Censored in Starmer’s ‘Free Speech Britain’?
Our PM, Keir Starmer, keeps claiming that free speech is protected in Britain. But that is not my experience. Moreover, I suspect that many other people are also falling foul of what appears to be an increasing climate of censorship of any views which contradict the official government narrative.
I’ve had a YouTube video channel for more than eight years without ever having had any problems. I have used my channel to post occasional videos, usually based on my current affairs books. So I have covered subjects such as foreign aid waste, our bloated charity industry, ever-rising knife crime in London, the rise and rise of Dame Cressida Dick, the pointlessness of many university degrees and, most recently, the supposed ‘Global Boiling Climate Crisis’.
In the last couple of months I made three short parody videos mocking three members of Keir Starmer’s government – Starmer himself, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves. This has led to YouTube taking down my whole video channel. So now none of my videos, even those which have been on YouTube for years, are available. Helpfully, YouTube informs me that I can appeal against their decision to ban me and remove all my videos. But in a rather Kafkaesque situation, I am not told why I have been banned. This makes it somewhat difficult to appeal against YouTube’s ban, as I have no idea what crime I am alleged to have committed. However, this perhaps gives a good idea of what life is becoming like in Starmer’s ‘free speech Britain’. This situation will no doubt become even worse once the Online Safety Act comes into law. Probably many more people will be found to be ‘guilty’ of thought and speech crimes without being told what they are actually guilty of.
In case any reader might be interested in trying to guess what appalling offence I have committed with my most recent three YouTube parody videos, here they are:
And here’s a link to a fourth video I tried to upload this week to YouTube – eco-zealot Ed Miliband singing about how he is going to bankrupt Britain. But I was prevented by the YouTube ban:
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Gosh, it’s almost like a communist dictatorship where criticism of the Dear Leaders is forbidden!
But it’s obviously not that, because we live in Great Britain, which has Free Speech.
The Dear Leader said so, so it must be true.
He said “We’ve always _had_ free speech in Britain.” Clearly he meant that we no longer do and was rather hoping that no one noticed his sophistry.
But we did not “always” have free speech.
just as we did not always have social benefits. That might seem incredible to some but blindingly obvious to others. In his 70s my late father regularly visited The Fox in Burwell. He was amazed to hear a retired local council employee say so.
he had beef two years old with a younger sister and four older siblings when his father died of Spanish Flu. His mother survived with difficulty but died of TB in 1939.
“… just as we did not always have social benefits.”
Except we did, just not controlled and doled out by Government stealing money from people’s pay packets.
For example: the Free Hospital (now Royal Free Hospital) was established in Gray’s Inn Road in the 1860s by a surgeon and run on donations for the poor; various other hospitals like St Bart’s 13th century), were set up and run by religious orders; schools were set up and run by the Church of England, the Poor Law obliged parishes to provide poor relief; religious orders and various organisations provided charitable support – then there was the best social benefits organisation… the family.
All that Government has done is nationalise social support that existed to create a national charity where donations are compulsory.
well they do keep trotting off to China, and have allowed China to build a huge embassy, possibly buy a water company, they have signed off a deal with them which we are not allowed to see.
in Wilsons time it was the Soviet Union they sucked up too, now its China
To me, this kind of flippant comment is a symptom of a people with NO power. We are witnessing the disassembling of britain on a daily basis and yet still the majority of people either deny it is happening, or simply ignore it. As an outsider, I cannot believe what I am witnessing.
Judging from a cursory look at the first two videos (backed by the respective Beatles and Rolling Stones songs) my guess would be that Youtube killed this on supposed copyright violation grounds. At least Facebook does that routinely for any kind of performance-with-a-copyrighted-backing-track.
An astute observation
A good test would be to remove the music and try again
Not possible as I have been banned from ever uploading a video to YouTube. I am also banned from subscribing to any other YouTube channel and banned from commenting on any other videos on YouTube.
Thanks for the update
How ridiculous and frustrating
Do you have a view on what should be done about this, and on what basis?
Sounds like you need to create a new account with different credentials.
I don’t know how it works. Can you just try again.
Yes you can – I have seen YT videos where they got a copyright strike or fell foul of some other restriction and modified and re uploaded. But it sounds like Mr Craig has been completely banned which smells political.
Wrong as I bought the rights to the music from a Karaoke music website!!!!
How is some automatic pattern recognition process supposed to know that? Or some idiot moderator who acted on this getting flagged as possibly issue?
NB: I’ve in the past been banned for suggesting that Ricarda Lang, very much “plus-sized” former chairwoman of the German Green Party, should be dropped from a plane over a Russian city in lieu of a bomb to “support Ukraine” as she would certainly have “a devastating impact.”
Justification for this: A credible call for violence or terrorist threat no one could possibly understand as being satirical or figurative. It’s always advisable to keep the following, probably apocryphal, Einstein-quote in mind: “Only two things are boundless, the universe and human stupidity, but I’m not really sure about the universe.”
It should be renamed “We don’t approve of YouTube”. Is political satire the new pornography?
