Starmer’s Progressive Tyranny

The Online Harms Act and the forthcoming Crime and Policing Act end Democracy in the UK and impose full on tyranny.

It’s not often that one of my pieces is composed primarily of descriptions of other sources. You usually get a great deal of my commentary.

But today I’ve had several pieces of information come at me from others, which I feel must be shared and which largely don’t need much further explanation from me. All I’m going to do is link them together with a little bit of explanation.

And all of them concern the Online Harms Act, which is already in force, and the Crime and Policing Bill, which will if passed soon also become an Act of Parliament and the settled law of the United Kingdom.

Together, I believe these two pieces of legislation represent the end of democracy and liberty in the UK. I’m not being rhetorical or dramatic here. I’m not saying they mean things will be worse, or incompetent, or annoying. I’m saying that every single citizen of the UK will no longer have basic rights anymore. The kind of moaning and complaining I do will be illegal. The kind of discussion and disillusionment millions share about this government will be illegal.

Majority opinions on immigration, integration, asylum seekers, migrants, border policy, Islam, asylum hotels, foreign aid, the government, the police and the courts will all be rendered effectively illegal and ANY of us could be put in prison on almost ZERO real evidence. The only evidence needed will be ONE person being offended, and the only process involved will be ONE council requesting a ‘respect order’ and ONE judge agreeing to that.

No juries, no trial, no need to gather evidence, no real witnesses, no investigation, no assumption of you having any rights to free speech or opinion-just one person to be offended by something you say (the ‘victim’), one local authority bureaucrat ready to issue an order, and one judge ready to agree to it.

Three people can put you away, with no due process and no legal rights pertaining to you, because you offended their ideas, identity or politics.

So, first, the part that already exists. The Online Harms Act. This was sold to us as protecting children from online porn, grooming and bullying, something which I’m sure most of us would agree with. But what it delivers is the first stage of total tyranny, which is a broad censorship of the internet, social media and online platforms. Here is an accurate description of how it’s already being used from a CitizenGo repeal campaign:

“The UK is now censoring lawful speech on the internet!

Over the weekend:

• A parliamentary speech made by Conservative MP Katie Lam, highlighting the horrors of grooming gang abuse and condemning the Government’s delay in launching local inquiries scandal, was taken out of the public conversation.

• Social media posts expressing support for single-sex spaces as essential to the safety of biological women were removed from the feeds of UK users of X.

• Videos of a public demonstration raising concerns over the government’s handling of illegal channel crossings were made inaccessible.

This wave of censorship followed the activation of new powers under the Online Safety Act 2023, which took effect on Friday, 25 July and changed the rules of the internet overnight.

When concerned citizens, civil liberties groups, legal experts and others warned that the Act would be used to censor lawful speech and suppress dissent, we were gaslighted.

But rather than address valid concerns about what these sweeping powers would mean for free speech, ministers in successive Conservative governments insisted it was all about keeping children safe. They brushed aside warnings, framing every objection as a threat to child welfare and smearing defenders of free expression as if they were complicit in harm.

Now, just days into the Online Safety Act's censorious powers coming into force, it’s clear our warnings were justified: legal speech is being suppressed for people of all ages.

The censorship we’re now witnessing is the direct result of specific powers buried in the Online Safety Act.

Section 11 compels platforms to restrict access to content deemed “harmful to children”, even when it is entirely lawful, unless users verify their age through invasive checks. This has already led to content critical of Labour being blocked from younger users. With the party seeking to give 16-17-year-olds the vote, this looks less like a measure to protect children and more like political grooming.

Section 44 gives a single minister the authority to impose censorship rules without a vote in Parliament. This allows the government to instruct Ofcom on what speech is permissible, and platforms face ruinous fines if they refuse to comply.

And, Section 179 makes it a criminal offence punishable by up to two years in prison to say something “false” that causes “non-trivial psychological harm”. Though no official data has been released yet, credible sources indicate that hundreds of individuals have already been targeted under this offence, with some of those having been imprisoned.

