Arrested for a Facebook Post: Ben Jones on Britain's Free Speech Collapse

Dr Ben Jones, Director of Case Management at the UK Free Speech Union, joins host Dane Giraud to discuss his new book, Island of Strangers, and a question that should trouble anyone who values open debate: how did Britain - the country that gave the world so much of its free-speech tradition - become a place where the police knock on your door over a Facebook post?

Jones has spent five years on the front line of Britain's free-speech wars, and his union now fields around fifty requests for help every week. Since the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government in 2024, he argues, the problem has shifted from cancellation to criminalisation - ordinary people arrested, interviewed and in some cases jailed for things they have said online. Taking Starmer's own "island of strangers" line as its starting point, the book argues that mass migration and the decline of Christianity have left Britain without the shared identity and common rituals that once held it together - and that a state trying to manage this "hyper-diversity" increasingly does so by suppressing speech, through two-tier policing and the quiet return of blasphemy law. 

Jones and Dane test the thesis hard: is the fault really with migration, or with the politicians who built the system? Does America's First Amendment prove a diverse society can stay free? And why does free speech look like a fragile, culturally specific inheritance rather than a universal default? The conversation ranges across the Roman Empire and the limits of assimilation, Aristotle and Durkheim on what actually makes a society, cancel culture and the "no debate" tactic, positive versus negative identity politics, the class dimension of censorship from the Lady Chatterley trial to today, and what all of this means for New Zealand and Australia - including NSW Premier Chris Minns' striking admission that free speech and multiculturalism may not mix. 

Island of Strangers is available now on Amazon in hardback, Kindle and audiobook. Free to Speak is the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union - uncensored conversations on free speech, civil liberties, and the people defending them. 

Hosted by Dane Giraud. 

Join the Free Speech Union: https://www.fsu.nz/join 

Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate 

Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe 

Website: https://www.fsu.nz 

Got feedback or a guest suggestion? podcast@fsu.nz

Transcript

Welcome And Why Free Speech Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Free to Speak, the New Zealand Free Speech Union podcast. If you enjoy the show, subscribe for uncensored conversations and free speech news from New Zealand and beyond.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Gilda, and welcome to Free to Speak, the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union. My name is Dane Giro. I'm a council member of the Free Speech Union, and joining us today is Ben Jones of the UK Free Speech Union. Ben, glad you could join us. Great to be here. Great to be here. Fantastic. Okay, so now Ben has written a book, Island of Strangers. I've got this written down here, I think, off your possibly your publisher's website. So Island of Strangers shows how multiculturalism came just as Britain was losing its sense of itself, as Christianity declined, and how its elite embraced a creative diversityism. Grounded in a long view of British history, this book gets to the fundamental causes of why Keir Starmer's UK feels so unfree. So not light reading. And with everything that's going on over there, um we're a long way away. We do watch on X and it looks quite chaotic and scary. Now, it it might be a bit different if you're on the ground, so you you could give us a sense of that. But we we do down here in New Zealand think our lucky stars that we don't have hate speech laws, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Um we're in a pretty rapey situation in Britain, it has

Inside The UK Free Speech Caseload

SPEAKER_01 1:32

to be said. Um perhaps I could just say by way of introduction, the uh UK Free Speech Union was set up back in 2020. Uh, I've worked there not quite since the beginning, but for just over five years now. And uh in that time we've dealt with more than 6,000 individual cases of cancel culture. So, of course, the whole English-speaking world is dealing with broadly similar issues of what the front lines in the culture war are and what people are likely to be cancelled for for saying. Um, what's changed in Britain since 2024, that's when the Labour government of Keir Starmer was elected in July 2024, is that we're now seeing a huge increase in criminal uh cases of prosecutions, of uh people having the police turn up at their door. Um, and I think it's worth saying that for people who've had no previous contact with the police, to have the police knocking on your door for something you've posted on social media, perhaps to have to go and wait in a police cell for 10 hours, is a hugely traumatic experience. I don't think you have to be a snowflake to uh to find that to be a terribly upsetting and stressful ordeal to go through. Um and what what we have seen in Britain is a very marked deterioration in uh freedom of speech. And as I said, I I link that explicitly to um to the arrival of a Labour government. Although, of course, the conditions were set long before. This this is something that's been going on in uh many Western countries, many English-speaking countries for at least 10 years now, with the the Great Awokening. Um, so that's the context of what we're dealing with. I wish I could have a more optimistic uh report for your listeners. I'm afraid I don't. Things are quite bad in Britain right now, and the free speech union over here uh is inundated. We get something like 50 new requests for help each week. And uh just for some sense of the scale of our operations, um, I'm the director of case management. I need a team of 10 people. We have a separate legal team of another five people, uh, all of whom are working flat out every day that God sends. So it is a huge, huge struggle over here to try and hold the line. And uh one of the interesting things that's now happening is that uh Britain's record on free speech, I think, is becoming something of a foreign policy problem, potentially even a foreign policy crisis, uh, which is is helpful, but of course it's deeply regrettable that we've we've reached that point.

Why “Island Of Strangers” Fits

SPEAKER_02 4:07

It's it's very scary. Um so uh Island of Strangers is the book that you've written. Is this your first book?