Free speech is not “protected” anywhere that I am aware of if what you mean is compelling private firms to carry all posted content without restriction
In the US the federal and by extension state governments are prohibited by the Constitution from passing laws restricting speech, which I think has quite logically been extended to bodies receiving federal and state funds from restricting speech
As far as this case goes, there seem to be three possibilities
1) The reason is not political – RW makes a very good point regarding this
2) Pressure on YouTube from the state, either direct or indirect- definitely should not be happening but possibly is
3) YouTube are a bunch of woke lefties – well you either accept that private companies can do whatever they please regarding content or you come up with a coherent law that forces major information carriers to not censor content. I have mixed feelings on this one
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to require providers of online services which are free for public use and open to all to refrain from taking anything down unless some court declared it illegal. Especially considering that there’s constant behind-the-scenes pressure from state actors to make such “private companies” censor on their behalf. Eg, Facebook has a deal with the German state that it’ll only remain free from being considered legally responsible for stuff Germans unrelated to the company post on FB for as long as it “proves” that it’s proactively deleting possibly objectionable user content aggressively enough through quarterly reports to the German authorities. It also enforces such policies retroactively: What was considered ok yesterday may today lead to a permanent ban.
I think that there’s obviously a problem here and this problem is not that online content hosters still don’t interfere with user publications aggressively enough “to save the children/ the planet/ our democracy/ whatever.”
On balance I agree
Of course there’s no free speech in marxo-fascist Ukaay. Marxo-fascist despots don’t do free speech. This is because they believe that the ruling class – the state bourgeoisie – is morally, emotionally, and spiritually superior to the white “lower orders”, and sees itself as being the possessor of what I call Wise And Numinous Knowledge (W.A.N.K. for short). This latter “fact” enables the marxo-fascists feel to entitled to silence the opponents of the Regime’s anti-whitism and anglophobia.
We need to read how Soviet freedom loving people managed. Businesses rarely have photocopiers these days so private, secret circulation of illicit material would be tough.
Of course we are now a highly regulated, censored state. Maybe DS will be in trouble for this post. Australia (also ruled by socialists) is well on the way too.
hey,JD, what’s yu’ gonna say about this. Please help us.
One of the most enthusiastic censors of free speech is msn. Some of it is just an overzealous automatic moderator, yesterday I had a comment declined for including the term black market which is presumably now classed as racist. Quite often posts are initially accepted them removed after an hour or so, presumably after being seen by a human moderator. I’ve had jokes about the name of Corbyn’s new party, ones that referred to Liebour and called JSO eco nutters removed. Any comment that mentions Muslim massacres of Jews, there documented cases going back hundreds of years, quotes from the Koran and any other factually correct comments that show that Islam isn’t a religion of peace and tolerance are removed. Comments about Israeli “massacres” of Palestinians (most of examples given are military action against Hamas etc.) imaginary atrocities committed in Gaza etc. are allowed. Also allowed were comments calling me racist and xenophobic for supporting the Rwanda scheme, surely this is abuse and if any comments are going to be removed it should be these. Lets just hope that when Farage becomes PM he cracks down really hard on companies that censor things they don’t agree with, alongside scrapping the… Read more »
Isn’t this a case for the Free Speech Union?
David, I’d have thought that our Angie (and, by extension, YouTube) would be flattered by the model you’ve chosen to represent her! Some Marxists can be so ungrateful!
David in your appeal you should say that the ban has been implemented as an administrative error, as you have been advised there is no reason for it.
Then hopefully at least they’ll tell you what it is.
At least you were told you were banned. I’ve been shadow banned for months after criticising the left for their apologism regarding Hamas. A few well organised flags by them and now I can’t even leave a comment on a cute kittens video.
No real way of appealing this either.
Dominic Frisby’s YouTube is still up and running; I wonder why Craig’s has been cancelled but not his, which also contains a number of songs highly critical of Two-Tier and the Student Union Marxists.
It’s noticeable that so many “comedians” are now very left-wing …. but lefties in general are so bloody humourless, particularly those in Government.
People need to understand that our PM is personality disordered. Sociopath, I suspect.
A couple of months back, one of his former SPADs – solid Labour man – said of him
“He’s a hollow man, who can’t stop lying.
This is what I have observed… all traits of the personality disordered
No empathy.
No sense of humour.
No emotions.
No inner life (doesn’t read, do art/music – openly admitted so).
Bristles when challenged.
Hates being laughed at (viz. TV audience at his “Son of a toolmaker” spiel) – which he has not repeated since having been unable to stop saying it previously..
Pathological liar. As confirmed by a former SPAD (Starmer is “a hollow man”).
Refuses to take responsibility for things that happened on his watch..
No soul. Look into his eyes. Nothing there. The eyes are where we see another.
.
.
Things are going from bad to worse at warp speed in the Uk. The puppet at the helm is killing free speech. Sept 13th will bring out more freedom fighters than anyone expects. Prepare to get the hell out of ussr britain, or live with a terribly dystopian government destroying citizens lives more each day.