Free speech

Friday

Sara Spencer

Freedom of speech in the UK is very, very under threat

With all the transatlantic back-and-forth over Ukraine, and J.D. Vance’s contentious remarks on Fox News about some “random country that hasn’t fought a war in thirty or forty years,” it’s easy to forget that just three weeks ago, the vice president gave a landmark address about free speech in Europe and Britain, in particular. Last week, when Keir Starmer visited Washington, DC, Vance raised his concerns more directly with the prime minister about “infringements on free speech … that affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.

Thursday

Derek VanBuskirk

Liz Truss calls for a ‘Trump revolution in Britain’

National Harbor, Maryland Former British prime minister Liz Truss began her speech at CPAC today by declaring that America has just entered its golden age with the election of President Trump. Britain, however, is in its dark age, she said: “Let’s be honest, Britain isn't working.” Truss’s concerns for the current state of the UK and Europe mirrored those expressed in Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich last week. She touched on attacks on free speech in the UK, the rise of Pakistani grooming gangs and the inability of the British government to do anything about the rise in illegal immigration.

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Teresa Mull

VP Vance touts border security, energy and humor at CPAC

Vice President J.D. Vance took to the Conservative Political Action Committee stage moments ago for a sit-down interview with Mercedes Schlapp.   In his signature earnest-yet-easy style, Vance reiterated his boss’s main, shared goals one month into the new administration: secure the southern border and grow the economy by unleashing American energy. While casting plenty of blame on the Biden administration throughout his talk, Vance touted the Trump administration’s early accomplishments; border crossings are already down 90 percent, he said, and “we’re just getting started.” In response to a question about fixing the economy, Vance said the key is, “Drill, baby, drill.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Vance criticises Britain: is this a new era for free speech?

From our UK edition

15 min listen

The fallout continues from US vice-president J.D. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference. Criticising Europe over what he sees as the retreat of free speech, he singled out the case of Adam Smith-Connor in the UK as something that worries him about the direction that Britain is heading in. Smith-Connor was arrested in 2022 and prosecuted for breaching an abortion buffer-zone in Bournemouth. Freddy Gray speaks to Paul Coleman at the ARC conference in London. Paul is executive director of ADF International, a faith-based legal advocacy organisation that has been advocating for Smith-Connor. What is the truth behind abortion buffer-zones? Is this part of a wider 'censorship industrial complex'? And does Vance's criticism signal a new era of free speech?

Wednesday

Mary Katharine Ham

How Mark Zuckerberg became based… by Brazilian jiu-jitsu

In the storied Fast & Furious movie franchise, now eleven films strong, there’s a tradition of the villain from one movie becoming a member of Vin Diesel’s street-racing international shenanigans gang in the next. Luke Hobbs (The Rock) is sent to hunt down Dominic Toretto before asking for his help to track Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), who is also adopted, while Jakob Toretto (John Cena), long-lost brother to Dom, redeems himself from assassinating their father in a sabotaged stock car by helping defuse a rogue weapons system that would cause all of civilization’s computers to collapse. You know, normal family stuff: wreaking havoc on the crew before being welcomed back with a Corona at a backyard barbecue.

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Taylor Millard

The royals coming after American free speech

The British royals are coming after American free speech, just days before Donald Trump is set to take office as president for the second time. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle expressed outrage that Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, changed policy to rely on community notes versus a dedicated fact-checking department. Ironically, the pair suggested Meta’s policy change “directly undermines free speech.” How exactly? Because, according to Harry and Meghan, Mark Zuckerberg is, allegedly, prioritizing those using social media “to spread hate, lies and division.

Sunday

Freddie Attenborough

‘Islamophobia’ and the grooming gangs scandal

From our UK edition

At PMQs this week, Kemi Badenoch told MPs that Labour’s adoption of the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslim’s definition of ‘Islamophobia’ has inhibited public discussion of rape gangs. She pointed out that, according to this definition, anyone who draws attention to the over-representation of Muslims in the grooming gangs is guilty of Islamophobia. This, she argued, is why some members of the Parliamentary Labour Party have been ‘scared to tell the truth’. She’s right, but the problem runs deeper than that. The definition Mrs Badenoch referred to was drawn up by the APPG in 2018, when the co-chairs were Wes Streeting and Anna Soubry.