SPEAKER_01 4:14

It is, yeah. Yeah, first time.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

Okay, well, that must feel good.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

It does, it's very exciting. It's out this Thursday, uh the 11th of June. Uh so I'm in that trepidatious state of waiting to see if anybody will actually buy it. But uh signs are looking good.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

Well, hopefully we'll move a few copies down here. But uh so um Keir Starmer ironically has given you your title though, hasn't he? So maybe explain that in in you can segue from the uh into the thesis of your book.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Yes, yeah, of course. So Keir Starmer last year gave this speech, um, which he later admitted that he'd not read beforehand. He stood up at uh at the lectern and started giving this speech. And he used this phrase, Island of Strangers, and he said Britain risked becoming an island of strangers. Um now, this I think was the only thing Keir Starmer has got right since he became Prime Minister. Uh, ironically, he then apologized for using this phrase. It was compared um uh I think without any basis to Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech um uh in the 1970s. And so Starmer, uh Starmer retracted uh and apologized and said he regretted using this phrase. But I think actually it was an apt phrase, and his speech writer, whoever actually came up with this, was on the money. Um, Britain has become an island of strangers, and and what I mean by that is that it has been transformed by massive-scale migration, which is without any historical parallel in British history. And secondly, by the decline of Christianity in Britain. Lots of this story, of course, is true across the Western world. And so while it's a book about Britain, I think that that many um many readers in the United States, in Canada, New Zealand, Australia will will look at elements of this and think that broadly a similar thing is happening in their countries as well. Um so my argument then is that um having become an island of strangers, that has all sorts of consequences. Diversity has consequences. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Some people think that diversity is an unalloyed good, other people think it's universally disastrous. In the middle, there are people, I think, who have a much more reasonable view of it, which is that uh immigration is not one phenomenon, and that we know that different migrant groups produce radically different economic outcomes. My argument is that different migrant groups also produce different outcomes for free speech, and that there are some groups who are um more likely to uh integrate and replicate the tradition of liberal democracy and freedom of speech, and some groups which are not, I think, in my view, ever going to do that. And having constructed this unwieldy multicultural society, it is now fraying, it is fracturing, and it is becoming um something actually quite like an empire, where you have different identity and belief groups, some of whom really don't like each other, many of whom are trying to impose their sacred ideas on the rest of society. And then you have all of the contradictions that go along with managing an empire, where the imperial power treats different groups in different ways, where there are different rules for different people. Um, and if your community is likely to cause uh unrest or violence, you're likely to be treated in a more lenient way. And this in British political debate is the phenomenon of two-tier policing. Now, I think that all of that unfairness and injustice is essentially baked into multiculturalism. And um, in terms of the consequences for freedom of speech, this means that, for example, demands for blasphemy laws from very powerful and uh numerous elements within Muslim communities in Britain are given serious weight and are being imposed across the rest of society. I mean, if I could give one example of that. Um there was some guidance published by labour-controlled local councils in northern England a few months ago. And uh in it it said that uh school teachers should not ask their pupils to ask, uh, sorry, they should not ask their pupils to depict Jesus, because Jesus is a prophet in Islam and Muslim pupils might find that offensive. So the dynamic of what's going on is that the British state has embarked upon this course of accommodationism, of trying to manage hyperdiversity as I describe it. Um and in so doing, it is trying to appease groups of people who cannot be appeased and who cannot be reconciled with a liberal democratic tradition of freedom of speech. And um when you look at the polling of British Muslims, and I'm happy to say that there are there are many um uh very impressive and courageous liberal British Muslims who are trying to make this all work. But but when you look at the weight of the polling, something like 52 to 68% of British Muslims, depending on the poll, think that criticizing Islam should be a criminal offense. About one-third think that um Sharia law should be the law of the land. And following the Charlie Hebdo attack more than a decade ago, uh, something like 10% of young British Muslims uh sympathized in some way with the with the attackers and and uh are of the view that if you depict Mohammed, you you deserve to be attacked. Um, I don't think there's any way to keep kicking the can down the road. I think these contradictions in multiculturalism um can't be ignored any longer. And I think that uh Keir Starmer was right, we have become an island of strangers, and that has serious consequences, and we need to get real about what those are.

SPEAKER_02 10:22

Okay.

Multiculturalism And The US Contrast

SPEAKER_02 10:23

Now, um, where I would start to push back uh is the idea, the cynicism about multiculturalism, right? Which I'm hearing from you. I would argue that Keir Starmer is probably even more cynical about multiculturalism. And that's why he's prepared to uh uh violate the equality and democracy of people with two tier policing and all that kind of stuff. Because fundamentally, these people don't think people can live together. But surely America proves that this isn't the case. Like the blasphemy laws that you bring up is a good point. In the US, they're just not gonna get anywhere with that. So they'll stop trying, won't they? They have that First Amendment. It's gonna be very near impossible unless they became 90% of the population. They're just not gonna be able to do it. So are we, in a way, looking in the wrong place by saying the fault is with the migrants and the migrant groups who, because you know, different communities will lobby for what they believe in, that's going to happen. Um should we be laying this completely at the feet of people like Keir Starmer, who clearly has no interest in preserving democracy and treating people uh equally?

