Many will be familiar with Benjamin Franklin’s line that those willing to purchase temporary safety at the price of essential freedoms deserve neither. While this is typically cited in defence of liberty, it still presents the two values in question, namely freedom and security, as existing in an awkward trade-off.
This rings less true today. Can there be any doubt that the reckless actions and wanton negligence of the political classes in Western countries pose a far greater threat to public safety than even their most impulsive, irreverent critics? After the mass slaughter of young girls in Southport by a second-generation Rwandan immigrant, the elites in Britain have followed the usual playbook, focussing on the more hot-headed aspects of the backlash to this atrocity while accusing anyone who points to its roots in disastrous, avoidable policy-making of ‘playing politics’ and ‘stoking division.’
In The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray clarified the debate over immigration by drawing an instructive distinction between “primary” and “secondary” problems. His wise counsel has not been heeded. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the Labour home secretary, would rather obsess over the regrettable riots in Southport—and elsewhere—after Axel Rudakubana’s murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class than grapple with the entirely justified grievances of a people who have had enough.
To put it in simple terms, we never voted to be demographically replaced—least of all by groups with a higher propensity for committing acts of violence. In just the last week or so, we have seen a British soldier nearly stabbed to death by a Nigerian called Anthony Esan, a policewoman punched in the face by Pakistani youths in Manchester, and machete brawls in Southend. Throughout July, we were also treated to Bangladeshi riots in London, Romani and South Asian lawlessness in Leeds, and Muslim protests outside a police station in solidarity with the very Pakistanis who had attacked officers at Manchester Airport.
Moreover, there has been blatant two-tier policing of different groups’ collective grievances. Compare the disorder in London earlier this week with the mid-July riots in Harehills, Leeds. As many as 111 people protesting the slaughter of young girls in Southport were arrested on Wednesday night—some quite justifiably, others seemingly not. In Harehills, where we witnessed orders of magnitude more chaos, arson, and property damage, the figure was just 17. That is what happens when the police run scared, rather than rocking up in full riot gear as they do when the so-called ‘far Right’ are in town.
This is just one example among many of the host population’s justified anger—often intermingled, it must be said, with technical inaccuracies and shoddy speculation fed by the silence of officials—being policed in a more heavy-handed manner than ethnic and religious minorities with bogus tribal grievances. This is reflected in the rictus of contempt displayed by Yvette Cooper when responding to the backlash from white working-class protestors in Southport, as compared with her more diplomatic, understanding demeanour after minorities burned Harehills to the ground.
This is not just a solitary clip. Overall, there has been much more catastrophising over the public’s reaction to the murder of three girls—an emergency meeting with police chiefs, a theatrical press conference, the sudden introduction of 24-hour rolling court proceedings—than there was to any of the rioting in Harehills, let alone the epidemic of knife crime in London or the mass rape of white working-class girls at the hands of predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs over many decades. The key difference, of course, is that while Brits have been protesting the state’s evident failure to protect children in Southport, foreign diasporas in majority-minority Harehills set their own neighbourhood on fire to protest the state’s success in protecting children in accordance with the law.
Rioting is wrong in both cases, but motives can be more or less legitimate. If necessary, will the government’s new “violent disorder units” be deployed to Britain’s highly ghettoised towns and neighbourhoods, where up until now the grudges and sensitivities of tribal sub-cultures have made them virtually untouchable? We would be unwise to hold our breath. Only yesterday, menacing mobs of Muslim men, many of them armed, freely stalked Stoke and Blackburn without arousing a flicker of police interest. In one case, those with weapons were merely invited by some community liaison officer to drop them off at the local mosque.