Monday

Matt McDonald

Spectator story debunking Elon Musk ‘alt account’ theory banned on X

A reporter has been restricted from posting on Elon Musk’s X for thirty days due to an article she wrote which The Spectator published over the weekend. The story itself has also been censored on X — you cannot post it on the site — with the reason given that it is “potentially harmful.” Here’s what happened. For months, there has been a social-media rumor that Elon Musk was operating an “alt account” under the pseudonym “Adrian Dittmann.” A number of users on the site were circulating it to make fun of Musk. Some media outlets — Newsweek, the New Republic, the Daily Mail — wrote up stories covering the rumor. None sought to examine its veracity.  Jacqueline Sweet, a contributor to The Spectator, began investigating the claims in late December.

AI

Monday

Daniel McCarthy

The classroom panopticon

Is it ironic to give a prize for encouraging “open discussion and debate in the classroom” and “creating an environment where all perspectives can be heard” in the name of William F. Buckley Jr.? Although best known today as the founder of National Review and longtime host of Firing Line, Buckley first came to prominence in 1951 with the publication of his book God and Man at Yale, subtitled: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.ˮ Buckley’s secular and secularized Protestant critics might well have considered the firmly Catholic young man, twenty-five years old at the time the book appeared, an apologist for something they regarded as superstition. But Buckley did not mean the term as a compliment when he applied it to academic freedom.

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Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Labour’s China pivot, Yvette Cooper’s extremism crackdown & the ladies who punch

From our UK edition

48 min listen

Successive governments have struggled with how to deal with China, balancing them as a geopolitical rival yet necessary trade partner. Recent moves from Labour have sent mixed signals, from the free speech act to the return of the Chagos Islands. Further decisions loom on the horizon. As Rachel Reeves seeks some economic wiggle room, can Labour resist the lure of the Chinese market? The Spectator’s Katy Balls, and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) James Crabtree, join the podcast to discuss further (02:05). Plus: as the first issue under The Spectator’s new editor Michael Gove, what are his reflections as he succeeds Fraser Nelson? He reads an excerpt from his diary (19:05).

Monday

David Abulafia

Labour’s outrageous attack on academic free speech

From our UK edition

In an extraordinary outburst, a government source has described the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, introduced by the Conservatives, as a ‘hate-speech charter’. This is an outrageous distortion of the new laws that aim to guarantee free speech within universities. The best that can be said about that phrase is that, so long as we retain free speech, people are free to describe it that way. But doing so raises worrying doubts about what the new government thinks free speech means.   Universities have a special role in the promotion of free speech. They are, or should be, places where those teaching and those taught can try out ideas, some of which may on closer examination turn out to be misconceived.

Thursday

Toby Young

Will Starmer make the Online Safety Act even worse?

From our UK edition

Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation passed by the previous government to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. To free speech advocates like me, that sounded ominous, given that ‘safety’ is always invoked by authoritarian regimes to clamp down on free speech. But after we raised the alarm, the government stripped out the most draconian clauses and put in some protections for freedom of expression, so even though it’s bad, it’s not quite as awful as it could have been. What about the BBC, which got several things wrong in its reporting of an explosion in the car park of Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital? Step forward Sir Keir Starmer.

Thursday

Morgan Marietta

Coercion and coddling take campus

On October 7, 2023, I was the chairman of the political science department at a large public university, but not for long. I did what I presumed universities are for, encouraging students to talk with professors about big questions and important issues of the day. So on October 18, I held a faculty-student discussion with a Middle East expert. I opened the event by stating some facts: that a terrorist organization committed to the death of Jews had attacked Israel, raping and murdering many young people at a peace concert and seizing hostages. I said that these events raised deep moral questions about what should be done in response, regarding the destruction of Hamas and the fate of thousands of noncombatant Palestinians. Discuss. The discussion did not go well.