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Well, this is this is the contradiction that um if if you are a British Muslim citizen, you're entitled to your to your right that to argue and to vote for people who will make um criticizing Islam a a criminal offense. You're well within your rights to to argue for that. Um and um the fault I I agree, I think, is therefore with politicians who have um have created this situation. As as um as for the situation in the United States, of course they have a First Amendment that is um fundamental, is constitutional. Um in Britain there is no such protection. And um actually, in your um uh uh broad neck of the wood, speaking on a global scale over in Australia, uh Chris Minns, uh the Premier of New South Wales, said, I think uniquely, I don't think another Western politician has been as direct about it. He said, we don't have First Amendment style free speech because we're trying to hold together a multicultural community.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

Yeah, I heard that. And I thought this is again, this is that cynicism I talk about. He's he clearly doesn't believe multiculturalism can work unless it's a police state.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Effectively. Um, and um what one of the examples I give actually in the book is there is this uh by all accounts, really brilliant school in uh in London, which has a really diverse population of pupils. It gets uh it's a state school, but it gets brilliant uh uh results for it with its exams and so on. Um, and it's known as Britain's strictest school. And so the pupils are forbidden from uh speaking to each other uh uh when they're moving between lessons. Um it's very draconian, as critics would say. Um, one of the interesting features about the school is that because it's so highly multicultural, all school meals are vegetarian. Because uh the head teacher realized that um when they try and cater for everyone's dietary requirements, you end up with Hindus sitting in one place, Jews sitting in one place, Muslims sitting over there, and so on. Um, and so everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator. And without wanting to criticize the school, which it seems to do a very good job, um, that seems to me to be a harbinger of where we're going, where everything has to be reduced to the lowest common denominator. And when you apply that uh uh ratchet effect to the question of freedom of speech and trying to preserve freedom of speech in those conditions, it becomes very difficult to see how the British and the Western tradition of freedom of speech can survive with people who are from cultures that are totally different and who have totally different cultural expectations. And one of the points I make in the book is that actually it's quite normal to have blasphemy laws. Most countries have blasphemy laws. Most people instinctively don't think that it's a good thing for a society's sacred ideas to be trashed. Most people don't think it's good that uh their holy book is is burned. Um, most people don't want chaotic and disordered societies. Um, and there are particular, highly culturally contingent reasons why freedom of speech uh arose in again, I'm focusing on Britain, but the argument can be can be generalized across the English-speaking world. Um and um in significant part, I argue it's because of Christianity, it's also because of the classical past and having the example of Athens and to a slightly lesser extent Rome to point back to. Um, but it's not something that's universal, it's something that's really quite weird, it's quite strange to have unfettered freedom of speech. And of course, it took a long time to emerge in the West. It's not really existed for that long, actually. Um, it's been a very uh disjointed process of getting here. And I think it's it's in grave threat now because of these transformations.

SPEAKER_02 15:57

Going back to the whole idea of um groups like, say, the Muslim community, even if 10% or 5%, or even though some of the numbers that you gave me are way way higher than that, yeah. Um in that American system, because they have the First Amendment, that's not gonna bend for them, that's gonna de-radicalize people over time, isn't it? So like when you say uh um in your book that these people are gonna have problems um uh accepting a lot of the the liberalism uh of a Western country, again, I would go back to the system that Keir Starmer and politicians like that are creating. Uh the First Amendment in the States is going to de-radicalize these people eventually because they're just not going to get what they want. So do you think that there's again, it's it's less the people and more the system?

SPEAKER_01 16:58

I I think it's a combination of both. I mean, America is a proposition nation. It's always been highly adept at um assimilating huge numbers of migrants who look to America as the city on the hill and all the rest of it, um, and who go there looking for something very particular. Um, Britain is not that. Britain is not a proposition nation. Um it's only in the last 50 years that British citizenship was even defined in law. Um Britain has been a place with a remarkably stable population, um, some of which is Celtic, some of which is Irish, Scottish, Anglo-Saxon, and so on. Um, which of course now is a deeply triggering term to many people, but but it's a perfectly legitimate historical category, and it was used by the people of that time in their own documents, so I have no trouble using it. Um England and Britain have never been proposition nations, they've always been communities of highly settled people who arrived uh 15 uh hundred years ago or or or longer in the case of the of the Celts and the Welsh. So it's quite different. Defining Britishness is quite difficult. As I said, it's only been defined in law relatively recently. Um, and there is no constitutional um uh framework for protecting freedom of speech.

Rome’s Warning On Assimilation

SPEAKER_01 18:21

And so the expectations placed on migrants are very unclear. Uh in fact, one of the arguments I make in the book is to look at, I go back to the Roman Empire, and I make this analogy that um when the Roman Empire was young and confident, uh, it was highly successful at assimilating people. And when you look at what it did in uh France, in Gaul, as it then was, um, it is very effective at converting local elites to Roman cultural standards. It gives citizenship to cultural elites. Uh, Ghouls become Roman. When you get to the late Western Empire, it is no longer able to do that. It is too tired, it is too overstretched, it lacks self-confidence, it's entirely divided, and so on. Um, and we have instead of the what I call the Gallic model, we have the Frankish model, where whole groups of people are transposed into Roman territory and are told effectively, don't cause trouble, pay taxes, fight in our wars, and you can govern yourselves, do your own thing. Which is, of course, a highly short-termist policy. And uh, in the end, the the Roman Empire is not quite so much conquered as simply transformed by the fact that these groups of people say, Well, we don't really need an emperor, actually, we'll just govern ourselves. Um, and then you you see the emergence of early medieval Europe and the emergence of um small kingdoms and so on. And so I think Britain and many other Western countries have moved from a Gallic to a Frankish model, where they are now just saying to groups of people, largely you can govern your own internal affairs as as you wish. Um, and Britain has become a society of societies uh rather than a cohesive country where people share in a in a sense of identity.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

So, do you think this is something that has just developed that way uh through weak leadership or uh fashionable politics, social media, or I mean, finding the the the pinning it down to one reason would be um quite hard. Bad leaders. It could be that simple. I don't think Keir Starmer's it was ever gonna set the world on fire, and uh history probably won't treat him as significant, probably for all the wrong reasons. Um but yeah, so where do you think that is coming from?

