Keir Starmer’s unrestrained war on freedom of speech continues
A year after the Southport massacre, state-sponsored censorship has worsened under Keir Starmer’s government. The Online Safety Act is being used to censor content critical of government immigration policy and the concerns over two-tier justice are growing.
The following are two articles picked up by UK Reloaded that demonstrate the ever-worsening situation in the UK.
Table of Contents
Southport a Year On: No Lessons Learned
By Frank Haviland, 30 July 2025
As I wrote a year ago, the Southport massacre was a checkmate for the multiculturalists:
Southport is the end of the line for me, I’m afraid. I refuse to play this game any longer. So “No” Prime Minister Starmer, you do not speak for me – I am not remotely “shocked” that the caravan of mass slaughter has made an unscheduled stop in Southport. “Au contraire,” your Majesties, I do not find it difficult to “imagine what the families, friends and loved ones are going through” (and doubtless, given time, neither will the rest of you). And it’s “Uh-uh” to you too, Home Secretary Cooper, my “thoughts and prayers” already have a prior engagement; resigned to the hope that the “refugees welcome” conniving bastards like you are one day held accountable for the blood on your hands. I’m sick of it all, but mostly I’m sick of the innocent picking up the bar tab for the multicultural piss-up they were denied entry to.
A year ago, I thought the situation couldn’t possibly get any worse. But then, like many frustrated Cassandras, it’s difficult to be sufficiently doom-mongering about the Starmer administration – a government whose Midas-like 174-seat majority still winds up turning everything to shit.
Announcing a public inquiry at the start of this year, Keir Starmer promised that Southport would be “a line in the sand” and that “nothing would be off the table”. And yet, the current situation is, unthinkably, worse. Under Starmer’s watch, from January to June 2025, there were around 20,000 small boat crossings – the highest ever number for this period, and 48% more than the same period in 2024. Meanwhile, thousands of Afghans have been secretly smuggled to Britain (some of them undoubtedly jihadists), after concerns for their safety following a Ministry of Defence data leak. Not to worry, says the Taliban, we’ll come and kill them over there. Keir Starmer may have been a human rights lawyer, but the human rights of British people, clearly, do not feature heavily in his statute book.
The fact is, whatever he says publicly, Starmer is simply not interested in stopping the boats, smashing the gangs or slowing the stab-rate. He’d much rather prevent the public from noticing, and severely punishes anyone who does. As a case in point, consider the dystopian wet dream that is the Online Safety Act – sold as the protection of children. Consider the irony of that for a moment. Not only does the Act criminalise any false statement that causes “non-trivial psychological harm” – effectively the end of comedy, it means content critical of government immigration policy can and is being censored. The real joke, of course, is that any child old enough to be gang-raped in a Labour constituency of their choice, will need about 10 seconds to circumvent these draconian restrictions.
[Related:
- Could debate on immigration be suppressed? Open Rights Group, 1 September 2022
- Reform UK chief erupts as migrant hotel protest ‘censored’ under new law, Express, 28 July 2025
- UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act, The Register, 28 July 2025
- Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that, The Register, 31 July 2025]
As for the two-tier justice that Starmer et al always deny, it’s painfully obvious to anyone with a brain cell that the British are second-class citizens in their own homeland. A great illustration of that is the juxtaposition of the Manchester Airport attack and the Southport riots, which occurred within days of each other. A year on, and Judge Neil Flewitt still hasn’t managed to persuade the jury that the Manchester attackers (brothers Mohammed Fahir Amaaz and Muhammad Amaad) ought to get anything more than a smack on the wrist, after inflicting a “high level of violence” on the Greater Manchester Police officers.
Indeed, the Judge seemed unusually determined to address the jury on the nature of the defendants’ “good character,” noting that they had no previous convictions:
Although good character is not a defence to any of the charges faced by the defendants, it is relevant in two ways. Firstly, as the defendants have given evidence, their good character is a positive feature which you should take into account in their favour when considering whether you accept what they told you.
Secondly, the fact that the defendants have not offended in the past, either before or since 23 July 2024, may make it less likely that they acted as the prosecution allege in this case.
It is for you to decide how much importance you attach to the defendants’ good character and it is for you to decide the extent to which it assists on the facts of this particular case. In making those decisions you should take into account everything that you have heard about them, including the unchallenged testimonials that were read on their behalf.
