Good ol’ Tom over at Free Speech Backlash graciously sent along this powerful post about the state of free speech—or the lack thereof—in Great Britain and Europe.

American readers are likely aware of the rapid erosion of free speech in the nation that birthed the very concept, and it serves as an object lesson on the importance of the First Amendment, which has so far protected Americans from the worst excesses of government censorship.  As Tom notes, though, paper guarantees are worthless if not supported for every American.

However, government censorship has rarely been the issue in the United States; rather, corporate censorship is what haunts free speech in the United States.  The various attempts by the tech giants to censor free speech on their platforms in 2016, 2020, and 2024 indicate that the platforms that serve as our de facto public square are often restricted at the whims of the rich and powerful.  Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter did much to restore free speech online, but even that is imperfect.

Further, American banks have the nasty habit of “debanking” account holders with unflatteringly Truth-based views.  Many conservatives found their deposited funds inaccessible, or unable to accept payments through popular payment processors, because of publicly-voiced opinions that did not fit the globohomo narrative.

But, ultimately, we have the protection of the Constitution to criticize the government, even when the ostensibly private sector platforms for doing so are often censored.  Great Britain and Europe at large lack that basic protection.

Tom links this destruction of free speech to the massive influx of Third Worlders.  The two go hand-in-hand—if you need an imported slave class to a.) do all of your work for cheap and b.) make you feel good about yourself, you don’t want the native-born proles complaining.  The solution—especially in a system like Britain’s where the party in power controls the executive and legislative functions simultaneously (usually) by default—is to make it illegal to criticize the massive influx of dusky hordes into your homeland.

That brings me to another point:  why does Britain have a Home Secretary—or anyone in power—named Shabana Mahmood?  It reminds me of this clip from The Simpsons:

But I digress.  Here’s Tom with more:

Free speech, the essential cornerstone of liberty and one of Britain’s gifts to the world, now faces steady, deliberate erosion in Britain itself. Laws purportedly meant to shield the vulnerable from harm are used instead to silence dissent. The Online Safety Act 2023, sold as a shield against child abuse and serious crime, gives government regulators great power over online communications and blogs[,] etc. Platforms must remove content deemed illegal or harmful – an insidious word with no adequate definition – or face fines up to 10% of global turnover. This, of course, pushes many to delete posts that cross no clear line of criminality, just to stay safe.

Police make over 30 arrests a day for online messages. Many involve posting what the police call ‘grossly offensive’ tweets on platforms like X.  There have been over 12,000 arrests in recent years for such ‘offences’. Few of these arrests result in convictions, as the main intention is intimidation. The police, now politicised and intent on enforcing the far-Left Establishment’s Globalist dogma, have been using a device known as a ‘non-crime hate incident’ report. Work that out: it’s not a crime, but somebody – often a highly woke senior policeman (or more often woman) or some activist fanatic – has deemed it offensive, and the police come a-knocking.  To be fair, the outcry over this sinister abuse of state power was so great that it has been very much scaled back, with even some senior cops calling for it to be scrapped. But it remains indicative of the lengths the state apparatus is prepared to go to dampen dissent.

The Online Safety Act is being used, as predicted, in a highly politicised way; Right wing and patriotic figures are routinely hounded, and occasionally jailed, for saying what the bulk of the British people think, but far-Left figures and dangerous Islamists advocating violence are ignored or let off with a mild rebuke. Now Ofcom, the government’s witch-finder general, has opened a formal probe into X over AI-generated sexualised images produced by Grok – spotlighted despite a large number of other platforms offering the same capability, leaving many to conclude that it is all part of the Europe-wide attempt to silence a platform for dissent and hurt Elon Musk, seen by the near-dictators running Europe and Britain as a threat to their precious agenda.

Real people bear the cost. Comedian Graham Linehan faced arrest at Heathrow Airport in 2025 over posts on X about transgender issues, absurdly regarded as inciting violence. Police questioned him for several hours and then, as they do so often, dropped the case. He is now suing them for wrongful arrest. Lucy Connolly received a prison term for a hasty tweet, quickly deleted, that could, just, be read by the malignant as supporting burning down hotels housing ‘asylum seekers’ – in reality illegal aliens – during the nationwide riots and unrest that followed the Southport stabbings, when a man of immigrant background stabbed three little girls to death. Lucy, on the advice of dodgy lawyers in the pay of the State, wrongly admitted to stirring racial hatred.

Silent prayer near abortion clinics has led to arrests; an army veteran, a Christian, was convicted for praying silently near an abortion facility in Bournemouth and given a two-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay £9,000 in prosecution costs. These cases show how authorities stretch laws to target opinions, like those on immigration, gender, or religion, that they disapprove of. Many here in Britain now firmly believe that we have a two-tier justice system, with the police and judiciary acting as the State’s enforcers against the majority, while being extremely lenient of violent Leftist organisations like Antifa and fanatical Islamists calling for the beheading of non-believers or the cutting of Right-Wing throats.

The state has expanded its reach greatly and is attempting to stretch it further. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, roughly the equivalent of the US Secretary of Homeland Security and a Muslim, is backing all this strongly. Sinisterly, she wants AI to enable the state to watch everyone, all the time. Speaking to the evil Tony Blair, possibly the most hated man in Britain, she said: “When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.” This vision, to any rational person, indicates a looming totalitarian dystopia. Bentham’s Panopticon was a prison where guards saw inmates without being seen.

