Freedom of Expression in the UK: Starmer's Efforts in Tightening the Screws There Will Have Effect on Others

UK government uses anti-immigration protests that followed the murder of 3 girls in Southport to double down on online censorship.

Last Friday, Leeds Crown Court in the UK handed down a 20-month prison sentence to 28-year-old Jordan Parlour on charges of inciting violence via Facebook. On August 4, Parlour made some vicious posts about immigrants, prompted by the ongoing events. To recall, on July 29, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, a son of Rwandan immigrants born in Wales, murdered three girls, aged 6, 7 and 9, at a children's dance studio in Southport and stabbed other participants, several of whom were taken to hospital with serious injuries. The tragedy was the trigger that let the frustration felt by the Brits over mass immigration spill out to the streets.

Immigration to the UK has been at record levels for some time, and many Britons feel that this is at the expense of their well-being and security. In fact, large numbers of immigrants are arriving illegally in small boats across the Channel, but are not being sent back. This situation has been going on for years and has become so routine that the UK government regularly publishes statistics for the last seven days on the number of boats seen at sea and the number of immigrants arriving onboard.

Starmer's promise: we will apply criminal law online

In several parts of the country, the killing of the girls at the end of July was followed by widespread anti-immigration protests, some of which escalated into riots. On the same day as Parlour's post, protesters had gathered at a hotel in Rotherham where the government had housed asylum seekers who had arrived in the country. One of the newspapers covering the events described those gathered at the hotel as anti-immigrant hooligans who wanted to attack the hotel, chanting “get them out” and “you're not welcome anymore”. According to the newspaper, a group of men also held a banner that said “Stopping the boats means stopping the stabbings”. Understandably the men referred to the same 'boats' that arrive daily across the Channel carrying illegal immigrants. Photographs taken at the hotel show clashes between the crowd and riot police who had arrived there, destruction of hotel property and setting fire to a rubbish container.

There is no doubt that such attacks are vandalism and that the police must respond. However, the British authorities did not just respond to this kind of real and physical threat. On the same day as the events in Rotherham, Parlour wrote on Facebook that 'every man and his dog should smash f*** out of Britannia hotel'. The post was about the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft, which at the time was housing 210 migrants. Parlour also pointed out that the hotel was living 'off the tax of us hard-working people earn when it could be put to better use'.

The British authorities acted swiftly, and less than a week later Parlour was one of the first to be convicted of the crime of venting his outrage and anger at immigrants and to receive a prison sentence.

This is exactly what UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer had promised on August 5 – that harsh sentences would be handed down not only for physical vandalism but for comments online. “We will ramp up criminal justice,” he said. “We will apply criminal law online as well as offline,” Starmer added.

Words written in anger lead to jail time

The British police set about implementing the approach promised by Starmer – hundreds upon hundreds of angry online posts are processed by officers from the serious and organised crime teams working with counter-terror police and other national agencies to review content across a range of social media sites.

The robust response is having results, and many who were expressing their frustration with the country's immigration policy after the girls were killed have been apprehended. Arrested and put on trial was Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative local councillor in Northamptonshire, who called for the immediate and mass deportation of immigrants via her X account. She added that the treacherous government and politicians should be sent off with them. In giving this message, she also said that if all the hotels that house asylum seekers were accommodated in were set on fire, she would not care. “I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me a racist, so be it," she wrote, referring to the families who lost their children in Southport.

Tyler Kay, a 26-year-old father of three, wrote the same on his social media – he copied Connolly's post to his account. Kay told the court that he had indeed acted foolishly when doing this, but that remorse was not taken into account too much – in imposing the sentence, the judge had formed the impression of Kay as a person with a fundamentally racist mindset. At Northampton Crown Court he was sentenced to 38 months in prison.

In Wales, however, Richard Williams was convicted of calling on people to take part in the protests, which he took part in himself, as well as posting what the court found to be a derogatory meme against immigrants.

As well as tracking down and prosecuting locals, British police promised to target foreigners they believe are taking unsuitable positions and prosecute them according to criminal law.