[Note from The Exposé: The above seems to be following the typical wording for a “good character” direction, read HERE.]
It is worth noting that Flewitt had no such qualms regarding “good character” or a lack of previous convictions, when sentencing many of the Southport rioters in double-quick time last year.
A week on from the Manchester attack, Axel Rudakubana committed what Sir Adrian Fulford, chair of the Southport public inquiry, called “one of the most egregious crimes in our country’s history.” It’s worth pointing that out, because if you read any of the sanitised, cut-and-paste tweets from prominent Labour politicians yesterday, you might not have realised what they were talking about.
This was Keir Starmer’s pathetic attempt:
Not a single mention of Rudakubana, murder, terrorism or the ideology that inspired it.
[Related: Starmer lied: Riots after Southport murders were not caused by the “far right,” new report finds]
Angela Rayner’s was no better, but then this was the woman famously filmed begging for Muslim votes:
Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper’s heart clearly wasn’t in it, as she barely managed four lines:
“We stand together in grief,” “all those whose lives were changed forever,” “A year since Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe were taken from us” – this passivity amounts to little more than gaslighting. Such poetry miraculously dries up when it’s time to admonish the “far-right” – those so extreme, they object to the mass slaughter of little girls. In the case of the Southport riots, Starmer’s words suddenly renewed their vigour: “violent disorder” committed by a “tiny, mindless minority” of “far-right thugs.”
Government incompetence on this scale tests the limits of credulity, even for a dullard like Starmer. Such incompetence only ever working one way, however, leads to one inescapable conclusion: it’s deliberate. If only Lucy Connolly had had the sense to wear a hijab and merely chinned a policewoman instead of tweeting, no doubt she’d still be out on bail!
[Related: Lucy Connolly’s case demonstrates that two-tier injustice is politically motivated “from the top”]
Never before has a British government openly displayed such utter contempt for the electorate. The Labour Party clearly hates the public it claims to “serve,” and its only plan appears to be the appeasement of Islam until the British are so far eradicated, they can no longer muster a response.
This, however, would be a grave mistake. Starmer may not have liked the Southport riots, but he ain’t seen nothing yet. Britain as it stands is a tinderbox. All it needs is a spark to set it off. The acquittal of the Manchester thugs would be more than sufficient.
[Note from The Exposé: Sky News reported yesterday that Mohammed Fahir Amaaz was found guilty of assaulting two female police officers and a member of the public. Prosecutors say they intend to retry both defendants on the charge they assaulted a male firearms officer, causing actual bodily harm. Also see HERE.]
The article above, ‘Southport a Year On: No Lessons Learned’, was created and published by Frank Haviland and is republished here under “Fair Use”
How Free Speech Became a Victim of the Southport Riots
The government’s crackdown on social media revealed the terrifying authoritarianism of our ruling class.
By Tom Slater, as published by Spiked Online on 29 July 2025
‘Think before you post.’ That was the message screamed out from government social-media accounts this time last year, as it desperately tried to quell the riots that erupted after the Southport killings, sparked by speculation the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker.
Today marks a year since that unspeakable horror – when Axel Rudakubana, the Cardiff-born son of Rwandan parents, walked into that Merseyside dance class, intent on killing as many children as he could. What happened next – the protests, the riots, the censorship – revealed a nation coming apart, and a government so dim and authoritarian that it looked upon scenes of hate-fuelled violence and instantly concluded that freedom of speech was almost entirely to blame.
And so, amid locking up the mix of racists, opportunists and thrill-seeking teenagers who inflicted so much carnage and fear on communities across the country, throwing bricks at mosques and trying to set hotels housing migrants on fire, the police also found time to go after those who had expressed despicable things online.
You will have heard of Lucy Connolly, the Northampton childminder who took to X in the wake of Southport to declare “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care,” earning her two years and seven months in prison. Less known is Tyler Kay, who received three years and two months for copying, pasting and posting Connolly’s tweet to his 127 followers. They were both convicted of “stirring up racial hatred.”
Fifty-three-year-old Julie Sweeney was given 15 months inside for “sending communications threatening death or serious harm.” “Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosques up with the adults in it,” she had posted, in a community Facebook group. Sweeney had never been arrested before and was her husband’s primary carer.