In 2025, Ofcom fined 4chan £20,000 for failing to produce a risk assessment under the Act. Platforms like Reddit have blocked non-verified users from forums on health topics to comply, forcing people to upload IDs for basic advice, creating self-censorship, where users and companies avoid debate to dodge penalties.

Mass immigration and multiculturalism drive much of this. Governments push these policies with no public consent and no direct democratic vote. Both Labour and Conservatives governments have led to record migration. Polls show that a majority are very much against this, feeling resources are strained and communities changing too fast. Around 75% of Britons, including over half of ethnic minorities, say immigration is too high. No vote or referendum has ever endorsed mass immigration or multiculturalism as policy. When backlash appears on online, hate speech laws are drafted to clamp down on it. Surveys reveal widespread calls for cuts in immigration, yet governments ignore them. The uneven benefits, gains for elites, costs for working classes, fuel discontent. People protest, but laws suppress debate, not address roots. Britain has shifted from cultural dominance to multiculturalism without public consent, eroding trust to the point where many see the government as their primary enemy. In return, the State acts as if the white majority, especially the white working class, are an enemy to be destroyed, if not physically then by having national identity smeared, diluted and eventually diluted and submerged. A definition, by the way, that falls within the UN’s definition of genocide.

It is important to understand that this is not only happening in Britain. The pattern is obviously co-ordinated and repeated across the West, indicating a guiding dogma and a hidden hand. Germany is, if anything, in worse shape. The state enforces strict bans on ‘hate speech’, anything that criticises the insane levels of immigration and the violence that results from it, with the NetzDG law forcing platforms to delete content quickly. France outlaws ‘incitement to hatred and discrimination’, again anything that goes against establishment policies of mass immigration and ‘diversity’. The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Sweden limit speech in the same way and for the same reason. Australia, New Zealand and Canada do much the same, just as enthusiastically. The EU’s Digital Services Act mirrors Britain’s approach, demanding risk assessments and removals. And you also have echoes of this, I understand, in the US, where the Globalist virus is very much alive, if in strategic retreat.

These measures claim to fight extremism and misinformation but are in reality a coordinated push by globalist bodies like the WEF, with the sinister Larry Fink pushing digital tyranny, and the UN with its Agenda 2030, calling for standardised control over expression and the silencing of dissent. National sovereignty weakens as supranational rules export censorship. The WEF promotes governance of ‘disinformation’, always tilting toward control. UN efforts label Agenda 2030 critics as conspiracy theorists, while pushing digital IDs and content regulation, framing dissent as threat and justifying curbs.

Yet Britons resist. The Free Speech Union has grown sharply, providing legal aid to those targeted, from Linehan to others facing probes over posts or protests. It helped a man win an appeal after conviction for burning a Quran at a demonstration. Rallies like “Unite the Kingdom” in 2025 drew huge crowds, over a million each time, to protest government overreach and attempts to stifle free speech. In September 2025, I was one of over a million who marched in London against censorship, led by Tommy Robinson. My own small fight back is the online magazine Free Speech Backlash, where freedom lovers come to speak their minds as they like. For a flavour, look at the open forum Today column – enough to give a woke globalist terminal conniptions.

Courts hear challenges to the Online Safety Act, and groups warn of self-censorship chilling debate. Protests against laws, like those by Defend Our Juries, test state boundaries. In 2025, hundreds were arrested for supporting Palestine Action, an organisation I abhor but whose right to free speech I support. The government belatedly and under pressure – they rarely act against Islamist groups – absurdly deemed it a terrorist group, sparking yet another backlash against overreach, this time from the usual smug, hypocritical Left.

Americans take note. Your First Amendment offers protection, more explicitly than England’s Bill of Rights and Common Law that stretches back centuries before Magna Carta. But as I understand it, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment as permitting restrictions on speech when they are tailored to prevent tangible harm, such as violence or exploitation, or to maintain public order. Now I’m sure there will be a sea of small print, but those are exactly the terms used by governments in Britain and from Ireland to Iran to suppress freedoms (emphasis added—TPP). I don’t claim any great depth of knowledge, but American friends in Tennessee and Colorado tell me that threats creep in and that they have been used government in the past to suppress free speech, in practice at least.

They also see worrying signs in the present administration. Apparently Trump, who my friends support, has issued orders to end federal censorship, but they worry that they are tools to target opponents. One, who I spoke to writing this, told me of moves to censor government data, targeting journalists and pursuing indictments against political foes. Executive orders bar funds to colleges allowing “illegal” protests, chilling assembly with over 500 actions in his first year. Now this may, if true, be seen as ‘draining the swamp’, or getting revenge for the undoubted assault on Trump, free speech, and liberty that prevailed in the Biden years, and which would now be orders of magnitude worse had Harris won, but free speech is an absolute. It’s for everyone, including your opponents, or it does not exist. The old, wise, saying “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance” means that maintaining liberty requires constant effort, attention, and active protection, as freedom is never guaranteed and can be lost through complacency.

If global trends continue unchecked, even constitutional safeguards could face pressure from trade deals, pressure on social media outlets, international ‘law’ and agenda, domestic calls for “safety” – and the return of demonic Democrats and leftist globalist governments across the world. The democratic nation state remains the best guard against tyranny. Britain shows what happens when the state turns enemy to its own people. Vigilance, not complacency, keeps freedom alive. Small government, not bloated bureaucracy, protects rights. The fight is on, and surrender is no option.