Starmer’s political prisoners
by Laurie Wastell, The Critic:
How the government used arbitrary authoritarianism to quell unrest.
“Keir Starmer locks people up who say nasty things on Facebook.” When Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said this on a recent BBC Question Time, he was met with applause from the audience — and dismay and disdain from his fellow panellists. “No, he doesn’t”, snapped Labour’s Jacqui Smith, incredulous, sniffing that to suggest such a thing was mere “sloganising and performative politics”. Farage pressed the issue: “When… people who write horrible things on Facebook go to prison, something is very wrong.” “Nonsense”, muttered Alastair Campbell, the podcaster and noted moral philosopher, visibly ill at ease. Host Fiona Bruce then sought to draw a line under the exchange, using all the authority of the national broadcaster to insist that “the prime minister doesn’t decide who goes to prison and who doesn’t”. Bruce could not deny, of course, that following the countrywide disorder after the Southport attack this summer, dozens have been sent to prison for things posted online. But for the panel, if this was acknowledged to be a problem at all, responsibility for it did not lie with the prime minister.
Clearly, this is what many people who doubtless imagine themselves to be right-thinking would like to believe. It’s certainly a convenient line for the Labour government to take. Yet we all saw what happened last summer with our own eyes, and the evidence suggests otherwise. Yes, Starmer did not literally jail anybody himself — a clever-clever quibble that could equally be applied to Stalin. But in the weeks after the Southport attack, as we shall see, he took personal control of the justice system and launched it, remorselessly, at the white working class.
It’s true at least that the present government didn’t write the speech laws under which people are being locked up. As our culture has become both more woke and more censorious in recent years, offences like the “stirring up racial hatred” offence in the Public Order Act 1986 and the “grossly offensive” online communication offence in the Communications Act 2003 have come to function like blasphemy laws. Crucially in relation to Southport, neither necessarily requires evidence that the accused has directly incited disorder or that they have offended (or caused alarm or distress to) any particular individual — only that such an outcome was “likely”, or “intended”. This means the principal test of whether speech could be classed as criminal according to these laws was, essentially, whether the accused has violated the sacred values of state multiculturalism.