EXCLUSIVE: Inside the UK’s free speech crisis

A FASCINATING one-hour discussion with top free speech expert Lord Young

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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).

Lord Young and the FSU have been at the very forefront of these battles over censorship, cancel culture, and online regulation, having gone to war with Keir Starmer and the Labour government in many areas, from defending free speech on campus to Labour’s ongoing attempt to restrict what we can say about Islam.

We covered a lot of ground, some of which is almost entirely ignored by legacy media, including: the rise of ‘law-fare’ against outspoken critics; the psychology that drives an increasingly dogmatic liberal elite class; the chilling effect of the Online Safety Act; who’s involved in the new push for ‘Islamophobia’ laws and why we should all be opposing this; what Lord Young really thinks of the Labour Ministers he has gone up against; the quiet expansion of ‘non-crime hate incidents’; the future of free expression in Britain; and what’s on his ‘wish list’ of things to do to protect free speech under the next government.

If you want to understand the stakes — and the fight ahead — you don’t want to miss this one. Here are a couple of clips.

Lord Young and I discussing Starmer's Southport disinformation:

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And here’s us discussing why Labour’s new ‘Islamophobia’ plan threatens free speech:

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