We are deeply concerned that the Online Safety Act has handed the Government powers that belong in a dictatorship, not a democracy.”

Christopher Joyce, who sent me this as part of the repeal campaign, is absolutely right. All of this is dictatorship, not democracy.

Take the blocking of footage of police actions against protestors. If people can’t see that footage, they are denied evidence to form an accurate opinion themselves. And it becomes much easier for the police, for example, to get away with criminal acts themselves, like the police being the ones who instigate violence, or like the police selectively using very different tactics against different groups of protestors. In Essex, where I live, the police escorted in Hard Left activist protestors and then denied they had done so. Only footage on social media proved that the Essex Chief of Police was lying about that.

Now to another source, which gives us a hint of how dangerous censoring comment on the police is and how untrustworthy many modern police officers are, both morally and politically. Here is what has emerged from recent revelations of police actions in relation to the mass rape of white girls by Pakistani Muslim men:

There were police officers who actively took part in the gang rape of children. They were allied with the gangs. They destroyed evidence. They probably participated in rapes. They supplied drugs to the gangs.

Of course not ALL police. But enough to help cover up those crimes for decades. Enough to harm and terrorise huge numbers of brutally abused children the police should have been protecting.

So do we want a legal situation in which footage of the police at a protest can be blocked from us seeing it? Do we trust the police that much that we assume their actions will be lawful themselves? When this is what other officers were doing? and do we want criticism of the police to be illegal too? What prevents an ‘offended’ police officer from going after someone telling the truth, using the new legal frameworks the Online Harms Act and Crime and Policing Bill (when it becomes an Act) provide?

Who watches the watchmen, when we are banned from doing so on social media? Are mainstream media trustworthy and honest and sure to report accurately. Hardly. That’s the mainstream media that also said nothing about child gang rapes for decades, and that also is currently trying to pretend that the tiny Homeland Party are all Nazis and organised every anti migrant hotel protest (many of which we know are local resident based, not funded externally, and completely spontaneous, while we also know too that objecting to illegal aliens who harass and abuse local children is sane parental concern rather than Nazism).

Block citizens from sharing truth, and you block truth altogether.

Now to another source, which has come to me via the excellent Mick Bolton at his substack. Let us look at the Crime and Policing Bill and just how INSANE the provisions of that are. As bad as the Online Harms Act is, it’s not the thing that creates absolute tyranny.

The Crime and Policing Bill is the thing that creates absolute tyranny.

Don’t believe me? Well don’t just take my word for it. Read this:

“The UK government’s Crime and Policing Bill poses a formidable threat to free speech in the UK. The bill, which is currently at the committee stage in the House of Commons, promises to keep our streets ‘safe’ by giving courts a new power to issue ‘respect orders’. These orders are potentially so draconian and wide-ranging that they could well end up being used for very different purposes – including silencing anyone who says anything online that the authorities disapprove of.

Under the bill, police, local authorities and a number of other bodies will be empowered to ask courts for ‘respect orders’ that can either prohibit someone from doing or require them to do ‘anything described in the order’. You read that right – anything. The only condition that needs to be satisfied is that the court thinks, on a balance of probabilities, that the person ‘has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person’. This essentially amounts to ‘precrime’. There won’t even be a need to warn people. The court can issue an interim order without notice. Once the order (which can be indefinite in duration) is there, breaching it carries an unlimited fine or two years in prison.

This spectacularly authoritarian measure is supposedly aimed at street hoodlums, but it is not restricted in any meaningful way. It is a racing certainty that the courts will not apply any limits to its scope.

This bill is a particular threat to free speech. Already, you have to worry that police might turn up at your door over a controversial social-media post. At least at present, the poster has a reasonable chance of defending themselves. While our hate-speech laws are vaguely worded and authoritarian, at least the onus is on the authorities to investigate and prosecute.

