"Police the streets not our tweets!"

 

I think we ought to treat the attack on free speech in Britain seriously. In an article in the Telegraph on 21 May 2025, the former Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, claimed that Britain is becoming a police state under Labour and Sir Keir Starmer.  According to Johnson, "The UK police are now making over 10,000 arrests every year for online comments, more than that of the police in Russia itself, and this judgement is yet another propaganda gift for Vladimir Putin."

Only recently, an Irish singer with the band 'Kneecap', was charged with a terrorism offence for displaying the flag of Hezbollah a proscribed organisation in Britain, during a concert. Anti-abortion protestors have been arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics and one was fined £20,000 for holding a placard which said, "Here to talk if you want." A couple were even arrested and held for eight hours for writing emails and WhatsApp messages criticising their daughter's primary school. Even though there's no crime of blasphemy in Britain, a man is on trial for burning a copy of the Quran in front of London's Turkish consulate.

Apart from arrest of this kind, there are what's called "non-crime hate incidents" where the "thought police" warn people about the things they have said or done that fall below the criminal threshold. If a crime hasn't been committed, then why does it necessitate a police visit to your home?  The police recorded 13,200 of these in the year to June 2024.

What Boris Johnson fails to mention, is that many of the laws that the police are using to curtail free speech in Britain, were introduced during fourteen years of Conservative government.

Johnson and other prominent right-wingers, have also taken up the case of Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old mother and childminder from Northampton. Since losing her appeal against a sentence of 31 months' imprisonment for inciting online racial hatred after last year's attack on children and others in Southport, who were attending a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club, Connolly's plight has become a cause celebre, among some in the Conservative Party. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer has defended the actions taken against Lucy Connolly.

Last September Connolly pleaded guilty to the offence of inciting racial hatred contrary to section 19(1) of the Public Order Act 1986. On 29 July 2024, Connolly had written on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) the following rant:

"Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you're at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me a racist, so be it."

We now know that in the aftermath of the Southport attack where three children were tragically killed, there were riots in Southport and attacks on Mosques and hotels accommodating refugees and asylum seekers. Yet the killer, Axel Rudakabana, who carried out this attack, was not an asylum seeker, but a 17-year-old local man living in Southport. It seems that Connolly removed that message just three and a half hours after publishing it. But within that time frame, the message had been reposted many times for others to read. The message was viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times. She was arrested on August 6, 2024.

An investigation showed that Connolly had expressed other views about illegal immigrants. A WhatsApp message sent to a friend on August 5, said: "The raging tweet about burning down hotels has bit me on the arse lol." In another message Connolly had said that if Ofsted got involved, she would tell them that she was not responsible, but was a victim of doxing. In another message she had said that if she was arrested, she would "play the mental health card."

Many other people were arrested, charged and convicted of offences of inciting racial hatred online, but Conservative politicians have been conspicuously silent about their plight. So, what makes Lucy Connolly's case different? Some think that she's been treated rather too harshly but others received similar sentences in the wake of the Southport attack for similar crimes. The crucial difference between Connolly's case and others, is that her husband Ray Connolly, is a West Northamptonshire Tory councillor.

Although so-called racial hatred posts don't violate X's rules, the company do explicitly prohibit "threats to inflict physical harm on others, which includes threatening to kill, torture, sexual assault, or otherwise hurt someone." A few days after Connolly made her post, X rejected a complaint from a user who flagged the message to it.

The right-wing in Britain is inclined to blame the left and state sponsored "wokery" for eroding free speech in Britain. But targeting migrants has become a politically convenient hobby horse for some politicians who like to whip things up for their own political ends. Prejudice is cultivated if it wins votes. It's easier for politicians to scapegoat one group or another rather than address the root causes of people's problems such as lack of affordable housing, long waits for GP appointments, unemployment and low wages. If you can't get an affordable rented home, then it's all the fault of immigrants.

There never has been an absolute right to free speech in Britain or anywhere else and any right that you believe that you have, had to be fought for. People like Lucy Connolly are encouraged by the state to harbour prejudices and hate but when they express those prejudices online, they get punished by the state. Some people do believe that the police crackdown on free speech in Britain is symptomatic of a Stasi-like police state and an attempt to intimidate and to silence people. I think they make a very good point.