Starmer’s Britain is descending into anarcho-tyranny

Even Nigel Farage testifying before the US Congress did not convey the full horror of what is happening in the 

03 September 2025 

Daily Telegraph

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Britain, once the freest, most democratic country in the world, is descending into anarcho-tyranny. Bereft of a moral compass, contemptuous of public opinion, uninterested in our glorious history of ordered freedom, the British state’s nomenklatura are presiding over an intolerable mix of chaos and authoritarianism, failing to tackle genuine criminality while persecuting respectable citizens for their thoughts and speech.

The contradictions, double-standards and selective enforcement are a national scandal. They threaten to turn us into a pariah state, shunned or even sanctioned by true believers in liberty.

Nigel Farage was in Washington, explaining to shocked Anglophile congressmen just how far we have turned our back on free speech, and yet even the Reform leader couldn’t fully convey in one session the full extent of Britain’s degeneration.

If you are a shoplifter, an illegal immigrant, a ne’er-do-well pretending to be disabled to claim benefits or a “petty criminal” no longer deemed worthy of prison, you have little to fear in anarchical Britain, where there is little money and limited policing resources to come after you. If you are a responsible pillar of the community exercising your traditional right to free speech, and have forthright or anti-woke views, you risk trouble from the commissars of authoritarian Britain, who suddenly have endless capacity to track you down, monitor your public and private messages and detain you.

The case of Graham Linehan, the Father Ted creator, was especially shocking: he was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow, interrogated over innocuous gender-critical tweets and ended up in hospital with elevated blood pressure. This is what happens in police-states, not civilised countries.

Nobody who engages in wrongthink is safe: thousands of ordinary people have been harassed, but so have leading journalists such as our own Allison Pearson, the author Julie Bindel and even a former Labour MP. As in all authoritarian regimes, the knock on the door can come at any time, for anyone, for any reason. The process is the punishment. Many stay quiet for an easier life.

The great paradox is that the advent of “human rights” as our secular religion undermined our traditional liberties and coincided with the decline of freedom of expression. Human rights curtailed our real rights, the very opposite of what we were promised. The Blairite revolution, which began in 1997, is to blame.

It is true that free speech was insufficiently protected in the 1980s and 1990s. But the Human Rights Act (HRA), the creation of the Supreme Court, the Left-wing takeover of our institutions, the rise of quangos, the onset of lawfare and the rest not only didn’t solve the problem but actually made it, and much else, worse. The public ended up less free to say what it thinks. The rot spread further during the technocratic Tory years of 2010-2024, under whose watch we suffered an explosion in the recording of non-crime hate incidents, further encroachments in freedom and mass monitoring and a war on dissent during Covid.

We keep being told that leaving the ECHR and HRA would turn us into a new Russia, and yet it increasingly feels as if we are already living in a Soviet-lite dystopia. We aren’t free to speak out despite these treaties and declarations.

The Left-wing juristocracy doesn’t believe in true freedom: it believes in weaponising the law for social engineering. The ECHR is a useful tool to promote open borders, but it won’t stop Linehan from being arrested.

Starmer felt obliged to defend Linehan, and Wes Streeting went as far as calling for a change in the law, but nothing meaningful will happen. Lord Hermer, the attorney general, would never allow it. The best we can hope for are tweaks and slightly more liberal guidance for the police.

Yet if the mainstream Left is bad, the far-Left which may soon replace it is worse. Zack Polanski, the Green Party’s new Corbynite leader, said on the BBC of Linehan that “these are totally unacceptable tweets… I think it was proportionate to arrest him”. This is a new development: the rise of a class of politicians who don’t seek to hide their authoritarianism. Many are influenced by woke ideology, which claims that speech is violence, a tool of oppression when in the hands of the “privileged” class of white overlords, and that only the “oppressed” have the right to speak out.

We need a radical break with the past 28 years. The Blairite project must be undone. We need fresh protections for free speech. The police must be retaught liberal values. Its operational autonomy must be curtailed. We must firmly resist digital ID cards as these would further shift power from citizen to state. The Online Safety Act has gone too far, and needs radical reform, as do many other laws. Non-crime hate incidents must be abolished. We need to quit the ECHR, scrap the HRA and return to Law Lords in Parliament.

We need Parliament to legislate for a UK version of Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the US Supreme Court judgment that determined what sort of speech advocating illegal conduct can be restricted under the First Amendment.

Under the Brandenburg test, the criteria are intent – whether the speech aims to incite and generate imminent violence – and likelihood, whether it has a real chance of succeeding in doing so. Only speech meeting both criteria can be banned in the US. There are real downsides: unbridled speech can be horrific, inflammatory and extreme, but that would still beat our slide towards repression.

One of Linehan’s posts read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” It would obviously have been protected speech in the US. I found Lucy Connolly’s post on the Southport riots repugnant, but US lawyers tell me her case would also have been thrown out.

Last but not least, we must start reading again, if only to know how bad it could get – George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report for a start. Science fiction cannot be allowed to become our new reality.