On a recent trip to Berlin, I became friendly with an American ex-pat in a bar. Over too many steins of strong German lager, we held some good-natured discussions on the many political dilemmas facing our countries and the wider world today.
After ploughing through the usual topics of drunk political debate, where we found ourselves mainly agreeing, we got to free speech, specifically, free speech in the UK. From what I could gather, the man seemed to believe that the UK government under Sir Keir Starmer had taken a leaf out of the Soviet playbook and sought to silence critics of his government by using the police as a sort of KGB. I assured him that this was not the case.
Yet the intriguing thing is that this is not a fringe view. Those who inhabit the world of right-wing podcasts will hear this theory, or similar ones, bandied around constantly. Free speech crusader Joe Rogan, on the most successful podcast in history, seems intent on mentioning it to nearly every guest he invites. Whether the guest is a conspiracy theorist or an ex-UFC champion, he seems determined to bring up the perceived lack of freedom of expression in the UK.
Worryingly, this view has now filtered into mainstream politics by way of Donald Trump and his apprentice JD Vance, who were intent on grilling Keir Starmer on the topic when he visited the Oval Office earlier this year. Similarly, former Secretary of State under Trump, Mike Pompeo, also raised the issue as a guest on the Rest Is Politics: Leading podcast last month.
The statistic that 3,300 people were arrested in Great Britain last year for social media posts, compared to only 400 in Russia, is regularly used as fodder against Starmer’s government in the podcast world. However, it seems unwise to compare statistics from a government with a reputation for speaking the truth like Russia’s.
After the car crash that was comedian Graham Linehan being arrested by armed police officers at Heathrow last month, Keir Starmer declared at PMQs that we must “ensure police focus on the most serious issues, this includes tackling knife crime, anti-social behaviour, and violence.” He also praised the history of free speech in this country and added that he was “always proud to defend it.”
Anyone who believes Keir Starmer is attempting to silence opposition when these types of arrests occur is misconstruing the facts. The UK government clearly has a current issue with arrests made for online posts, yet this appears to be a failure in the creation of laws rather than any effort to control political narratives.
After the arrest of Mr. Linehan, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said, “Officers involved in the arrest had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed” under a law called The Public Order Act. He also complained that the police had “been left between a rock and a hard place by successive governments.”
The Prime Minister is by no means blameless here, these arrests are being carried out under his government, and they are subsequently accelerating the popularity of Reform and their concept of ‘Broken Britain.’
Especially among Gen Z, podcasts are among the most popular ways to consume media, and a significant number have hosts who are right-of-centre. Starmer must attempt to enact the common-sense policies he promised prior to the election, or he will continue to fuel an already ignited populist digital landscape.