The UK has been in turmoil. Riots have broken out across the country since the end of July — a visceral response to a horrific crime in which a teenaged boy went into a dance studio and stabbed adult teachers and several children, killing three little girls.

Why did this happen? Well, the police won’t say. They made the fatal mistake of keeping the public underinformed in the face of terrible tragedy and let the public write its own version of the story.

Though the murderer wasn’t an immigrant, his parents were. This connection was enough to spark riots. For decades, the UK has been suffering under an onslaught of mass migration, most of it illegal, and with that influx of different cultures has come the inevitable clash. You cannot have this many non-assimilated people come into a country and it not destabilize it. The newcomers often import very unwelcome cultural influences from their own home countries.

A particularly infamous example would be what happened in Rotherham, where from 1998 to 2005, a gang of Pakistani immigrants groomed and exploited over 1,000 children over the course of several years. Even in articles, you’re hard-pressed to find the details to even understand that these men weren’t native to the UK but were migrants.

Since then, however, the government has switched its tune from blaming the victims to blaming social media for the unrest within the country. After whipping out the Counter Disinformation Unit during COVID, the current government has re-weaponized this group and rebranded it as the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT) whose job is to find anyone spreading “misinformation” or “inciting riots” online and arrest them.

This is a tricky proposal at the best of times. It prompts one to ask: What do the powers that be deem to be “misinformation”? As we know, the policing of “misinformation” during the COVID lockdowns was an ugly way for those in power to suppress ideas they disagreed with. Another question that needs to be asked is this: Does the UK government make a distinction between words that tell people to go burn down buildings and people organizing to peacefully protest? Again, British authorities are very vague in their language — and this is purposeful. They want to use the threat of arrest as a cudgel to suppress free speech.

Prime Minister Kier Starmer said: “We’re going to have to look more broadly at social media after this disorder… This is not a law-free zone. And I think that’s clear from the prosecutions and sentencing. Sentencing for online behaviour whether you’re directly involved or whether you’re remotely involved, you’re culpable, and you will be put before the courts.” In other words, you could be thrown in jail for organizing a peaceful protest that got derailed by violence and looting (even if it’s a counterprotester who did it). Seems like straight-up authoritarianism.

In the UK, free speech isn’t a codified right like it is in the United States. The British only have freedom of expression, and even that is only because broader European laws have defined it as a human right.

The UK has been a pioneer in cracking down on free speech on the Internet. According to Tom Slater of Spiked magazine, the fall of the Brits into their current Orwellian dilemma is the work of decades, not just a matter of days. Slater writes:

The upshot of this is a scale of speech-policing that is surely unprecedented in our history. In 2017, an investigation by The Times found that nine people a day were being arrested for ‘posting allegedly offensive messages online’ – with 3,395 arrested in 2016 alone. Even then, that investigation was limited to one piece of legislation — the Communications Act — and the real number is almost certainly higher, not least because many police forces didn’t respond to the survey. Greg Lukianoff, president of America’s estimable Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, argues that, on the basis of those partial numbers alone, Britain is comfortably locking up more people today for speech crimes than America did during the first Red Scare.

Which leads us to today’s UK landscape of stifling online dissent. One person has already been arrested for an “inaccurate social media post.”

But perhaps the most sinister threats are coming from London’s Metropolitan Police Chief Mark Rowley, who told reporters: “We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.”

He went on to say: “Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law. You can be guilty of offenses of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred. There are numerous terrorist offenses regarding the sort of publishing of material. All of those offenses are in play if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets, and we will come after those individuals, just as we will physically confront on the streets the thugs and the yobs who are taking, who are causing the problems for communities.”

Rowley was referring to Elon Musk, who went so far as to accuse the prime minister of a two-tiered system of justice vis-à-vis the riots. Amusingly, Rowley also specifically threatened extradition in the case of the American keyboard warriors.

The riots have been painted from the get-go as one-sided and inspired by the “hard-right” or “far-right-wingers” who are racists and hate immigrants. This is absolutely inaccurate. The counterprotesters have been just a violent and threatening. However, this is the narrative that the Labour Party wants to push. In fact, one Labour Party member, Councillor Ricky Jones, called for the outright killing of the right-wing rioters by “slitting their throats.” Clearly, the animosity is on both sides of the dispute.

This man should be arrested. If not, we know there is two-tier policing. @metpoliceuk pic.twitter.com/PR50gGK2zJ

— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) August 8, 2024

Jones has been suspended from his position and is in court dealing with the consequences of his words. We shall see if he is equally dealt with for his genuine threats.

The whole situation in Britain underscores President Ronald Reagan’s famous bit of wisdom: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Let us never allow our nation to slip into the palms of authoritarian tyranny like the UK seems content to do.