“I think we’ve seen a significant decline in the culture of free speech,” Lord Toby Young says, reflecting on the developments of the past 15 years or so. And this is evident from what we can see – dozens of people are arrested or questioned every day in the UK for things they have posted online, usually about gender, immigration or similar debated topics. However, it is not a UK-specific issue, as active policing of online speech is more and more common in other major European countries as well.
In this interview, Young walks us through the trajectory of how we’ve ended up in this situation and how it all reflects a kind of a moral shift – Western Christian values being replaced by a new woke orthodoxy. “And if you find yourself falling foul of that, if you trespass on the sacred values of this new creed, you can lose your livelihood, in some cases end up in prison,” he says.
He also highlights how words or phrases such as “hate speech,” “misinformation,” or “disinformation” are actually used to silence dissent and provide a reason not to engage in debates on important topics such as climate, gender, COVID-19, and so on.
And since expressing certain views on such topics can already lead to severe consequences – such as debanking – the situation is already resembling a softer version of a Chinese-style social credit system, one in which people can be denied access to services for expressing “wrong” thoughts. Young points out that adding the advancing digital surveillance into the mix, we could all end up in a somewhat totalitarian system in the West as well, one in which the government has great control over our lives – for example, under the pretext of achieving Net Zero by 2050, they might pose restrictions on what we can buy, how much we can travel, and so forth.
But is this the path we’re already on? “I think it partly depends upon how willing people are to defend their basic freedoms. The state is always going to want to erode and restrict those freedoms and extend its own power in every direction,” Young says. “Whether or not freedom survives in the West depends upon... People like you and me, ordinary people resisting, organising, protesting, not cooperating, saying what it is they really think, without fear of consequences,” he suggests.
Lord Toby Young is a British journalist, author and public figure. He is the founder and general secretary of the Free Speech Union, an organisation that has helped over 7,000 people protect their freedom of expression in the UK. He is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Sceptic and an associate editor of The Spectator. He has co-founded several free schools.
He became a Conservative life peer on January 21, 2025 and sits in the House of Lords as Baron Young of Acton.