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Friday

Thursday

Toby Young

What Labour could learn from Australia and New Zealand

From our UK edition

I’m just coming to the end of a four-week speaking tour Down Under and have spotted some worrying signs of what our new government might have in store for us, particularly on the free speech front. During its six years in power, the Labour party in New Zealand tried to criminalise ‘hate speech’ against minority groups, and Australia’s Labor government has announced it will bring forward legislation to strengthen laws against speech that incites hatred in relation to race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity. Will Keir Starmer do likewise? In England and Wales, it’s already a criminal offence to stir up hatred on the basis of a person’s race, religion or sexual orientation, although Nicola Sturgeon went further.

Wednesday

Philip Womack

Salman Rushdie’s memoir is a devastating and powerful account of near-death

In late summer 2022, at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, the celebrated novelist Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed many times as he was about to give a lecture, the subject of which, ironically, was keeping authors safe. The attack sent shockwaves throughout the literary establishment, and the world. It seemed as if civilization itself was under threat, as if our fundamental freedoms to create, associate and speak as we wish were defunct, reduced to the point of a knife. His new memoir, Knife, examines the attack and its implications for him, and for such freedoms generally.

Rushdie

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

I hate hate speech laws

From our UK edition

I originally intended to observe that American universities’ anti-Israel protestors and Hamas terrorists deserve each other, because they’ve so much in common. They’re both vicious, authoritarian, fanatical, powered by antipathy and focused on either unachievable or pointless aims (even if Columbia did divest from Israel, the pittance withdrawn would have no effect on financial markets, much less on Gaza). But many commentators have decried the protestors chanting ‘From the Mississippi to the Pacific!’ as poorly informed, faddish, spoilt, pathetic and anti-Semitic. So rather than assess the logic of what I’d have called ‘woke-lam’, we’ll pivot elsewhere. On 1 May, the US House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Bill by 320 to 91.

Sunday

Juan P. Villasmil

USC’s suppression of the anti-Israel valedictorian is unacceptable

University of Southern California’s 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, will not be allowed to deliver a speech at the university's commencement ceremony due to, according to the school’s provost, security concerns. The cancellation comes following a wave of criticism over what groups such as US-nonprofit StopAntisemitism labeled “her authoring [of] an antisemitic social media post on her Instagram account.” This is a textbook attack on the principle of free expression in the name of security. The move is designed to avoid controversy and save face by unjustly silencing those whose beliefs and speech differs from that of other, often more powerful, groups.  You don’t have to agree with Tabassum. You may well see her position on Israel-Palestine as radical and impractical.

asna tabassum usc

Friday

Iain Macwhirter

Scotland’s Hate Crime Act may have done us all a favour

From our UK edition

Scotland's Hate Crime Act (HCA) has, by common agreement, been an unmitigated disaster. Less than a week old, there are already calls for it to be repealed – like the equally misconceived but more awfully named Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012. The police are now clearly hesitant of arresting anyone for hate crime The police have been swamped with thousands of complaints, many vexatious, all of which they are pledged to investigate. JK Rowling has blown the doors off with her ‘arrest me’ tweets, but the First Minister, Humza Yousaf, attracted more hate crime complaints in the first two days than she did. SNP Ministers like Siobhan Brown have been ridiculed for misrepresenting their own law.

Thursday

William Moore

War on words: is Scotland ready for its new hate crime law?

From our UK edition

51 min listen

On the podcast: Scotland’s new hate crime law; the man who could be France’s next PM; and why do directors meddle with Shakespeare?  First up: Scotland is smothering free speech. Scotland is getting a new, modern blasphemy code in the form of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which takes effect from 1 April. The offence of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ will be extended to disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. The new law gives few assurances for protecting freedom of speech writes Lucy Hunter Blackburn, former senior Scottish civil servant. Lucy joins the podcast, alongside Baroness Claire Fox, unaffiliated peer and founder of the Academy of Ideas think tank.