At his press conference on Thursday, Starmer tried to deflect attention away from the primary problem and towards the radical discontent, not always intelligently expressed but very well-founded, of Britain’s host population. He condemned “far-right hatred” and spoke directly to social media companies about the way in which “violent disorder” gets “whipped up online.” Yvette Cooper has also lectured the tech platforms, as if chatter on X—rather than the mass stabbing of children followed by a complete information vacuum—is the truly radicalising factor. The one-sidedness of Starmer’s remarks backfired, prompting a viral X meme among those in the silent majority who have no desire to riot, but do confess to being intolerant of child murder and consistently broken election promises: #FarRightThugsUnite.
Still, the Labour government is clearly intent on using the more aggressive aspects of the backlash as a pretext to crack down further on free speech and popular dissent, particularly online. (Even before the election, Starmer was talking tough with Mayor Sadiq Khan about his eagerness to tighten ‘Islamophobia’ laws.) In front of the cameras, Starmer concluded that “service rests on security, and we will take all necessary action to keep our streets safe.” By “all necessary action,” of course, he means everything except closing the border to the Third World.
It is also telling that Starmer associates “security” with a state-driven stranglehold, hand in glove with Big Tech, over the spread of information and opinion. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there is an honourable tradition of defending free speech not just by reference to some right to autonomy, but as an instrumental value that ensures the well-being of those who live in free societies. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Spinoza argues that the toleration of eccentric opinions is not just a price we should be willing to pay for respecting autonomy, but in fact a positive benefit:
Not only may this liberty [of thought and speech] be granted without risk to the peace of the republic and to piety as well as the authority of the sovereign power, but … to conserve all of this such freedom must be granted.
After all, how can we know that views are false if their proponents are forbidden from making the case and we are prevented from hearing it? Freedom of thought and speech are in this way praised by Spinoza as dual-servants of social flourishing. The reframing is significant: all of a sudden, freedom of speech comes to be seen as necessary for security, not a value we should uphold in spite of it.
This brings us to the serious dangers of a Labour crackdown on free speech. Without wanting to get personal, it is a matter of public record that both Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper have daughters. This raises the question: would they ever send these daughters unaccompanied to Rwanda, Somalia, or Pakistan? If not, why are they so blasé about importing huge numbers of people from such countries into our own towns and cities? What do they think it is that makes Rwanda, Somalia, and Pakistan so much more ill-advised as an all-girls holiday destination than, say, Switzerland, Denmark, or South Korea?
It can hardly have anything to do with natural factors. And if it is not the climate, the altitude, or the biodiversity, it must surely have something to do with the people—not when considered in a way that unfairly smears all on the basis of observable patterns, but when considered at scale and in general.
It would be absurd to tar all members of any group with the same brush. However, it is equally absurd—and a grave danger—for those with a sworn duty to keep us safe to maintain the delusion that a randomised sample of military-aged male Rwandans, Somalis, and Pakistanis (especially if we include those willing to pay criminal gangs to smuggle them illegally into our homelands) will be identical to a randomised sample of Swissmen, Danes, and South Koreans. Anyone who clutches their pearls at such obvious truths simply exposes himself as a fanatic who cares more about betting the house on human nature than ensuring the safety of our women and girls.
It is betrayal enough that our politicians have imported, and continue to import, so many foreign peoples who are consistently overrepresented in violent crime statistics. Now they flirt with plans to forbid Brits from noticing? Is it really in the interests of Britain’s national security to silence those of us pointing out unpleasant facts and sounding the alarm to prevent further bloodshed?
Freedom of speech is not just one value among many. Being necessary for course correction, it is the value that enables us to make good on all of our other values. Unless we are free to criticise government abuses and mistakes, they will get worse. If Starmer uses recent events as an excuse for a renewed crackdown on our free speech rights, he will be further endangering national security, not making the streets safer. We can expect even more attacks on our people if whistleblowers are either muzzled or hurled into prison.
If truth is to set us free, we must first be at liberty to pursue it. Free speech is liable to strike many as an abstract concern. But if the Labour government sees fit to make further assaults on our liberties, free speech will come to be seen in a very different, much more sobering light: a matter of life and death.