. Already, there was a prominent case where armed police officers—and most cops in the U.K. are not armed—threatened to arrest an activist named Laura Murton for holding a Palestinian flag and a sign that said “Israel is committing genocide” in Canterbury. When questioned, Murton told the cops directly that she doesn’t support any proscribed organizations—only to be told that “Mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all come under proscribed groups.” Ultimately, she only avoided arrest by agreeing to give them her identification and home address. If she hadn’t filmed the encounter, it would be hard to believe, but it’s all too real. And at protests around the U.K., the Metropolitan Police are now wheeling out big lighted traffic signs that say “ITS AN OFFENCE TO SUPPORT A PROSCRIBED ORGANISATION,” just to intimidate everyone.
It shouldn’t be surprising that so much of this censorship is aimed at Palestine and its supporters. For liberal governments like Starmer’s—and Emmanuel Macron’s in France, and Friedrich Merz’s in Germany—the issue of Gaza is existential. Their complicity in Israel’s genocide reveals them as lacking legitimacy or moral authority on anyissue, and increasingly people are starting to realize they’re not fit to run the world. They’re starting to call Keir Starmer “Kid Starver,” and he can’t have that. So if, God forbid, I were in Sir Keir’s shoes, I’d be desperately scrambling to shut down dissent too.
With the typical dull-minded, crypto-fascist bluster of the cop profession, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police defended his agency’s arrest of Reverend Parfitt by saying that “If you're supporting proscribed organisations, then the law is going to be enforced… it’s a serious law.” But that’s dead wrong. The idea that the Home Secretary can just “proscribe” whatever group they like, and then everyone else in the country is forbidden to voice an opinionin support of that group, is not a serious law. It’s a buckwild, ludicrous law, and its existence is a slap in the face to every British person.
They’re even trying to make swearing illegal over there. In Kent—specifically the Isle of Thanet, which is not an isle but a peninsula—the local council is trying to introduce £100 fines for anyone caught using “foul or abusive language in such a manner that is loud and can be heard by others and cause either alarm or distress.” This would be done through a PSPO, or Public Spaces Protection Order. It’s a slight variation on the infamous Anti-Social Behavior Orders (ASBOs) of the Thatcher years, which allowed cops to ban all kinds of activities that are annoying but not actually illegal. (Several teenagers were banned from wearing hoodies, for example, or from saying the word “grass,” presumably in reference to marijuana.) The Kent police claim their PSPO wouldn’t be used for “casual swearing,” but the kind of aggressive swearing that starts fights. But like with the “suspicion” of supporting a proscribed organization, it would be up to their discretion to decide what crosses the line. And predictably enough, Sir Keir Starmer is a big fan of ASBOs as a concept, so despite the proposal being a blatant violation of free speech, the Labour government isn’t doing or saying anything about it.
This kind of policy isn’t just illegitimate on the merits, although that would be enough reason to oppose it. It’s also incredibly dangerous for Britain’s electoral future. As we’ve seen, people hate being censored, so policies like the Online Safety Act give a valuable political opportunity to anyone who’ll come out strongly against them. And right now, the only person seizing on that opportunity is Nigel Farage, the far-right leader of the Reform UK party. Farage has called Starmer’s internet censorship “borderline dystopian,” and he promises to repeal it immediately if he gets elected. And he’s right. He’s wrong about pretty much everything else, but because he’s making good sense on this issue, people may well vote for him because of it. If Starmer were smart, he’d just scrap the whole law and admit he was wrong. Since he’s not, it’s imperative that the Left, especially in Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s new party, have a strong anti-censorship stance of their own if they want to fend Farage off. Free speech used to be a bedrock issue for leftists, going all the way back to Karl Marx and his banned Rheinische Zeitung newspaper. It can be again.
A lot of this repression comes from the fact that the United Kingdom doesn’t actually have a written constitution. They just have a patchwork of statutes, common law, unwritten rules, and other bits and bobs that stand in for one, sometimes called the “uncodified constitution.” So they don’t have a single foundational law that says the right to free speech can’t be infringed, the way the U.S. does with its First Amendment. That’s one of the things we Americans fought the Revolutionary War over, and although I’m no great fan of the Founders, they got that one right. The First Amendment is First for a reason, because all other rights spring from the ability to discuss and debate them openly. But we shouldn’t get too complacent here in the States. Rights on paper are all well and good, but they don’t mean much if the people who control all the money and guns decide to violate them. Right now, there are plenty of U.S. lawmakers who would happily throw the First Amendment in a wood chipper if they thought they could get away with it.
Donald Trump is one of them, obviously, with all his bullying lawsuits against media companies and his attempts to deport people for writing op-eds he disapproves of. But he’s not the only one. The Heritage Foundation fanatics behind Project 2025 explicitly say they want a ban on all pornography, writing that “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned” and “telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” (Never mind that Donald Trump has appeared on the cover of Playboy.) There’s also Senator Andy Ogles, who has called for Zohran Mamdani to be deported over his political views and statements, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis with his never-ending bans on library books, and Louisiana’s own Governor Jeff Landry, who thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to force every school to hang the Ten Commandments on its walls. There’s also a piece of legislation working its way through Congress, called the “Kids Online Safety Act,” that’s similar to the new British internet law. The would-be censors and controllers of public speech are everywhere in this country, possibly even more than in the U.K., and an old piece of parchment signed by John Adams won’t hold them off by itself.
Ironically, Sir Keir Starmer got his start in politics as a human rights lawyer. But these people have no respect whatsoever for human rights or dignity. Their actions make that much clear. They only understand power, and so they’ve got to be met with power—in the form of election campaigns and court challenges, yes, but also in the form of mass civil disobedience when it’s needed. The British anti-censorship protesters, like Reverend Parfitt, have the right idea. Like the legendary Romans who all yelled “I am Spartacus,” every single person ought to be belting out “I Support Palestine Action,” or whatever slogan or opinion the state tries to forbid. Censorship and repression can’t be tolerated. Four hundred years ago, John Milton knew that well. In his 1649 essay on “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” he wrote that when a ruler, or a set of them, starts to trample on people’s inherent rights, it is right to rebel against them—“as against a common pest, and destroyer of mankinde.” Maybe it’s time our leaders were reminded of that.