SPEAKER_01 20:46

I think there's a kind of malicious naivety that underpins lots of this. Um I think there are lots of people who um uh in elite political and cultural circles who have a totally blank slate view of human nature who really do think that groups of people are interchangeable, that that men can become women, that Afghans really can become British, and that there is no friction, there's no moment of difficulty, there's no um that there are no competing sets of expectations or values. Um, and I think that is is a significant part of it. Um there was an advisor of of Tony Blair, um, who I think this was reported maybe 20 years ago or so now, um, who said that he wanted um uh high levels of migration in order to rub the right nose in diversity. Um, so there there is also this is why I say malicious naivety. Um uh some people really do think that um everybody wants the same things, that when you scratch away the cultural specificity that people really are just liberal universalists underneath, it's for that reason that the West embarked upon wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Um, I think we've We've tested the theories of destruction. People people do want different things. Um and um we can't avoid that. Um people do have really different cultural expectations about things, and and obviously the the main lens in which I view that is through freedom of speech in this book. Um, but there are many other conflicts as as well.

Sacred Ideas And Cancel Culture

SPEAKER_02 22:23

So um in terms of I think uh a bit uh quite a controversial argument in and that that you make is that free speech is is uh is more likely to to work in a in a more cohesive society. But if we look at do we have an example of that really? Because it's not like that we've had free speech for that long, even though we may have thought we did, like in the 1930s, you're not gonna get a bonnie blue, you know, like that sort of freedom of expression or anything like that. The Victorian era might have been more socially cohesive in terms of like the types of people and and and and more or less more or less one religion. But these are not the Victorian era is not really known as a very permissible era. So is is is what you're saying right there? Will social cohesion necessarily mean more free speech, or will we just divide again back into class in a more pronounced way?

SPEAKER_01 23:27

I think one of the cul-de-sacs that conservatives can get ourselves into um is it suggesting that there is a golden age to go back to. I think with with respect to freedom of speech, there are moments of greater or lesser freedom. Um, and uh I make the point in the book that if you were to go back to the 1950s in Britain, if you were to be a playwright, the government would censor your plays. It was it would have this is in the post-war period, the government retained the right to censor, censor plays. Um, there were blasphemy prosecutions brought on a private basis uh in the late 20th century. Blasphemy laws remained on the books in England and Wales until 2008 and in Scotland and until only four years ago. Um, so I I totally concede that there's no moment at which I'd say, uh, right, that's the golden age of free speech. Uh we should go back to that. The transformation, though, means that we've gone from a situation where you have, again, in the case of 1950s England, a cohesive society broadly united around the same moral value system. Uh, generally, people are going to find the same sorts of things offensive. Uh, you know that if you write a poem depicting um Jesus as gay, that there's a chance you're going to be prosecuted for blasphemy, either by the state or or by Mary Whitehouse, as happened in the 1970s. Um broadly, you know what you can't say. That's the point I'm driving at. The problem now is that where you have all of these identity groups, and I don't just mean migrant groups, I mean um uh the trans rights campaign is probably the biggest example, um, but also Black Light's Matter, all the rest of it. You have all of these people funneling religious energy into politics, and you have um hyperdiversity because of mass-scale migration. What that means is you have lots of different groups of people who each have their own sacred ideas that they think other people shouldn't uh transgress against. And so replacing a cohesive society that has uh one set of offensive things you can't say to a fragmented society where lots of people are saying that's offensive, you're not allowed to say that, is much worse from a free speech point of view. So um paradoxically, but but is it though?

SPEAKER_02 25:48

Like I have to say, is it? Because I would have thought that free speech was it's a progressive engine. So it's wanting to draw a difference in individuality out, and it's wanting to take small subsets and say, here, here's the mic, isn't it? Like the the what you're describing with your Black Lives Matter and all these other groups is I would expect that from a free speech society.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Well, I suppose it's the difference between um people advocating for an identity group or for a uh a minority set of beliefs, is of course an exercise in freedom of speech. That's uncontroversial. Um the difference, however, is, and I think we've seen this since the 2020s, is the onset of council culture. It's the trans rights movement's um uh strap line of no debate. Because you're you're if you if you debate me, you're you're saying I don't exist, you'll say my identity is invalid. Um, and so that of course raises the stakes of politics to a very high level. Um, and it is for that reason that council culture became so endemic, and still is, frankly. It really isn't over. Um, and that's where the problem is. The problem is not with the trans rights movement making a reasoned argument that um there are an oppressed group of people who need to be treated in a different way by the law, and society needs to make accommodations for them, and these are the reasons why. That largely is not how the trans rights movement has has gone about it. It's gone about it through, and again, I'm not I'm not saying I'm not saying all trans people are uh have behaved in this way, um, but the movement as a whole um has proceeded on the basis of shutting down events, uh terrorizing people, counseling speakers, etc.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

It's wanting to remove error correction, as Peter Bogosi would say. He's he's been with us for a while. And I think that's what blasphemy laws are too, aren't they? It's like to remove the whole idea of error correction. Um but again, this takes us back to it's not the competing groups and the different. That's probably to be expected. Um, I mean, the gay rights movement is probably a good example of that. Um in this more cohesive um uh society, you speak of um homosexuality might have been very closeted. Um, but free speech meant that they could agitate and eventually get their rights. So, but it's it's them knowing that they can't take those rights away from other people, that there's just no mechanism to take those rights away from other people.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

That's where I think I would differ from your thesis in a way, or with the gay rights movement um or the civil rights movement, um, I I think both both of those are their identity politics of a kind that they are organized around particular sets of characteristics for obvious reasons. Um in both of those instances, though, I think we have groups of people who are saying, please allow us to integrate into society and enjoy the rights that that you have.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

