There was a time—say, until 2020—when a political blog existed to publish arguments, not to conduct a rolling legal risk assessment. That time has passed. The Libertarian Alliance now operates in a country where every sentence must be weighed, not against truth or coherence, but against the temper of a politicised police force and a legislative thicket designed to punish expression without requiring harm or intent, or even a crime. This is not hysteria. It is the settled condition of England in the mid-2020s. We have less freedom of speech than the United States. We have less in practice than is enjoyed in most European countries. We have absurdly less than in the country where I grew up and believed to be the classic home of liberty.
It is therefore no longer possible to run a serious dissenting platform without internal monitoring of what is published—not because the arguments are wrong, but because the law has been engineered to make wrongness irrelevant.
The modern English censorship regime rests on a simple inversion: speech is regulated by perceived impact, not by demonstrated harm. This inversion has been constructed deliberately across several statutes, with enthusiastic enforcement guidance from the police.
Start with the Public Order Act 1986, sections 4A and 5. These criminalise words that are “threatening, abusive or insulting” if they are likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress. There is no requirement that anyone actually be harmed, nor that the speaker intend any harm. Likelihood is enough. So is interpretation.
The ratchet tightens with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, section 28, which introduced sentence uplifts where an offence is deemed “racially or religiously aggravated”, a definition extended over time to include a widening array of “hostilities”. Hostility here does not mean violence. It can mean tone, assumption, or attitude. A bad opinion becomes an aggravating factor in law.
The real workhorse of repression, however, is section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. It criminalises the sending of any message that is “grossly offensive”, “indecent”, or “menacing”. Parliament declined to define any of these terms. Courts have largely deferred to police discretion. Section 127 has been used against jokes, song lyrics, political commentary, and quotations. Intent is inferred from publication itself.
Alongside this sits the Malicious Communications Act 1988, which criminalises sending messages “with the purpose of causing distress or anxiety”. Purpose, again, is inferred. Publish something that upsets the right person, and purpose emerges as if by magic.
These provisions would be bad enough if enforced narrowly. They are not.
The decisive break with liberal legality came with the invention of Non-Crime Hate Incidents. An NCHI requires no offence, no victim, no investigation, and no outcome. It requires only that someone perceives hostility. The College of Policing instructs officers to “record perception, not fact”.
These records are kept. They can appear on enhanced DBS checks. They can shape future police interactions. They are ideological Post-it notes stuck to a citizen’s name.
This is not law enforcement. It is surveillance of opinion. The courts have expressed occasional discomfort, but the practice remains. Police forces continue to log speech that is lawful, but inconvenient to those who matter. England now maintains a system of political black marks without trial.
All of this was crowned by the Online Safety Act 2023, which formalises the idea that lawful speech may nonetheless be suppressed if deemed “harmful”. Platforms are compelled to over-remove content to avoid regulatory sanction. Police guidance increasingly treats online expression as presumptively actionable. The Act does not need mass prosecutions to succeed. Its purpose is managerial compliance. The chilling effect is not accidental. It is the point.
It is easy to condemn the Labour Party, and entirely fair to do so. Labour has long been staffed by middle-class leftists who do not believe in freedom of speech. They believe in “harm reduction”, “community impact”, and the therapeutic state. For them, censorship is kindness with a warrant card. The statutes of 1986, 1998, and 2003 fit comfortably within their moral universe. More contemptible are the Conservatives between 2010 and 2024. They claimed to believe in free expression. They did nothing to unmake the regulatory architecture they inherited. They presided over the normalisation of NCHIs. They passed the Online Safety Act. They watched as policing became ideological and said nothing. Their contribution to liberty was to manage its funeral while insisting the victim was still alive and well.
And then there is the Reform Party, which talks loudly about freedom while rolling out the red carpet for Nadine Dorries, the political front-woman for the Online Safety Act itself. One might have expected embarrassment. Instead, there was applause. Reform’s commitment to free speech appears to end precisely where it becomes inconvenient.
This is why every article on the Libertarian Alliance blog must now be read twice: once for argument, and once for exposure. Not because the state is omnipotent, but because it is capricious. Enforcement is discretionary and ideological. That makes it more dangerous, not less.
Fictional voices do not protect you. Irony does not protect you. Subjunctive phrasing does not protect you. The test applied is not “did this cause harm?” but “how might this be received?” by a hypothetical complainant armed with a complaint form and a grievance.
England still has elections. There are still judges in wigs. There are still antique ceremonies. It no longer has a reliable right to speak freely. What it has instead is permission culture, administered by police guidance and platform compliance teams.
Monitoring our own output is therefore not cowardice. Telling Bryan Mercadente to strip whole paragraphs from his more inflammatory utterances is not adult fussiness. It is recognition of reality.
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I think a new TV series is on the horizon: Midchester Mischief, in which DCI Barnacle and his loyal Sergeant solve the case of the frightful tweet and suchlike. It would be more realistic that many existing shows.