Fighting misinformation

Alongside the crackdown and the swift punishment of those who express their fury towards government immigration policies and lack of protection for the kids, the UK government is also combating the spread of 'misinformation'. For this, they use the same authority that has already been used in the past. At the time of the Covid crisis, the Counter Disinformation Unit was engaged in secretly monitoring people on social media. Its task was to identify and prevent the spread of posts critical of Covid policies. In doing so, they secretly tracked, for example, prominent doctors, scientists, politicians and activists who were critical of the widespread implementation of Covid restrictions in the country. The same agency is now called the National Security Online Information Team, and has special status under the Online Safety Act, passed last year, as a "trusted flagger" for social media platforms. That is, their role is to monitor social media and, if necessary, declare posts to be misinformation and require platforms to remove them swiftly. If the platforms fail to comply with the Online Safety Act, they can face hefty fines – up to 10% of the global turnover of the company hosting the platform. The regulation is similar to the EU's Digital Services Act which we have written more about here.

The problem with such state initiatives to combat misinformation, however, is that the authorities often do not tell the platforms to remove information that is false, but rather declare factual information that the government is eager to restrict for other reasons to be 'misinformation'. A good example in recent years has been posts that discussed the problems of safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines and although they presented factual information were taken down as misinformation. But there are examples from other areas as well of course. For more on the rise of such censorship, you can read here and here.

The far-right thugs and Islamic extremists

The driving force behind such censorship that declares facts 'misinformation', is the desire of the authorities to create an image of the world that may not respond, at least to some extent, to what is actually happening. In the context of the riots in Britain, for example, we have a situation where the media reports on anti-immigration and anti-Islamist protests by white British people who have been labelled right-wing thugs or extremists. At the same time, the same amount of coverage is not given to the groups of immigrants with Islamic backgrounds who have taken to the streets as if to protest, sometimes carrying machetes, hammers and other weapons, and who target white British people. The problem for the government here is that the spread of information about such Islamist rallies suggests that the British protesters, who have been labelled far-right, are at least to some extent right about the dangers of mass immigration.

While the police intervene in white British protests with apparent force, using riot gear and dogs, Islamists – or Islamic extremists – are not treated in the same way. A number of videos are circulating on social media that highlight this double standard.

It is worth recalling that Prime Minister Starmer, in the same address in which he promised to bring the perpetrators to justice, also said that it was precisely attacks against the Muslim community that the authorities would not tolerate. Although this particular remark was made in response to the fact that one mosque had been attacked by those involved in the riots, the Prime Minister's highlighting of the security of one community in a situation where three little girls had been brutally murdered shortly prior does seem a little odd.

Government plans to toughen up the law

The same double standard has earned Prime Minister Starmer a new nickname: two-tier Keir, a term used to denote the different ways the police deal with protesters from different backgrounds. The same nickname was used by Elon Musk, owner of X, in response to Starmer's post, when he asked whether the country's prime minister shouldn't be concerned about about attacks on all communities, not just Muslims. In addition, Musk called what was happening in England a 'civil war' and was criticised by members of the British government for it.

In any case, the UK government wants social media platforms to quickly remove posts they identify as inciting unrest. Among other things, Musk is being criticised for the fact that X continues to allow well-known anti-immigration activists, such as Tommy Robinson, to share his views and videos of what is happening on the streets. “There is a significant amount of content circulating that platforms need to be dealing with at pace,” commented UK Science Secretary Peter Kyle early last week, following a meeting with representatives of the major platforms.

However, Sadiq Khan, London's Muslim mayor and an influential member of the ruling Labour party, also spoke of the need to review legislation on online harms to see if it was still fit for purpose. While the Online Safety Act, passed last year, is already tough enough, Prime Minister Starmer pledged to review the regulations. Given the global nature of social media platforms, any tightening of the rules will have at least some cross-border impact, even if similar laws are not introduced in other countries. There is also a danger that the example is contagious – we have written at length about how countries are trying to control freedom of expression online with similar laws modelled on each other.