Of course, threats or direct incitement to violence are not considered freedom of speech in any civilised nation, even the US. But the idea that Connolly’s, Kay’s or Sweeney’s rank little missives, muttered darkly into the digital ether, were both likely and intended to spark rioting and murder was a considerable stretch, and the hefty sentences meted out to them – eclipsing those for even violent crimes – were wildly disproportionate.
Even so, the arrests, prosecutions and convictions weren’t limited to those who appeared to call for – or more accurately, revel in – the violence that had already erupted. Lee Joseph Dunn, from Cumbria, was jailed for eight weeks for posting “grossly offensive” memes, a crime under Section 127 of the Communications Act. They depicted Asian men, arriving on boats, with knives. “Coming to a town near you,” ran the lurid caption.
Those who witlessly shared false information also received a knock at the door. Bernadette Spofforth, a conspiratorial tweeter from Cheshire, was arrested on suspicion of “stirring up racial hatred” and sending “false communications.” She had amplified that bogus claim that the Southport perpetrator was Ali Al-Shakati, a small-boats migrant on a watchlist. In the end, police took no further action, due to “insufficient evidence.”
Dimitrie Stoica, a Romanian migrant living in Derby, wasn’t so lucky. He landed himself a three-month prison sentence over a livestream in which he pretended to be fleeing from a far-right mob. In truth, there had been no trouble in the city that night. Still, the news that lying for attention on social media is a crime no doubt sent shivers down the spines of the nation’s influencers.
This crackdown won’t have surprised anyone who had been paying attention. For 60 years, Britain has been engaged in a foolhardy experiment in policing hate, offence, misinformation – as if any of these concepts can be neatly, objectively, defined. Alongside acid washing your social-media feeds, as users discovered to their horror this week, the 2023 Online Safety Act also brought in a new “false communications offence” that caught out Stoica and – very nearly – Spofforth.
But it would be naive to say all of these cases were simply about the criminal justice system applying the law without fear or favour. From the top of government, the message rang out that riots-adjacent hate-speakers would be made examples of. Connolly received a longer sentence than Philip Prescott, an actual Southport rioter, who helped menace the local mosque. Since then, she has been denied release on temporary licence, reportedly due to “media interest” in her case.
Entirely innocent people, who had said nothing inflammatory or hateful, were caught in the riptide, too. Take Jamie Michael, a former Royal Marine from the Welsh valleys, who was arrested, held in custody for 17 days, sent home on a tag, and all for a Facebook video after Southport in which he called for a public meeting to discuss the threat posed by illegal migration and the need for security at parks and schools to protect children. If he wasn’t one of the few Southport speech criminals who pleaded not guilty, he’d probably still be inside now. In the end, with help from the Free Speech Union, he was acquitted by a jury in just 17 minutes, one for every day he had been in a jail cell. Apparently, his cup of tea hadn’t even had a chance to cool when he and his legal team were rushed back in for the verdict.
There are no doubt many more Jamie Michaels who we do not know about. The UK is investigating more people for speech crimes today than America did during the First Red Scare. At least 30 people are now arrested each day for “grossly offensive” speech under the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act. And those are just two pieces of censorious legislation, among a groaning bookshelf of them.
Naturally, having demonstrated the full gamut of its censorious powers post-Southport, Labour now wants to go further. There has been talk of making the Online Safety Act even more dystopian, by reviving provisions forcing Big Tech firms to remove “legal but harmful” speech. A working group is drawing up a definition of “Islamophobia,” to be imposed on government bodies. Having apparently concluded that Britain’s increasingly agoraphobic coppers don’t spend enough time scouring social media, there are even plans for a new “elite team of police officers” to monitor anti-migrant online sentiment. What could possibly go wrong?
After Southport, there was some ridiculous talk on X that Britain had gone the full North Korea: that Keir Starmer had established the world’s first personalist dictatorship without the merest whiff of a personality. But that doesn’t mean what we are actually contending with is any less chilling. We are ruled by people who see censorship as all that stands between civilisation and barbarism. Who see freedom of speech as the root cause of riots and racism, rather than the means through which you can challenge prejudice and salve tensions in society.
This is a recipe not only for ever-more authoritarianism, but also for more of the fear, division and distrust that are already pulling at the threads of a fraying society. Think before you post? Think before you censor!
The article above, ‘How free speech became a victim of the Southport riots’, was created and published by Spiked Online and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Tom Slater.
Featured image: Keir Starmer. Source: Getty Images
