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I consider my membership dues well spent. July 17th, 2026 | 20 comments
 The inimitable Preston Byrne has compared two think tank proposals for restoring free speech within the United Kingdom in A Tale of Two Bills: Comparing the Adam Smith Institute’s and the Prosperity Institute’s Free Speech Proposals. This kind of thing is an essential part of setting the intellectual ground work for the future. July 15th, 2026 | 11 comments
Combined with the already-passed Online Safety Act and the previously announced intention to ban under-16s entirely from social media — a ban that Prime Minister-in-waiting Burnham intends to support — these laws, enacted or proposed, look to anyone except a Labour lickspittle to be a serious erosion of the rights of the British people to access information freely and express their political opinions online. These draconian measures bear a striking resemblance to the reaction of a seemingly very different British government to ostensibly dissimilar circumstances: William Pitt the Younger’s infamous series of repressive laws enacted during the 1790s. Pitt’s anti-radical legislation was designed to preserve elite power, control the public narrative, and protect the lower orders from ideas — what we now call misinformation — reckoned likely to lead them astray. The intent of these laws and the fears they were enacted to allay shed considerable light on Labour’s own attempts at gagging us. July 14th, 2026 | 17 comments
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the families of the victims of horrific crime always express the same concern, word for word, every time. I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the “specially-trained” officers who support them. July 13th, 2026 | 12 comments
This is a fine article by Nina Roberts, but it might have been nice if Guardian readers and their US equivalents had thought about the disproportionate burden of “equality” laws on small businesses (as opposed to large businesses who have whole floors full of hotshot lawyers) forty years ago.
July 11th, 2026 | 23 comments
“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.” If a member of your family had been left comatose after a Sudanese migrant attempted to behead them, is this how you’d respond? Can you imagine your own tone being so conciliatory — or your own words tacking so closely to the establishment view on migration? Apparently, this is how the family of Stephen Ogilvie expressed themselves, after watching his attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast. The Ogilvie family’s statement is eerily similar to those issued by the family members of other victims, in cases which might be termed politically sensitive. […] All we can say for sure is that the British state is secretly working to shape how you think about, and respond to, politically sensitive events. Mass migration isn’t going away and multiculturalism will be upheld, regardless of what voters may think or instinctively want. As such, these state agencies take a keen interest in what people say online, about subjects like race, immigration and Islam. They view certain positions on those issues as inherently dangerous and extremist — and if William Shawcross is to be believed, its definition of which views constitute “extremism” is very expansive. – Anonymous (unsurprisingly) June 30th, 2026 | 24 comments
Claire Fox lays out the folly of trusting the state and state-adjacent institutions to decides what constitutes disinformation. June 28th, 2026 | 2 comments
Michael Mosbacher, the Telegraph‘s Deputy Comment Editor, is going for the rage-clicks, but he has a point:
June 26th, 2026 | 19 comments
No Government has the right, whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind, to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used. – William Butler Yeats, written in 1928 in opposition to censorship legislation in the Irish Free State June 17th, 2026 | 16 comments
Sir Keir Starmer is set to announce sweeping reforms tomorrow banning under-16s from 10 major social media platforms, including X, but not the Left-wing platform Bluesky.
June 14th, 2026 | 23 comments
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all. – Signal official statement June 8th, 2026 | 20 comments
The Crime and Policing Bill, currently completing its passage through Parliament, represents the most comprehensive assault on the traditional liberties of the freeborn Englishman since the Stuart kings. It is more dangerous than those royal provocations, because it comes dressed in the language of safety, of community, of respect, and because it is only part of a wider pattern that, when you step back and see it whole, should stop the blood. Let me begin with a man most people have never heard of. Giles Udy is one of Britain’s finest historians of Soviet Communism. His book Labour and the Gulag is a work of meticulous, uncomfortable scholarship, tracing the seduction of the British left by the Bolshevik experiment. He has spent twenty years studying what it actually looks like when a state decides that its ideological certainty entitles it to total control over those who do not share its worldview. Udy has recently made a statement that I suspect cost him some effort to compose. He is not a man given to hyperbole. But writing about Soviet repression, he finds it, as he puts it, “really hard to bring a similar accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.” Hard, but he reaches it nonetheless. “What Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common,“ he concludes, “is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to total control over all those who do not share their worldview.“ He is careful to note we have no Gulag, no death penalty. So am I. But his observation about the tools of control is what should make us stop. Legislation, and courts co-opted to apply it. The policing of dissent, hate crime orders, arrests, the long-term seizure of electronic appliances to intimidate those against whom no charges are ever brought. Twelve thousand arrests annually for social media posts. The framing of dissent as fascism, a habit, Udy notes, with deep roots in the Labour movement’s Stalinist period, when ‘fascist‘ became the approved term for anyone who inconveniently noticed what was happening in Moscow. Orwell’s thought crime, he argues, has become a reality. It is 2026, and he cannot believe what he is seeing. Nor can I. – Gawain Towler writes a terrifying essay May 20th, 2026 | 18 comments
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