This changes dramatically under the Crime and Policing Bill. If it passes, all the police would have to do is persuade a county court judge that people are distressed by the post in question. Then, the poster can be compelled, on pain of prosecution, to delete the offending content, not refer to the subject concerned online again and even stay off social media altogether. They might even be forced to provide an official with the passwords to all of their internet-enabled devices.

This law could be used to attack practically anyone who criticises or makes life difficult for their elected officials. It would be straightforward for, say, a local council to obtain such a ‘respect order’, telling a pesky critic to pipe down indefinitely or face possible imprisonment.

The Crime and Policing Bill could even be abused by central government to silence dissent. What if, in a year or so, we saw another pandemic? Or more riots similar to those that erupted after the Southport attack? During Covid-19, the authorities did their best to repress criticism of lockdowns on social media. And we saw in the wake of Southport how quick the authorities were not only to quell the violence, but also to silence speech online.

On those occasions, the crackdown was only partly successful. Even when it came to the speech-related arrests made over the Southport riots, a number of prosecutions stalled and a good many convictions look fairly doubtful. But this new bill would tip the balance in the state’s favour. The bar will be significantly lowered. People will be shut up on the basis that somebody, somewhere, might be alarmed or distressed by something online. The county-court judges who will hear these cases may well come to see it as their job to bolster the government’s efforts to preserve social harmony, rather than worry too much about free speech.

Of course this wouldn’t happen, the Home Office will purr. There’s supposedly no threat to free speech, because Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights will protect those with something worth saying. Both of these deflections demand extreme scepticism. For starters, governments (and local governments) have form in pushing their powers as far as they can when they feel their interests are threatened. In any case, the ECHR has a fairly dismal record when it comes to protecting speech that is awkward, offensive and bloody-minded.

The Crime and Policing Bill is turning out to be a censor’s dream. We must speak up about this draconian piece of legislation – while we still can.

Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of commercial law and a former Cambridge admissions officer.”

Again Andrew Tettenborn (the original source) and Mick Bolton (who shared the Tettenborn article) are chillingly correct.

A legal framework where it is actually IN LAW that you can be put in prison for 2 YEARS for ANY action that offends SOMEBODY is not a democracy. It’s not a free country in any meaningful sense. It’s scrapped civil liberties completely. It’s dustbinned free speech completely. It’s reversed centuries of basic liberty. You can’t have free criticism of the government, police and authorities under such law, and you can’t have honest comment on politics under such law. It’s impossible.

William the Conqueror, a ruler who seized the throne and pillaged and burned his way through the North so throughly that it created 1,000 years of the South being richer than the North in England, had MORE legal constraints on his behavior than will exist for the police, judges, councils and courts of Britain after the Crime and Policing Bill comes into force. There was more in English law protecting English rights even under Norman conquest than there is in the Crime and Policing Bill, which doesn’t spare a single line for liberty and whose powers are so insanely broad that EVERYTHING can be counted as a criminal act so long as one person is offended. Magna Carta in 1215 was far more freedom loving than this Bill. The 1688 Bill of Rights was far more freedom loving than this Bill.

Under this Bill, combined with the Online Harms Act, there is no free speech and no freedom. You can’t as a citizen police the police, the judges, and the government through your right to see what they are doing and through your right to criticise what they are doing. That will be GONE.

Of course they won’t be able to arrest everyone. But they will be empowered to arrest and imprison anyone who voices dissent. And they don’t need to prove harm or crime, because it will be there in the law saying that since someone was offended and a judge agreed, you’re guilty of harm. Their perception of your opinion being harmful is the crime and you are AUTOMATICALLY guilty. It’s all entirely subjective, and it’s all entirely political, and it needs very, very little process to put you in prison.

That’s the result of totally open-ended and subjective laws on offence, combined with a totally ideological and politicised judiciary and police who are aligned with the current government against the interests and freedoms of the people.

That is tyranny.

It’s half here already, and the second half is almost complete too.