Silenced in Starmer’s ‘Free Speech Britain’?
I’m sure we were all very proud of our PM when he informed Donald Trump that we’ve had free speech in Britain for a long time and that we would continue to have free speech in the future. But that hasn’t been my recent 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’ve covered subjects such as Gordon Brown’s financial incontinence, foreign aid waste, our bloated charity industry, ever-rising knife crime in London, 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. A week or so ago I tried to upload a fourth video onto YouTube mocking Ed Miliband’s ludicrous Net Zero assault on our country. But I was unable to upload my latest video as YouTube had taken down my whole video channel. So now none of my videos, even those which have been live on YouTube for years, are available. Helpfully YouTube informed me that I could appeal against their decision to ban me and remove all my videos. But, in a rather Kafkaesque situation, I’m not told why I have been banned. The only information I got was a link to all the many reasons why YouTube could remove a video channel. This made it somewhat difficult to appeal against YouTube’s ban as I’ve no idea what violation I am alleged to have committed. However, I did appeal and my appeal was quickly rejected again without any reason being given.
A few days later, someone hacked my WordPress blog making it send out more than 100,000 emails to some huge list of people I didn’t know. This apparently caused chaos for the company hosting my website. I was given a choice by the hosting company – fix the problem within 24 hours or else my website would be taken down. I’ve been informed by a website developper that it could cost hundreds of pounds to fix the website so am mulling over whether to proceed.
For quite a few years I have been selling my books through Amazon. But the day after my website was hacked, I received an email from Amazon informing me that I had somehow violated its terms and conditions and that it would stop selling my books.
I’m not a crazed conspiracy theorist. But these three attacks on me through YouTube, my website and Amazon do seem to suggest that my YouTube videos may have upset someone in power and a decision was taken to silence me; at the very least they are consistent with that sinister scenario. My situation may be an isolated case. Or perhaps this gives a good idea of what life is becoming like in Starmer’s ‘free speech Britain’. This situation will no doubt become even worse now that the Online Safety Act has come 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 and will be banned, cancelled and silenced just as has happened to me. Still, looking on the bright side, in many other countries I would already be in prison for my supposed ‘crimes’.
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:
- Keir Starmer: Back in the EUSSR
- Keir Starmer: Angie
- Rachel Reeves: How I Crashed The Economy
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 from uploading it by the YouTube ban:
- Ed Miliband: I want to bankrupt you
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available (for now) as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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It may not be a conspiracy but a murmuration of like mined minions, perhaps?
Someone complains to YouTube and a minion decides that stuff they don’t like should not be permitted and they make it difficult to appeal.
Over drinks at the Vegan Slug and Lettuce they mention the takedown and a different minion seizes the knowledge to mount an attack on your WordPress blog.
Then another minion feeling brave because you have received a black mark from YouTube and your website hoster then decides to use Amazon to give you more grief.
Not necessarily a conspiracy… but it could be a flock of like minded people ‘doing their bit for the cause’.
Useful idiots are always a crucial tool in the totalitarian’s toolbox.
No, it is not “minions”, u less you are calling your very own gov’t minions.
Not a conspiracy in the traditional sense. Just removal of choice. The more you resist the less access to everything you have. You won’t be “denied”, it will just be the case that you have not opted in. No force is used, you will just have to comply with the frameworks.
This is basically a repeat of the model they’ve used with banks to control us financially.
The state sets up set of new rules, usually with a superficially reasonable explanation such as to stop financial crime, stop tax dodging, protect you children from bad content. Stuff nobody could really argue with.
Then they use the banks or in this case now online companies to police and do the dirty work for them. Like proper thugs, they threaten the banks and online companies with massive fines if anyone slips through. Banks and online companies become paid thugs to carry out the state’s bidding.
And when problems occur in the implementation, because the devil is always in the detail and it’s impossible to police millions of people without some heavy handedness, given the fines hanging over the banks and online companies for failures, then it’s the fault of the paid thugs. The state can always fall back on its intention and claim the problem is in the implementation.
It’s a terrible thing that is happening. It’s basically fascism.
Over the last couple of decades, I have noticed a trend towards the introduction of laws which use “vicarious liability” as a means of enforcement, and the Scottish Executive in particular seems to have found this to be a wizard wheeze. There are examples at a corporate level which are arguably morally good, such as the responsibility of large organisations to ensure that their supply chain doesn’t involve slavery, or that those who handle their waste products do so correctly; however, the use of this concept has crept into many day to day interactions. For example, while it is illegal to smoke on public premises, the responsibility lies primarily with the operator of the premises, not the smoker; similarly with underage drinking, or serving alcohol to drunks; a person selling a nicotine vape to someone under 18 is committing an offence and it is their responsibility to ensure the customer is legal; in these cases, if an individual violates the statute, it is the operator who stands to be punished, therefore the operator is obligated to police their customers. There have been a number of cases where campervan owners have been prosecuted because an illegal immigrant sneaked into this country… Read more »
This ☝️
Yes. It creates a world in which it becomes the norm to treat everyone like a rule breaker until they can prove otherwise. Assume everyone is a criminal and work backwards from that. Those who can demonstrate they aren’t get service. Those who can’t demonstrate their “innocence” to a high degree of satisfaction, then too bad.
A great world to live in.
You are right, that’s how they got Tommy Robinson, he spoke out against rape and they got him on a tax irregularity. 22,000 page tax code and anyone can be prosecuted if they want.