It's a positive identity politics, it's not a negative, it's not wanting to remove something from others, it's wanting to be on the same level.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

And of course, that there is a there is a violent fringe to um uh you know on the edges of civil rights movement, but but the mainstream of that movement to Martin Luther King is is is peaceful and it's it's it's trying to access rights that that those people should have enjoyed anyway. Um they're not asking for anything extra. Um the trans rights movement is different because it is asking for um it's a zero-sum question. They're asking for uh an increase in something which will be to the detriment of another group of people, women and girls. Um and I again, I mean, they can make that they can make that argument, they can have a debate about it, and if that's how they proceeded, I think that would be quite different. My view about it would remain the same. Um, but I wouldn't think it it was an attack on freedom of speech. Uh that isn't what's happening, uh, that isn't what's happened. And when we have this fragmentation, one of the points I make in the in the book is that um free speech ceases being between um uh citizens who have different classes, different political views, but share a view of the common good. Speech acts start becoming acts of provocation or diplomacy between different community groups. And that is what the British state is now trying to manage.

Arrests, Two-Tier Policing Claims

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Um I expect you would you have seen this horrendous murder um of Henry Novak at an 18-year-old in Britain, um, and uh the police handcuffing him as he lay dying, having said, I've been stabbed, and the police respond, I don't think you have made. Um it's been a huge scandal, and again has become a huge foreign policy problem for the British government because we now have JD Vance totally correctly criticising what's happened. Uh uh, yeah, I read what he said.

SPEAKER_02 30:57

He he's he's he likes to put the boot into the UK, doesn't he?

SPEAKER_01 31:00

He does, he does, Mr. Vance. He does. Um I mean it it it's it's extraordinary, really, how um the scale of how the free speech crisis has spread, because I do think Britain's past in the free world is now very much in question. I just don't see how you can have images of of uh people being arrested, uh, the comedian Graham Linehan turning up at an airport and being being taken away by the police for things he's posted on Twitter and all the rest of it. We had a story actually um last year uh with an American woman who lived in Britain, uh, Deborah Anderson, and she was a member of the free speech union. The police knocked on her door, and thank goodness she started recording the interaction immediately. Um, what happened was this police officer came around and he saw immediately that Deborah was very frail and had lost her hair, was uh in the advanced stages of cancer and going through chemotherapy. Despite knowing all of that, he came in, sat down, and said, Um, I'm here because something you've written on Facebook has offended somebody. And she says, Well, have I committed a crime? And he says, No. And she says, Well, what are you doing here? Why are you here? And there's no satisfactory answer to that. Um, and and then he sort of suggests that she might have to come and attend a police interview for something that he has said is not a crime because somebody else has been offended about something she's written. And that video went viral. I think four or five million people saw it on X alone. And I think when you see these things happening on a weekly basis in Britain, um I just I just don't see how America will continue to see that and think, yes, this is a reliable ally with a similar set of values.

SPEAKER_02 32:44

Well, well, that that's chapter one of the trial. Well, Franz Kafka, isn't it? That's how the trial opens. Well, well, uh I I think also it it's eventually, um, well, we may even be there now, it's gonna affect investment and all sorts of things. I don't think people are as prepared to invest in countries that are becoming you know stridently anti-democratic and uh will um you know knock on your door for things being said, um look at Putin's Russia, you know. So uh the economic situation, which I believe isn't that great in in the UK now anyway, um will just get worse because it, of course, free speech is actually key to innovation and um and also trust, I think, for people. You're right. I mean, America's gonna just stop trusting. I think they're there now, really, like with Iran and everything.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yeah. I mean, the reason to preserve free speech in Britain is not to say that the Americans think favorably about it, but I think it's a really serious consequence that the British state has been blindsided by. Um they do they seem to not understand that there is a free speech crisis. And uh when Keir Starmer was questioned about this, he had a very testy exchange in the Oval Office with um uh President Trump and Vice President Vance. Um and he said, We've had freedom of speech for a long time in Britain, and we're going to go on having freedom of speech for a long time. And when he said that, he was speaking within a month of somebody being arrested in Manchester in northern England um for burning a Quran in protest. And there has been this space of, and I say, by the way, I I don't approve of book burning, it's not an activity that that I I want to see going on. Um, and uh in in a European context, it obviously has quite um quite dark associations. Um, but nonetheless, it's a legitimate act of of protest for somebody to burn that.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

Free speech is is right. Yeah, free speech is about protecting some of these more unsavory expressions. I mean, that's um we're we're we're called upon to defend people that'll that the general population would think are are cranks. Or exactly. I mean, that's that's part of it. That's that's the game.

SPEAKER_01 35:01

Exactly. Um and um over here, the the UK Free Speech Union has dealt with three separate cases in about 18 months of people being prosecuted or threatened with prosecution for burning copies of the Quran. And uh two of those cases concern people who are not British, who are refugees who came here, um either, well, I think actually in both cases, because they'd um they'd left Islam um and one of them had converted to Christianity. And so they come here looking for a tradition of free speech that would protect them from the culture they'd left behind. They burnt Qurans in in protests and separate incidents and uh and were arrested for doing so. And in one of those cases, um uh man called Hamid Koskin, um he I mean, it's just an extraordinary story. Um, he was convicted, appealed, and was successful in overturning it. And then the Crown Prosecution Service appealed against his appeal. And I think I read about that, is he? A two Rush chap? Yes. That's it, and that's it.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

Were you defending him?

