Britain is Descending into Anarcho-Tyranny – We Need a First Amendment

Britain is descending into an anarcho-tyrannical state and needs the equivalent of the US First Amendment to protect freedom of speech from our censorious overlords, says Allister Heath in his latest blistering Telegraph column. Here’s an excerpt.

The Left-wing juristocracy doesn’t believe in true freedom: it believes in weaponising the law for social engineering. The ECHR is a useful tool to promote open borders, but it won’t stop Linehan from being arrested.

Starmer felt obliged to defend Linehan, and Wes Streeting went as far as calling for a change in the law, but nothing meaningful will happen. Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, would never allow it. The best we can hope for are tweaks and slightly more liberal guidance for the police.

Yet if the mainstream Left is bad, the far-Left which may soon replace it is worse. Zack Polanski, the Green Party’s new Corbynite leader, said on the BBC of Linehan that “these are totally unacceptable tweets… I think it was proportionate to arrest him”. This is a new development: the rise of a class of politicians who don’t seek to hide their authoritarianism. Many are influenced by woke ideology, which claims that speech is violence, a tool of oppression when in the hands of the ‘privileged’ class of white overlords, and that only the ‘oppressed’ have the right to speak out.

We need a radical break with the past 28 years. The Blairite project must be undone. We need fresh protections for free speech. The police must be retaught liberal values. Its operational autonomy must be curtailed. We must firmly resist digital ID cards as these would further shift power from citizen to state. The Online Safety Act has gone too far, and needs radical reform, as do many other laws. Non-crime hate incidents must be abolished. We need to quit the ECHR, scrap the HRA and return to Law Lords in Parliament.

We need Parliament to legislate for a UK version of Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the US Supreme Court judgment that determined what sort of speech advocating illegal conduct can be restricted under the First Amendment.

Under the Brandenburg test, the criteria are intent – whether the speech aims to incite and generate imminent violence – and likelihood, whether it has a real chance of succeeding in doing so. Only speech meeting both criteria can be banned in the US. There are real downsides: unbridled speech can be horrific, inflammatory and extreme, but that would still beat our slide towards repression.

One of Linehan’s posts read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” It would obviously have been protected speech in the US. I found Lucy Connolly’s post on the Southport riots repugnant, but US lawyers tell me her case would also have been thrown out.

Worth reading in full – and if readers have other suggestions for improving free speech protections in Britain, pop them in the comments.

Stop Press: Stephen Daisley makes a similar argument in the Spectator:

We need to tear up the current legal framework governing limits on speech and legislate US-style protections as provided by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. … We need to learn to distinguish between speech we find offensive or hateful, which however objectionable ought to be shielded from prosecution, and those types of expression which “tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace“, which should generally not be shielded.