Are We the Baddies?

“At what point did we become North Korea?” Well, quite. When Nigel Farage appeared before the U.S. Congress last week to discuss free speech in the UK, there was a bitter irony in the moment. A man once derided as a ‘Little Britain’ nationalist had been invited to the heart of Washington to warn Americans that his country—the birthplace of Magna Carta, Locke, Mill, and Orwell—has drifted into tyranny. Indeed, Farage might have added that more people are arrested for the things they say in London than in Moscow. That wouldn’t have been just empty rhetoric: the figures would have backed him up.

Britain was once synonymous with liberty. Not anymore. Police records show that 12,000 people are arrested each year for things they say online. That is roughly 33 people every day—men and women dragged into custody for a tweet, a Facebook post, or a sardonic message in a WhatsApp group. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988 criminalise anything “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” “obscene,” or “likely to cause distress.” But who decides what offends? Who acts as the arbiter of distress? Naturally, the police. In Hertfordshire, a mother was arrested in front of her children for criticising a school on WhatsApp. Also in Britain, a teenager was convicted for posting rap lyrics on Instagram—lyrics already licensed and streamed legally on Spotify. Pensioners have faced prosecution for retweeting crude memes. This is not the suppression of terrorism or incitement to violence; it is the criminalisation of bad jokes, blunt opinions, tasteless venting, or mere disagreement. If a Tommy storming into Normandy or fighting at Arnhem back in 1944 had been told that this would one day be a daily occurrence in his native England, would he have believed it?

But Britain is just one dark example in what has become a continent obsessed with censorship. Germany, too, has been refining the art of censorship. What it has so far achieved would make the Stasi smile. The 2017 NetzDG law, also known as ‘Facebook Law,’ requires platforms to delete “illegal content” within 24 hours or face fines up to €50 million. Predictably, out of caution, corporations delete far more than the law demands, therefore wiping satire, political debate, and inconvenient dissent. The law was sold as a weapon against ‘hate speech.’ In practice, it created a privatised censorship machine: Silicon Valley firms deciding what Germans are allowed to read, lest they face the wrath of the Bundesregierung. France, meanwhile, has turned its already suffocating hate-speech codes into a tool for criminalising disagreement, patriotism, and humour. Citizens have been fined for caricatures of politicians; protesters against Macron’s policies have been prosecuted for slogans deemed offensive. Even Denmark—long admired for its blunt plain-speaking, not least during the Muhammad cartoons controversy—brought back blasphemy laws in the name of “community cohesion.”

The EU animates this inquisitorial effort. The Digital Services Act gives its unelected apparatchiki the power to demand the removal of online speech across all 27 member states. The label of ‘disinformation’ or ‘harmful content’ suffices—even though both are so vague they can mean whatever a commissioner wants them to mean. The U.S. State Department has called the DSA “Orwellian.” The Americans are right, though even Orwell might have blanched at the sheer scale of what the Eurocrats have managed to concoct: a distant nomenklatura now policing the speech of hundreds of millions of Europeans who never voted for them, never consented to their authority, and who have no way of getting rid of them.

But what seems the most staggering is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. European leaders barely pass a day without denouncing Russia and China as enemies of liberty—and, granted, neither government is exactly a liberal democracy. But consider this: out of a population of circa 60 million (that is, England and Wales, not including Scotland), Britain is arresting 12,000 of its own citizens for the things they say online. Each year. That’s 20 in every 100,000. Russia, with a population of circa 150 million, arrested or fined some 2,800 people in 2023 for reasons such as “disinformation”, “discrediting the army”, or other speech-related offences, according to NGOs such as OVD-Info and the SOVA Centre. That’s 1.4-2.1 in every 100,000 Russians.

European governments may pretend their motives are nobler. Every censor in history has claimed virtue. The Bolsheviks silenced ‘counter-revolutionaries’ as ‘enemies of the people.’ Beijing justifies censorship as protection of ‘harmony.’ In Brussels the excuse is ‘safety’ and ‘inclusion.’ If a government wants to suppress dissent, it will always find the excuse. We all know what the excuse is in Europe’s case—and we all know what the actual motive is.

Europe’s newly overt illiberal liberalism isn’t about the protection of anyone’s rights, as it piously asserts. It is about preserving, by whatever means necessary, the power of Europe’s threatened elites. But it is also suicidal for Europe’s credibility as a beacon of liberty. How can the Union lecture others on freedom of speech while silencing its own citizens? How can Brussels condemn ‘disinformation’ in Beijing while ordering takedowns of political dissent at home? When Farage told Congress that Britain is now the cautionary tale, the words stung because they were true. The moral high ground has collapsed. Only America remains true to the West’s great tradition of spiritual liberty and unimpeded opinion.

Europe once gave the world its most eloquent defenders of liberty. Liberty as we think of it today, indeed, is a wholly European invention. It is grotesque that their descendants now hand down edicts of censorship. Voltaire, Mill, Camus, Orwell, even Churchill or de Gaulle—all would be unpublishable today under the elastic definitions of “hate” and “harm” devised by the professional censors. Farage’s testimony in Washington was a reminder of what we risk losing. With America now the last fortress of free thought and speech in the West, Winston’s words again seem strangely poignant. Must we, too, wait for the “New World, with all its power and might” to “set forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old”?