ANDREW NEIL: Free speech is beneath risk as by no means earlier than

We live in an age of authoritarians who have not only halted, so far, the spread of democracy in the 21st century but whose totalitarian methods and attitudes are now infecting and undermining the democracies themselves, especially when it comes to that most valuable of all rights – free speech.

The right to say or write what you want without fear of repercussions is, of course, the first right dictators snuff out when they grab power.

But free speech is now in retreat across the democratic world too, as governments, politicians, judges and powerful lobbies, intent on imposing their view of the world, increasingly seek to curtail or censor what we can say, see or hear.

Everywhere you look, free speech is in retreat. Last month, a Hong Kong court convicted two editors of a now-defunct independent news website of sedition for reporting China’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy dissent in the former British colony in 2020 and 2021.

Hong Kong was once a beacon of the free press in a part of the world where censorship was too often the norm. Now, when it comes to free speech, it has entered the dark ages with the rest of totalitarian China.

Also late last month – but closer to home – Pavel Durov, the Russian billionaire founder of Telegram, a secure messaging service with 50 per cent more users than X/Twitter, was arrested when his private jet landed in Paris.

French prosecutors have since indicted him on six charges of illicit activity on the platform.

Durov’s arrest created much more of a fuss than the Hong Kong case, largely because, since it was swallowed up whole by Communist China, which has never known free speech, Britain’s former colony has become just another casualty of the two decades’ long march of the autocrats.

Nor is Durov’s arrest purely a free speech matter. Telegram has been a boon to those who live in the grimmest dictatorships, giving them a platform on which to opine and exchange information banned by the regime.

But the apparent impossibility of cracking its content has also made it a platform for child pornographers and abusers, drug dealers, people traffickers and money launderers. Durov is being charged for allowing this to happen on his platform unchecked.

Free speech does not mean unbridled licence. It cannot be used to promote criminality or racism or violence.

You cannot shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded cinema just for the fun of it.

But in weighing competing claims in the balance, democracies should always have a bias in favour of freedom of expression. That disposition, which should come naturally in free societies, is being lost.

In Brazil, an imperfect, messy but rumbustious and vibrant Latin American democracy, a senior activist judge has just banned X/Twitter, with the full support of the country’s Supreme Court and the government, led by a Left-wing populist, Lula da Silva.

Brazil is X’s fourth largest market, where 22 million users regularly take to the platform, often to let off steam about the government and its supporters.

It has been banned because its multi-billionaire owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with court orders to remove dozens of accounts critical of the government, including some belonging to members of Brazil’s Congress.

The judge has also ordered Google and Apple to remove the X app from their platforms and threatened fines of £6,750 a day for anybody who tries to get round the blockade by using a VPN connection which can disguise where you’re tweeting from.

It’s a clear clampdown on democratic dissent. We should not be surprised President de Silva supports it. He’s a fan of Communist Cuba, where free speech is still not tolerated, and a supporter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He even has a soft spot for Hamas.

X, of course, is banned in most of the world’s autocracies, from Russia to China to Venezuela, whose dictator president, Nicolás Maduro, banned it to cover up the fact that he won the recent election only thanks to widespread fraud.

Pakistan has also banned X, in its case to hide political repression and systemic human rights violations.

But Brazil has the inglorious distinction of being the first democracy to outlaw its use. People wonder who’ll be next in Latin America.

Perhaps Mexico, whose outgoing President Obrador, another Left-wing populist, became increasingly authoritarian the longer he was in power and whose final act was to end the independence of the judiciary. Obrador’s successor will be Mexico’s first female president – she is also his protégé.

Events in Brazil are perhaps at the extreme end of threats to free speech in a democracy. But even in America, where free speech has always enjoyed the protection of the mighty First Amendment to the Constitution, it is being whittled away.

In a remarkable letter to the US Congress last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration strong-armed him into taking down posts suggesting Covid vaccines might have serious side effects or that masks didn’t work. ‘I regret we were not more outspoken about it,’ wrote Zuckerberg, somewhat belatedly.

It doesn’t bode well for free speech under a Kamala Harris presidency. After all, she was second-in-command when the US government was leaning on Facebook to censor content it regarded as inconvenient. Plus, she has previous in the censorship stakes.

Five years ago, when she was California’s attorney general (the state’s top legal officer), she pressed the boss of what was then known as Twitter to ban Donald Trump from the platform. Trump was then the president.

