THE gauleiters of this deeply inept and sinister Labour government are now pushing for legislation which could become the biggest threat to free speech in this country’s modern history. Their target is the public square. Their weapon is the news feed. Their excuse is ‘trusted news’.
Among the final utterances of failed Prime Minster Sir Keir Starmer is that Labour is considering forcing social media companies and platforms such as YouTube to give greater prominence to ‘public service journalism’. Strip away the velvet language and the meaning is brutal. Private companies are to be ordered to push state-approved broadcasters in front of the public while newspapers, independent journalists, online creators, sceptics and dissenters are shoved down the digital staircase.
In the old world, censorship meant police at the printer’s door and shadowy ‘D’ notices. In the digital world, it adopts the newspeak of safety and is enforced through algorithm. The modern censor does not have to resort to the frenzied book-burning of Fahrenheit 451. He does not need to ban your website. He buries it beneath ‘trusted’ sources. He does not need to criminalise dissent on Net Zero, immigration, Gaza, covid, Brexit or the BBC itself. He ensures the approved version appears first and the dissenter disappears.
That is what is what this wretched Labour government is now heading towards.
Labour says the public must be helped to ‘discover trusted news sources’ and protected from misinformation. Every regime that wants to control speech says the same thing in its own language. Then the machinery is built and the labels are applied. This is the road to savage dictatorship.
The British people did not vote to have their news feeds managed by Labour ministers and their lackeys at Ofcom and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. They did not vote for the BBC to be enthroned as the official guardian of truth, or for a government with no mandate for its full Net Zero extremism to rig the information system against those who challenge it.
That is the real issue. This is not about helping people find reliable journalism. It is about protecting a dangerous, authoritarian government from scrutiny. On Net Zero, the public are being marched towards higher bills, weaker industry, reduced energy security and national impoverishment by politicians who behave as though the argument is over. It is not over. It has barely begun. The costs, assumptions, trade-offs and fantasies of Net Zero should be exposed daily.
Instead Labour wants a Big Brother regime in which the BBC is pushed to the top of the feed. For at least 40 years the BBC has not been a beacon of truth. It has become the leftist house broadcaster of establishment prejudice. It disgracefully substitutes the worldview of its own class for the desire of the nation. Again and again, on the defining issues of our time, it has not reported reality. It has arranged reality.
On Net Zero, the BBC treats a gigantic political and economic project as though it were holy writ. Costs are softened. Dissent is pathologised. Sceptics are framed as cranks or deniers. The destruction of energy security is presented as virtue. De-industrialisation is sold as progress. The public are not invited into an argument: they are inducted into a faith.
On Brexit, the BBC turned the largest democratic instruction in British history into a years-long exercise in institutional grief. The constitutional case for self-government was buried under elite forecasts, business anxieties and Remainer assumptions. The voters had spoken, but the BBC carried on broadcasting as though the grown-ups needed to repair the damage.
On immigration, it has for years filtered public concern through a moral lens designed to make restriction look hard-hearted and liberalisation humane. Numbers, housing, wages, public services, cohesion and national identity are treated not as the legitimate concerns of citizens, but as awkward material to be processed by experts.
On Gaza, the corporation’s record has been grotesquely distorted by questions about framing, sourcing and moral balance. This is the sort of output Labour apparently wants elevated as an antidote to ‘misinformation’.
On the trans debate, the leaked Michael Prescott memo found that the BBC’s LGBT desk had subjected coverage to ‘effective censorship’, with stories departing from a hyper-progressive line seemingly ignored. This is not public service journalism. It is ideological gatekeeping via an enforced telly tax.
Then there is ‘BBC Verify’, the corporation’s self-anointed truth squad. But who verifies the verifiers? A broadcaster whose deepest bias lies in selection, omission, framing, tone and emphasis cannot wash itself clean by inventing a brand with a forensic name.
This is why Orwell is not a cliché here. In 1984, Winston Smith worked in the Ministry of Truth rewriting the past to fit the Party’s present needs. The terror was not only the lie. It was the destruction of independent memory. Citizens were trapped inside an official version of reality.
Modern Britain is not Oceania, but the direction of travel under Labour is unmistakable. The state does not need a Ministry of Truth when it can build one out of platform rules, ‘trusted news’ labels, BBC Verify, compliant regulators, tame institutions and frightened tech companies. Big Brother did not have artificial intelligence, behavioural science, real-time feeds and global platforms. This government does.
That makes it more dangerous, not less.
The BBC’s defenders claim social media is chaotic, vulgar and full of nonsense. So what? Democracy is chaotic. Freedom is chaotic. The public square, such as Speakers’ Corner, has always contained, in addition to truth-tellers with wisdom and common sense, those who are fools, fanatics, bores, cranks, prophets and liars. The answer to bad speech is not state-preferred speech. The answer is more speech, more challenge, more memory, more rivalry, more exposure and more freedom.
Labour’s plan would do the opposite. It would shrink the space for newspapers, independent journalists and online dissent. It would give official broadcasters an artificial advantage. It would let the government pretend to fight misinformation while helping its ideological allies dominate the feed. This is press regulation by stealth and censorship by ranking.
The public would still be ‘free’ to find other views, just as a prisoner is ‘free’ to admire the sky through bars. Dissent would remain legal, but buried. Opposition would remain possible, but harder to hear. That is perhaps how liberty dies in the algorithmic age: not with a bonfire of books, but with a tweak to distribution.
If the BBC wants trust, let it earn it. If BBC Verify wants authority, let it submit to robust public accountability.
A free people do not need state-approved truth rammed into their faces. They do not need ministers and unaccountable, shadowy state employees deciding which voices rise and which sink. Whatever shape-shifting guise this government now adopts, it must keep its sinister hands off the public square.