We live at a time of great hypocrisy. Accusations of a failure to protect free speech are coming out of America thick and fast. Accompanied by some very determined efforts to suppress that very freedom.
Outlets for independent thought, where it is possible to question the wisdom of Donald Trump and explore objective scientific evidence, are being closed down with a vengeance. And I do mean vengeance. Because that is central to the psychology of those who are leading this determined assault on any notion of a genuinely free world.
Universities attacked
Harvard University has had its grants cut because it refuses to give equal weight to every wild theory endorsed by the president and prefers to rely upon academic freedom of thought. They are being threatened with their endowment funds being taxed if they fail to come into line. Academics travelling to America are being turned away and denied visas if the authorities don’t like their views. Just one of the many examples is a French scientist who was denied entry to the States because he had published tweets criticising the president.
It is particularly dangerous for anyone in the USA to dare to put forward any suggestion that military action in Gaza or the West Bank could be part of an ethnic cleansing policy being pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Even US residents, who are supposed to have full rights, have been bundled into police vans, driven to airports and taken to detention camps in El Salvador. Courts have been ignored when they issue orders for their release and lies made up about people’s involvement in terrorism without a shred of evidence.
The media oligarchy
Many of the largest television channels in the USA have long been under the control of those who pump out misinformation at such speed that attempts to correct even the most basic factual errors are drowned out by the next one. More and more of the major independent newspapers, like the Washington Post, are being bought up by tech oligarchs, such as Jeff Bezos. He can allocate US$250mn dollars without making a dent in his wealth and then proceed to have editorial lines changed and journalists who wish to make honest independent reports removed.
Once relatively free marketplaces for ideas, such as Twitter (now X), have had any semblance of equal access destroyed by algorithms designed to promote Elon Musk’s pet theories and suppress reasonable views. Having spent US$44bn to gain the ability to talk to the world he has used X to spread white supremacist fantasies about Jewish conspiracies, spread lies about the mayor of London being an Islamic extremist, and accused Jess Philips of being a rape genocide apologist. All in direct contradiction to the evidence.
He then had the blatant cheek to proclaim that Britain is a police state where there is no genuine freedom of speech. George Orwell wrote about a Ministry of Truth pumping out lies. The big difference now is that there are very rich oligarchs doing the job. Nasty variants of Truth Social compete to offer the craziest conspiracy theories while promoting a world of low taxation for the very rich.
Scientific knowledge that contradicts with the pet theories of the president’s increasingly aggressive supporters and advisers is getting harder and harder to obtain. Musk’s army of cost cutters are working their way through government institutions, gutting the staffing of agencies which produce inconvenient forms of objective evidence. Facts are being replaced by the most loudly shouted opinion. People who continue to try and publish accurate information are losing their jobs and livelihoods while those who promote wildly impractical theories get rich.
The return of Liz Truss
It is a strange world when Liz Truss is able to command high fees for speeches about her expert grasp of economic theory while there are economics students who leave University without ever having been asked to read the works of John Maynard Keynes. We are not witnessing an open interchange of well evidenced ideas that are being critically examined by independent free thinkers. Instead, we are enduring the fierce promotion of dangerous propaganda by the rich and powerful.
In such circumstances it is vital that the tech oligarchs are not allowed to gain even greater control over the information sources in Britain. Ensuring that they are properly controlled is essential to the future of any free society. If we allow the very wealthy to buy up and dominate our media, then we are not dealing with free speech for all. We are dealing with free speech for those who can afford it.
Starmer’s Room 101 dilemma
We are on the cusp of a moment of real choice about our future. Keir Starmer seems to want to handle Trump’s bullying trade tactics by trying to get him to be nice to Britain and cut us a better deal than that offered to our friends and neighbours. However, it isn’t possible to placate or do deals with people who are deliberately trying to undermine your fundamental core values without absorbing a great deal of their culture.
At the climax of 1984 Winston Smith is taken to Room 101 where his interrogator exposes him to the worst thing in the world. For Winston that is rats, and he is trapped in a cage that enables them to run around close to his face until he cries out in desperation the great betrayal that destroys every hope within him. He yells out: “Don’t do it to me. Do it to Julia.” The second he says that the punishment ends because there is no resistance left within him and his interrogator can fill his soul with love of Big Brother.
Starmer’s dealings with Trump over tariffs amount to exactly that kind of betrayal. Don’t do it to Britain. Do it to Canada. Come to tea with the King, be nice to us and cut us a special deal. You want Britain to go easy on those tech giants who are trying to control our thoughts? We can discuss it. You think the NHS is unfair to US drug companies? Let’s talk about it. You want to sell US farm products produced via methods that are banned across Europe? We might be able to do business if the payback is right.
There are times to make a reasoned practical choice about the least bad option and to try and do a deal with those you don’t agree with. And there are times to stand up and voice clearly the values you wish to live by. Let us hope the British prime minister can dredge up enough remnants of self-respect to stand firm on behalf of our country in the face of a wall of misinformation and a mass outbreak of bullying behaviour from a former close ally.
The dangers of trusting Trump
Sleeping with an enemy of every value you ever stood for is not just morally repugnant. It is very bad tactics. Untrustworthy people tend to betray you. Standing firmly alongside our remaining allies in the EU and Canada is the only strategy which provides some hope of stopping the advance of the forces of Big Brother Trump.
In the dark days that lie ahead our country needs to be a bastion of genuine freedom of thought and expression. Not a humiliated and weakened country leading the queue of countries that are begging to kiss the a** of Donald Trump.