SPEAKER_01 36:10

Yes, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, interesting. So so we we won in the end. Um, but it again it just shows that this the imperatives of policing a multicultural state are such that that the Crown Prosecution Service decided we really need to send a very strong signal that there are some things you can't do because they're too distressing to elements within Muslim communities, and and this is one of them. Um and it it just was extraordinary the the length to which they went to uh to prosecute him. Um meanwhile, while he was burnt, he was so he was burning this this copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate. So it was a sort of political and religious protest. Um he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant um uh who uh was let off without ever having to go to prison. Um so the justice system has spent more time dealing with Hamet for burning a Quran than for the man who attacked him with a knife.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

And of course, that's just gonna make people uh well like ourselves and and and uh other the the public just have less trust in government and the system, and they're gonna respond likely by being even more sensorial, aren't they? I mean, they're just gonna double down and double down and double down until I mean that this is what I don't understand. These Keir Starmer is an intelligent man. Where does he think this is gonna end?

SPEAKER_01 37:44

Well one would one would imagine he's a um human rights lawyer with decades of experience, uh, was given a knighthood for his tenure as head of the Crown Prosecution Service before he came into politics. Um uh I think he may be a clever fool. That's my that's my sense of him. Um that he's got he's got no instinct um for governing and he's got no understanding of the conditions in the country which he he uh claims to lead. I would say, though, that I think he's uniquely badly suited to it, but I think even somebody who was well suited to it was a struggle. I mean, Britain now is churning through prime ministers at a quicker rate than Italy. Um, there is something about Britain that seems to be becoming fundamentally ungovernable. I mean, that's a different book to to mine, but I think it's probably related to the fragmentation of of our society.

SPEAKER_02 38:39

I

Social Cohesion After Secularisation

SPEAKER_02 38:40

want to talk about social cohesion, would be, you know, what it really means and things. So yeah, because you do talk about Aristotle and Durkheim. It'd be good to get those theories.

SPEAKER_01 38:50

Well, the the quote from uh Aristotle that I uh invoked throughout the book is uh that a city or a polity can't be a chance collection of peoples, that it has to have some kind of cohesive features. Um now, in my view, that doesn't necessarily have to be um uh in ethnic terms. Um uh you could construct a society that's cohesive, that's that is multiracial, and and I think the United States has a has a claim to have to have done that. Um but I think there are two things that I say in this book that really are preconditioned of calling something a society. It can't be a chance collection of people, it can't be haphazard, there has to be some unifying uh uh uh cohesive uh quality to the to that to the to the population in order for it to be a society. The second quote is from Durkheim that there has to be um uh some sense of uh regular collective rituals, I think is his phrase. There has to be some shared um to use the Latin word, relegare, something to bind, something to to cohere. Um to go back to your earlier question, I think the United States, as we've said, is very successful at creating a relegare, a system that that binds people together, and it has a very strong um uh republican character and institutions and uh traditions into which newcomers can be can be integrated. Um my thesis, my my argument in in the book is that um Britain has essentially broken both of those conditions of being a society, a single society, because it is a chant collection of people. Um something like one in 30 of Britain's population arrived in the last five years, for example. Um something like five million people arrived between 2021 and 2025. Um, and um it's correct to say that there are now more Muslims than there are Welsh people in the United Kingdom. Um, so it it really is a chant collection of people, it's quite a haphazard assembly of people. The other element of that that we've not really spoken about is um the idea of collective rituals, of a collective um belief system of some kind. Now, I argue that Britain has lost that as well, and this argument I think is also true of much of the Western world, um, because we've had a process of secularisation over the 19th and 20th centuries. Um then we have the phenomenon of new atheism, uh, to which I must say I was a committed supporter as a teenage uh new atheist. Um, but the effects of that has been instead of ushering in a world of uh rationalism and enlightenment uh and an end of dogmatism, those traits don't arise because of religion. They arise because those traits are an integral part of human nature. And so, in in kicking the old dead man of Christianity out of his chair, all we've actually done um is is leave an empty throne, to quote Paul Kingsnorth. And uh the people now, or the ideologies now trying to sit on that throne and replace Christianity are quite a lot worse.

SPEAKER_02 42:11

Yeah, there's something neo-Calvinist about uh woke politics, I think. They have their they have their holy people, they they uh have their clerical class that want to tell us all what to do. The other thing with America, I went to America in 2009 and and did a um made a documentary uh on a Maori man from New Zealand who had gone over there when he was eight, Ricky Ellison. He went over there and uh got into American football first and became a superstar, you know, did really well. And then after that, he went into missile defense lobbying, right? Right. So he's one of, yeah. So he's one of the chief missile defense lobbyists in the world now, right? Okay. Now it was interesting talking to him because he he he held on to a lot of elements of his Māori culture and did come back here. He lived in Christchurch for a year, went back to the States because he was so American by that stage. But you know, at his wedding, he did the haka and all all the Maori ritual and everything. But, you know, we were in Washington because he he lived in DC, so we could be close to those in power. And we shot at the memorial. Um, it's is it is it it's not Franklin, hey? Who's it who's it? The big guy. Lincoln. Lincoln. Yeah, Lincoln's dead. There's another one too. Uh Jefferson, I think. I think that I think there's a bit yet. Um, and he was talking about how he liked to go down there and just sit next to this statue of this great thinker when he had problems and he'd just sit next to this symb symbol of a strong uh intellectual powerhouse and just absorb the whole the spirit of that place. And I thought this is a Maori man who's gone over to the U to the US. But he's got those the founding fathers. That quite struck me because I wasn't used to that. I'd heard of them, obviously. But like they're like ghosts that travel around with Americans, you know what I mean? So uh having a common calendar is one thing, having a history and understanding the importance of that history uh is another. And I think the Americans actually have done that really well. I don't think we've done that, done that very well. I mean, Mori, um, the settlement of New Zealand, uh, our race relations are pretty good when comparatively to a lot of other places. But if you put me in the hot seat and really question me on uh a lot of our history, I I wouldn't be very strong. You know, I wouldn't be very strong. We weren't really uh we're trying to address that in the education system now, but it it but we we got bits and pieces. We it wasn't as strong as what you would would have got in an American school where they're doing, you know, the the national anthem every morning and things like that. So it's like these are the touchstones that they have on top of the First Amendment, I think, that mean that they're just they're really welcoming people into a common culture, calendar, and intro intellectual tradition, even.

