Do the Conservatives really care about free speech? – Spectator.co.uk

The Conservative Party Chair and Minister without Portfolio, Oliver Dowden, made headlines on Tuesday after a speech at the Washington-based Conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation. In his speech Dowden lambasted woke ideology, berated cancel culture and even argued that these concepts constitute a new brand of modern Maoism.

Despite this sabre rattling, it is clear that this is not an administration that cares about free speech. While Dowden uses the language of cancel culture to defend a free society, the government is fast finalising plans for a censors charter which Dowden himself helped craft during his time as Culture Secretary. The Online Safety Bill, as it is formally known, promises to be one of the most damaging pieces of legislation to free speech in the UK in living memory.

This Bill as currently drafted gives express state-backing to social media censorship and specifically targets lawful expression in a way that will do untold damage to free speech in Britain. Plans to tackle lawful speech free speech to you and me that the government believes to be harmful could include statements that risk, even indirectly, an adverse psychological impact. This is such an absurdly broad definition that it would encapsulate even the mildest bit of speech. Worse still, the Bill hands the government of the day sweeping powers to create a list of speech categories which it believes could be harmful, in a brazen attempt to strengthen executive power over online discourse.

Rather than rein in the big tech titans the legislation will strengthen their hand and actually entrench some of Silicon Valleys most nonsensical rules. These could include an absurd Facebook policy which has seen womens posts removed for saying that men are idiots under the guise of hate speech and Twitters censorious rules which have seen individuals of all persuasions removed from the platform for using the widely used terms cis and Terf when discussing trans rights. Under the Online Safety Bill, all of this Big Tech interference would become state-backed.

Far from being great protectors of free speech, this governments new Bill will stymie sensitive discussions on identity issues altogether. If Conservative MPs truly want to protect free speech, they should be demanding that the government entirely remove this notion of legal but harmful speech from its proposed legislation.

All the more worrying is that this seems to be another piece of anti-free speech law from a government which talks the talk when it comes to freedom of expression but legislates to stifle dissent at every turn. We are now weeks away from the passing of legislation which will make it materially harder to protest in the UK. Newly proposed measures in the governments policing Bill will give officers the power to curtail protests where they are considered to be too noisy. This should be any libertarians nightmare. The policing Bill fundamentally empowers the state at the expense of the individual, opens the policing of protests up to politicisation and will fundamentally stifle the expression of citizens on Britains streets. If Conservative MPs want to protect free speech and freedom of assembly then they must act quickly.

Concerns about so-called cancel culture are not unfounded. It is clear that liberal societies are going through a period of intolerance when it comes to accepting diverging and unorthodox views. At times this amounts to deliberate attempts at censorship, stifling alternative perspectives and even the ruination of individuals. Yet the acceptance of this intolerance as a problem means nothing from a government which is intent on making it harder for people to have their voices heard both online and in the streets.

Free speech is the bedrock of our democracy. The rights of people to be able to speak and consequentially think freely are paramount to human flourishing and development. That is why all of this matters so much. There is little doubt that societal intolerance is a problem in many Western nations in 2022 but political intolerance is too, and the spectre of state censorship is fast coming down the track. If the government wants to show a true commitment to protecting freedom of speech, it must demonstrate this where it matters in the coming weeks. The preservation of the free society that Oliver Dowden describes may depend on it.

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Do the Conservatives really care about free speech? - Spectator.co.uk