from Matt Goodwin’s substack
It’s the topic everybody’s talking about. The United Kingdom’s free speech crisis.
Astonishingly, only yesterday, even America’s State Department warned that human rights in the UK are being eroded, at least partly because of what it called “serious restrictions on free speech”.
A censorship industrial complex in overdrive. A government that appears more interested in controlling our speech than our borders.
The spread of ominous, Orwellian things such as ‘non-crime hate incidents’ and a new definition of ‘Islamophobia’, which are being used to try and control, if not shut down, free speech and debate.
And many renegades and outspoken critics who are losing their jobs, reputations, and freedoms for saying the wrong thing.
So, as in our recent discussion with top economy expert Liam Halligan, I wanted to discuss all this, in-depth, with a top expert on free speech.
Are we witnessing the slow death of free speech in the UK? Is the U.S. State Department right in its dire warning, or is it exaggerating the scale of the problem?
How free are we, really, amid things like the Online Safety Act and other efforts to control the national debate?
And, crucially, rather than just complaining about the problem what might we do, what could we do, to reassert the traditions of free speech and individual liberty that have long defined these islands?
To dig into all of this, I sat down for a frank and eye-opening hour-long conversation with Lord Young, one of the country’s most outspoken defenders of free speech, from the Free Speech Union (FSU).