SPEAKER_01 45:28

Yeah.

Americanisation And History Blind Spots

SPEAKER_01 45:29

What one of the um one of the vulnerabilities that's created by people not having a strong sense of their own country's history, whether that's New Zealand or Britain or elsewhere, um, is that it it does leave young people susceptible um to um woke ideas, uh the the flip side of American culture. Um and it it produced in in 2020 in Britain, for example, um the bizarre spectacle of people calling for uh the rights of indigenous people to be protected. Now, in Britain, I'm an indigenous person because my ancestry is half Anglo-Saxon and half Keld. So my ancestors have been here variously for 10,000 or 1500 years. Um and but you're framed as the other in that conversation, aren't you? Right, right. And so it it just it obviously stops making sense. And so you have this transposition of American ideas and and and obviously the the debate about indigenous peoples' rights in New Zealand and the United States, that whatever you think about it, it does make sense. Um it doesn't make any sense in England. Um, but because people don't have a sense of their own history, they are seeing these things on Instagram and on TikTok, they're repeating them, uh, and you get this this, I mean, quite stupid sloganeering, for example, of people facing unarmed British police officers with signs saying, hands up, don't shoot. Well, of course they're not going to shoot you. They don't carry guns. Uh, there's no there's no risk they're going to shoot you. Uh in order million years are they going to shoot? They've got no means to shoot you. Um, and so I think that's one of the problems. There is this um well, one of the one of the lines I I use in the book is that America is a faraway country of which we know too much. Um there is this Americanization. And there's things to admire about the United States, that there really are. Um, but I think it that admiration should come after a grounding in one's own history.

SPEAKER_02 47:30

Yeah, well, I find that with Israel-Palestine, when people talk about Israel being a colonizing, I mean, that they're they're looking, they're looking at it through their own lens, or or like you say, the in all these cultures, all these conflicts uh are so different, and they need to be, you need to do the work, really, don't you? You need to actually understand them.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

You do, you do. And um i in Britain, again, I mean, you you probably have seen there are these um massive scale protests, um, uh pro-Palestine protests and people chanting from the river to the sea, and there is there is this debate about um should that slogan be uh uh criminalized, should people who chant that be uh be arrested for doing so? And um it's a difficult question, and my answer to it is contextual. I think that uh for I would I would speculate, probably the majority of people who use that phrase don't know what river or what sea they're talking about, they've got no idea what it means. Um, they've learned from social media that they're an oppressed group of people and that saying this is a way of pressuring the baddies in the world um to help this this oppressed group, and that's the level of their analysis and understanding about it. Um so I I don't think at all that people should be um prosecuted universally for saying that. I mean, you could imagine a situation if if someone's whipping up a mob outside a synagogue shouting uh from the river to the sea, it might have some kind of violent uh uh overton or suggestion of incitement.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

Yeah, the the uh a public order sort of uh crime, maybe charge or something, like maybe not the speech, depending on what else was happening with it, and uh I guess the tone and everything. I mean I'm Jewish myself. I I I do worry that uh if we were well, I think the the the lesson from Bondi, to be honest, and and the the the hate speech laws and most of them did get knocked pushed back, but they tried to push a whole lot of crazy reforms through in three days. And and and it just on being on X, like pe people there were saying, Well, this is proof uh of the uh the outsizer's influence that Jews have. So it was you know what I mean? It wasn't pr there wasn't going to protect us. You know?

SPEAKER_01 49:58

Yeah, absolutely. Uh and similarly in Britain, there's there's been uh there have been calls to ban these marches. Um I I just don't see how that solves the problem. I mean, setting aside the civil liberties argument, it doesn't solve the problem. It gets rid of a superficial manifestation of it. Uh it it doesn't stop the spread of anti-Semitism.

SPEAKER_02 50:18

No, well, I don't think there's any uh research that will say that what Keir Starmer's doing is going to going to even lead to social cohesion, less racism, more understanding. Uh there's no data, is there? We'll we've engaged with Nadine Strassen on this. She said that there's kind there's really nothing.

SPEAKER_01 50:36

There's no the the fear, my fear in the book, and I I will say as well, for it by way of sales pitch, it's quite a short book because it's it's quite heavy in tone in places there. I've kept it quite short. My publisher said, Don't overstay, you're welcome. Um, so it's uh it's just under 200 pages, it's quite quite a slim volume. Um I I think that it's really important to be realistic about where we are and how we got here and about what the tensions of multiculturalism are. Um, one of the other points I make is that um the current uh fudge of pretending that everything's fine, that there aren't trade-offs, that there aren't tensions, um, it is that people who are minorities within minorities, uh liberal Muslims, ex-Muslims, and so on, those people are betrayed because um they really do want to live in a liberal democracy. Um, and the British state just has no interest in protecting their rights whatsoever. Um, it it's doing everything it can now um to keep the peace, but it's it's a short-termist strategy and it's it's kicking the can down the road. So this book is not a it's not a manifesto, it it doesn't have all of the answers, um, but it it does explain with recourse to a lot of data and polling um and uh and with the smattering of philosophy about what the problems are and what the trade-offs are and what the possible solutions to this might be.