It’s interesting that the UK and some of its European allies are more like the Soviet Union.
What kind of people would do this to your country? Davos sock puppets?
I would think in most cases, it’s very low level censorship, of the form where speaking out might damage a friendship or upset a family member. This is because the messaging has been so invasive of the population’s mind, it’s been taken as true by default, and how dare we say anything to the contrary.
Your books are still listed on Amazon – they have a very abrupt and threatening manner to their correspondences so my advice is ‘don’t panic’ they are probably telling you to download your invoices or add shipping details, etc. and list your books on eBay I sell just as many copies of the book I push, Larken Rose’s The Most Dangerous Superstition, via eBay as I do from the Leviathan. But sadly so many do buy via Amazon sheeplike.
I did manage to buy four copies of your book for family and friends before Amazon stopped selling it .. It’s highly recommended
I wouldn’t take it personally… It’s not so much that you have upset someone in power, as someone in power decreed that the algorithms overseeing social media content should close down channels if they detect very selective combinations of keywords.
The whole thing is automatic, like a digital content filter that churns through billions of gigabytes of data per second, programmed to sanitize the internet of all dissent.
That is why there is no point in appealing and that is why you can’t see what violation you’ve committed. The bottom line is… nobody knows!
I had a very similar thing happen to me on Facebook, where I had “violated community policy”, an appeal and an automatic rejection with zero information.
The internet basically has a digital filter that extracts anything that is:
Does the silencing continue? When I click on any of the links I get “unable to continue. Capacity exceeded”.
Ditto.
Nigel is in the US giving evidence at a Congressional Hearing , investigating the attack on our freedoms in the UK. This won’t end well for our communist government.
Britain never had proper free speech but whatever level we had has been massively reduced over the past couple of decades. Now we are far away from any semblance of free speech and this is one of the largest reasons for the mess that is now Britain.
When I published a short story called “A Christmas Carol “ on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing about 18 months ago I was asked to change the metadata as I might be confusing readers who wanted Dickens’ book. Quite why they could be confused I am not sure, but I did as asked. The book stayed live until about 4 weeks after I published my COVID diary, when I too got an email that my KDP agreement was being terminated due to violation of the terms and conditions. All my books – a medical memoir, poetry anthology, novel, and the diary and supposedly confusing Christmas Carol – disappeared. Despite asking how I had offended I had no response and my appeal was rejected within 24 hours by a bot.
So far my blog and website remain unaffected, but I am now wondering for how long… and I suspect it’s my COVID diary that really triggered the cancellation; as Daily Sceptic regulars know, my views on the Hallett Inquiry have been “controversial “. So I am coming round to the conclusion that someone wants me silenced. Daid Craig, welcome to the club.
Just returned from Chicago, my home town to the Uk where unfortunately I live due to my husband being British and not wanting to leave. I have been here 27 yrs. everyone in the USA appears to know free speech is banned in the Uk, even the young man I spoke to, who worked behind the desk at the BMO bank. britain is, for the amt of tax people pay, a disgrace. You pay £7 to drop someone off at the airport, your car parks are filthy as are the verges along the motorway, your libraries are worse than rundown, no decent community centres, hospitals and surgeries delapidated, an economy that is tanking, a total lack of prosperity, roads continuously kicked due to ?, business rates continuously going up, petrol never going down, despite the market value of oil, every activity and product purchased have gone up, with no good explanation. No shortage of cell towers erected in the dead of night, no shortage of fields covered in solar panels, the sake full of chem trails nearly everyday, no shortage of mrnacovid jabs despite everyone knowing how dangerous they are and the icing on the cake now is your free… Read more »
Double plus horrifying.
Great videos, the best that I have seen recently. Obviously completely correct, so the regime don’t like them.
Everyone born after the cold war ended should watch this PBS documentary to see the way these things go. https://www.pbsamerica.co.uk/series/iron-curtain-living-under-soviet-occupation/
When “our” PM informed Donald Trump that we’ve had free speech in Britain for a long time – the devil is in the detail. Note the past tense – i.e. we used to havê free speech, not any longer in stalag Starmer!
Glen Greenwald uses Rumble as he was censored by YouTube. They are resisting the ofcom threats.
Thanks for the funny videos, much enjoyed. However, have to say, they are hardly controversial – no more than comedic restatements of what everyone is already saying – Kier Starmer lacks a back-bone; Rachel Reeves is crashing the economy. Why would these get you banned from anything?
I reckon you have an issue with copyrighted music. (Although I’m not sure if the Reeves song is your own tune!) YouTube even bans videos of people on the street if they accidentally pick up music in the background. Driven by music publishers that employ the equivalent of ambulance chasing lawyers, apparently. Takes too much time for YouTube to investigate so they just take them down and wait for an appeal. Enjoyed them though!
Sinister. ——But this is where we are headed as compliance and alignment with Technocratic diktats emanating from the UN/WEF, where if people do not comply they will simply be left behind and unable to operate within the system. Our Shackles used to be made of iron but now they are digital. ——-I just checked my Amazon Account to see if you book is still available and it still is, and it tells me I purchased it in Sept 2021. I read it back then and over 200 books on the issue of climate/energy. The idea that people cannot question what is supposed to “science” is totally absurd, and only reveals one thing. The Climate Change Agenda isn’t and never was about “science”. It is “Official Science” in support of the UN Political Agenda called Sustainable Development.