When it was put to her on CNN that this was surely a ‘violation of free speech’ and a ‘slippery slope’ to widespread banning, she replied that online free speech was a ‘privilege’ and that censorship defended ‘our democracy’ from those who spread fake news and disinformation.

It would be hard for her to be more wrong.

Free speech is not a privilege in America: it is guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The idea people need censorship to protect them from ‘bad’ information is not appropriate language for a Democrat.

That is the argument of dictators throughout the ages to justify their control of news and opinion. Free speech – along with transparency – is the disinfectant that keeps democracies free.

The fact she clearly doesn’t understand this suggests that, should she win in November, free speech will not have an ally in the Oval Office.

Things are not that much better over here in Blighty.

Left-wing feminists are hounded from their academic posts or face having their careers stymied for refusing to bow before the ideology of the ubiquitous – and vitriolic – trans lobby. A similar fate greets more conservative scholars who dare to challenge the new academic consensus that Britain’s past is uniquely evil.

This all serves to close down discourse in the one place where free speech should be at its free-est: our universities.

Instead they are now dominated by a debilitating groupthink from which you deviate at your peril: unless you have the tenacity and resources of a JK Rowling.

But the threat to free speech in Britain goes far beyond the campus. Everybody’s right to say what they want is at risk.

Police, slow to investigate burglaries, theft and other crimes that people care about, seem to spend an inordinate amount of time chronicling so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’, or NCHIs.

The fact they are, by definition, not crimes might make you wonder why the police are involved at all. But that does not deter the forces of law and order, which now appear to be more interested in what we think than what we do.

‘Trans rights are boring,’ tweeted a Surrey parish councillor. He was threatened with arrest.

An ex-soldier who shared on social media a stupid image in which rainbow pride flags had been rearranged into a swastika was arrested because ‘someone has been caused anxiety’ by the post. ‘I need to check your thinking,’ said one officer investigating an NCHI. It spoke ominously for the current police frame of mind.

In fact, the police have neither the right nor the qualifications to investigate our thoughts.

Almost 50 per cent of England’s police forces have failed to solve a single burglary in the past year.

They might like to do a little better when it comes to what’s going on inside our houses before trying to see inside our minds.

But it’s about to get worse.

The previous Tory government recently tried to tighten up the basis for investigating NCHIs.

It didn’t seem to make much difference and the numbers logged stayed the same.

The Free Speech Union, a doughty defender of freedom, reckons about a quarter of a million such incidents have been recorded since the College of Policing concocted the concept in 2014.

If you’re linked to an NCHI it can show up on enhanced criminal record checks.

It can seriously undermine your chances of being hired for a new job, especially one in the public sector. The Court of Appeal has talked about the ‘chilling effect on public debate’ – in other words on free speech.

No matter. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, a bossy Roundhead if ever there was one, wants to reverse the Tories’ tighter rules so that the police can record more NCHIs, not fewer.

Keir Starmer’s government has already canned legislation designed to protect free speech in higher education. It’s also toughened up online safety laws in ways that will endanger free speech.

All the signs are that the Starmer administration is no more a friend of free speech than a Harris White House would be.

We have come a long way since the days we thought progress was best served by allowing all manner of opinions to be expressed, to be tested by time, events, argument and scrutiny, with the best emerging triumphant to guide us forward.

Now we have a ruling elite, increasingly dominant in public life, which is hostile to free speech if it means the expression of opinions of which it disapproves.

Unfashionable ideas are no longer to be tested, they are to be shut down. Promotion and plum jobs will go to those who toe the line. Those stupid enough to dissent will be dispatched to some metaphorical gulag. The glittering prizes will go to the compliant and obedient. It’s already happening.

Of course we’re still a free society compared to the dictatorships. But bit by bit our freedoms are being eroded, above all when it comes to free speech.

The Enlightenment set us on our free-speech path more than 250 years ago and, until recently, we have followed it faithfully, to our immense benefit, and exported it to nascent democracies which also saw its value.

Now, in an epochal change, we are putting the Enlightenment into reverse. Free speech is under siege on multiple fronts.

We know that freedom is hard won, now we’re about to learn that it’s easily lost unless good people stand up for it.

If they don’t, we will wake up one day to discover we are so cribbed and confined in what we can say that free speech has effectively become a feature of our past.

We would not quickly get it back.