Matthew Feeney: “There is a panic over, ‘If we allow free speech, what will result?’”

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Great Britain seems like a free nation. In recent years, there have been mass protests against everything from Israel’s war with Hamas to fossil fuels. Newspaper editorialists denounce the government in strong terms daily. The nation draws upon hundreds of years of demands for free speech from intellectual giants, including John Milton, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell.

But today, Britain appears to be descending into tyranny. In 2023, Britain’s parliament passed the Public Order Act and Online Safety Act to crack down on protests and online content and then failed to pass the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act that same year. Then, last summer, the Keir Starmer Labor government appears to have deliberately spread disinformation about the high-profile killings of three little girls to justify censorship and repression of anti-mass migration protesters and rioters.