Class Fear And Harsh Sentencing

SPEAKER_02 52:12

Now, this might sound a little uh don't don't take this the wrong way. Um, but I with the First Amendment in the US, so free speech is there to to frighten power, really, isn't it? It's there to frighten power. Among other things, but yes. Yeah, among other things, but but that's definitely uh a part of it. Like, you know, power won't get its way. So the relationship they have with the people, therefore, is a little different. Now, if you're doing everything in your power to suppress free speech, which is what I think we can fairly say that characters like Kear Starmer are doing, that to me shows a real contempt for the population at a level. And I wonder if uh uh if there's a class element to this, especially in the UK, that we might not even have down here. I mean, we we have classism and everything, but uh it's I I think our story and Australia's story is a lot of class distinctions did get broken down quite a lot with people coming over here. Um over there, I imagine they're probably still quite robust and in place. Yeah. So do you think do you think classism is a part of the story?

SPEAKER_01 53:31

I I do. Um there is this strange performance in modern Britain of egalitarianism. Um, but I I think within moments you can identify in Britain what someone's social class is. There's no way I could disguise my social class from somebody. It's it's a sense that all British people seem to have um to to uh interpret these things very quickly. Um I do think that among um the political elite class, there is a great fear of the white working class and of disorder, and that they are the group that are um feared most by um by the state. Uh David Betts, who uh I heard him speak on Saturday, he's a professor of war studies, and he started to make, in a very careful way, this hugely controversial argument that Britain and other European countries um are in conditions which suggest that they are likely to enter into civil conflict or even civil war of some kind in in the near future. Um it's worth reading his argument. I won't I won't repeat his entire analysis, um, the elements of it I agree with, and the elements of it I don't, um, but it it it it's a very comp he's a very thoughtful and and compelling and very sober academic who I think has to be has to be heeded. Um and I think that um this repression of and this anxiety about the white working class has to be seen in that context where um from the state's perspective that is the group most likely um to be able to cause serious social unrest. And that's why following um the Southport killings in which um uh many young, very young girls were attacked and and three girls were killed in an attack on a dance class, um there was this really intense repression um of people who had made anti-multiculturalism comments on social media. One of those, the most prominent example was a child of minor called Lucy Connolly, um, who said something I think was very unwise. Um uh she was talking about migrant hotels and she said, Um, burn them all down for all I care. Now I think for all I care is a significant mitigation, as is the fact that she deleted that post within four hours. But nonetheless, she was angry, yeah. She was angry, but an unwise an unwise thing to have said. Um, she received a 31-month uh jail sentence for that. Um, and all of the people who you would expect to be making the argument that um there needs to be uh prison reform, that women should only be sent to prison in very rare circumstances. Um, the fact that she has a child should have been taken into account. Uh all of those people were totally silent. I used to work for some of them, by the way. They're totally, totally silent. They're nowhere to be seen, they just don't care. So there is a class thing, uh, there is a class dimension to this. Um, I'm a bit of a class traitor, being from a uh to quote all well, a lower upper middle class background. Um uh and I think that my own social class needs to be um picked up and shaken and confronted with the facts of what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 57:06

Yeah, yeah. I I think censorship has always had a class dimension to it. I was actually interviewing a an Englishman who now lived in the US and uh and he was uh he moved over there to uh start restor restoring video nasties, you know, the the horror movies that were getting banned in the 80s. He he's a fascinating guy. You should have you should talk to him, he's fun. Um, but he was saying that you know, having to deal with censorship, you know, working as a young guy and for for distributors and things. If it was an art film, they'd always be lenient. But if it was something that they thought like the Yahoos would watch, then R2D or banned, you know what I mean? Because they didn't tr didn't trust the working class not to lose their minds if they saw, you know, breasts or something like this, you know.

SPEAKER_01 57:59

Well, it is so uh that I think that there's there's a line from the the uh Chattery trial of uh of when the judge said um it's not something you'd want your wife or servant to read. Um it's almost that kind it's that kind of mentality that um uh some groups can be trusted with certain things, but but ordinary working class people can't be.

Book Plug And Closing Notes

SPEAKER_02 58:22

Well, look, we won't we won't get into solutions because that's the teaser for the book, isn't it? I think our people need to buy this book, so where can they find it? Will it be on Amazon?

SPEAKER_01 58:31

And we're all yeah, Amazon's Amazon's the best place to go for it. Uh it's available uh in audiobook, uh, Kindle, and uh Harbak as well.

SPEAKER_02 58:40

Fantastic. Well, congratulations on uh being a writer. And let's hope there's many more.

SPEAKER_01 58:46

Yeah, thanks very much. Thanks for your time.

SPEAKER_02 58:49

Oh no, thank you for your time this morning, Ben. Uh that was Ben Jones. So, yeah, we'll um keep you posted. We we may actually get you back on for updates and things as well. So great.

SPEAKER_00 59:01

Thank you for listening to Free2Speak. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and consider sharing the podcast with others. We release new episodes regularly, and subscribing is the easiest way to stay up to date. If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, you can contact us at podcast at fsu.nz. If you want to find out more about the New Zealand Free Speech Union, visit fsu.nz.