In our country, in our time, a silent siege on free speech is underway. The subtle encroachment of censorship, masquerading as a political correctness, is disturbing.
I have written before of George Orwell’s groundbreaking novel 1984, which introduced the concept of "thoughtcrime"— the offence of engaging with ideas that a totalitarian regime deems unacceptable. Now, fiction has become fact, as the lines of acceptable discourse blur, the essence of open debate is at risk.
Crime is about what people do, not what they think. Yet, over seventy years after Orwell's seminal book, Britain's long-standing commitment to free speech appears to be under threat. Events labelled as "non-crime hate incidents"— though not legally classified as offences — are being investigated by police, solely because someone has reported behaviour perceived to be unacceptable.
All this is in stark contrast to the founder of modern policing, Sir Robert Peel. He championed the clear separation between addressing criminal behaviour and intruding into personal beliefs. Peel’s guiding principles stressed that law enforcement should focus on tangible actions, insisting that "the police are the public and the public are the police".
Yet, in our time, we see an increasing propensity by some of our police forces to waste valuable resources on incidents that are not unlawful but simply contentious. Last year police visited the home of award-winning Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson for the 'offence' of writing offensive tweets. Most recently, a grandmother from Manchester, Helen Jones was interrogated by two police officers in Manchester over her calls on Facebook for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the Labour Party WhatsApp scandal. The police admitted that no crime had been committed, yet she was silenced for little beyond expressing a forthright opinion. The mere fact that Greater Manchester has one of the highest crime rates in Britain makes this action all the more preposterous. Police officers there and elsewhere should be catching criminals not hounding housewives.
The new American Vice President J.D. Vance's words in Munich last week resonate as a call against this kind of self-censorship—a phenomenon that, if left unchecked, may erode the foundations of every Briton’s birthright. Even when opinions diverge, the right to speak freely is not merely a marginal detail of British democracy but its very essence. The same free speech that empowers individuals can, of course, offend and disturb, but such disturbance is the price of freedom.
The civil exchange of contrasting views is at the heart of the best of open debate. It is increasingly possible to offend in an age which is, paradoxically, as puritanical as it is prurient. Like the tyrannies in Bolshevik Russia and Mao's China, the Nazi regime was built on censoring views thought unacceptable. The clampdown on free expression there created an environment in which persecution could occur unchecked, as dissent was systematically silenced. First, the absence of free speech obscured injustice, then the absence of justice allowed horror.
The history of British thought is full of examples of men and women who dared to defy the orthodoxy in search of betterment. In our Parliament, those who govern are held to account by His Majesty's Official Opposition. The proud legacy of challenging the government through fearless debate has a continuing life — it is what I do day in and day out.
Freedom of speech should be valued and protected. Its existence means that I can praise Mr Vance's defence of free speech, while simultaneously challenging President Trump's belief that peace in Ukraine can be negotiated without the involvement of Ukrainians!
As Mr Vance so aptly articulated in Munich, the future of our society hinges upon our collective commitment to nurture an environment where contrasting ideas flourish unimpeded by the grip of censorship – for intellectual stagnation is the natural consequence of a society that prefers silence to speech. I hope that America, the United Kingdom, and the broader Western alliance can unite to defend such values, for their precious fragility is evident in both repressive states like China, Russia and Iran and in the small-minded political correctness of so called ‘progressive’ zealots who long to silence their critics.