Free Speech

I have already indicated that Yascha Mounk is someone I distrust – because of his serving as Tony Bliar’s Head of whatever he now calls his Institute. But he has been posting some important stuff on this subject and at a conference on free speech reproduced on substack of which I’ve taken the liberty to quote some excerpts -

Over the last days, I’ve been genuinely impressed speaking to many participants of this forum. For many people around the world, advocating for freedom of speech is not some abstract endeavor. They face severe consequences if they speak up against the dictators that rule their countries. It is inspiring to hear how so many people are standing up for fundamental democratic values under genuinely scary circumstances. At the same time, there is always a danger at these kinds of conferences of looking out into the world and identifying trouble everywhere other than at home. It would be easy to say, in effect: “Look at all of those benighted places—thank god we have it so much better here!” So my goal with my remarks today is to ensure that we don’t fall into that trap.

Let me start with a geographic guessing game. Imagine a country where a citizen dislikes the government and shares a meme depicting the deputy head of that government as an idiot, parodying a ubiquitous shampoo ad. This politician then invokes a special law protecting elected officials, prompting the police to raid the citizen’s home at 6am, to confiscate his laptop, and to initiate criminal proceedings. Can you guess what country this could have happened in? The answer is: Germany. Here is another example. Two parents become upset about how their daughter’s elementary school handles certain matters, voicing their concerns in a parents’ WhatsApp group. The school leadership reports these parents for “malicious communication.” The police arrive at the home of the parents, take them into custody for many hours, and begin criminal proceedings against them. Any guesses about where this took place? The answer is: the United Kingdom.

What you’ve heard about the United States so far at this conference is right. We are in the midst of serious attacks on free speech from the White House. The Trump administration has deported—or tried to deport—individuals based on their political beliefs. And it has also put enormous financial pressure on universities because it disagrees with their ideology. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he promised to restore free speech. But while he did end some genuinely restrictive forms of censorship, he also used his control of the platform to amplify content he happens to like and to suppress views he doesn’t. Despite promising to defend free speech globally, Musk has repeatedly complied with demands for censorship from authoritarian governments.

There is no reason to trust that the most powerful people in the United States are sincere when they claim that they are defending free speech. I have warned about the rise of right-wing populism and the threat it poses to liberal democracy for the better part of a decade, and you won’t hear me make any excuses for these kinds of actions today. The threat to free speech in the United States is grave. But before we become too self-congratulatory, I believe it’s important to ask ourselves how consistent the supposedly pro-democratic or liberal forces with which many of us here in this room identify are about supporting those same principles of free expression. And it turns out that there are very real challenges in this realm as well.

Five years ago, we were in the middle of one of the most deadly pandemics in human history. One of the important questions concerned its origins. Did Covid originate in the natural world, or was it the accidental consequence of gain-of-function research in a lab with inadequate safety precautions? Answering this question was crucial for us to know how to deal with Covid; to take precautions for how to prevent the next pandemic; and to reflect on the kinds of rules which should in future constrain potentially dangerous forms of biological research. And yet, for the better part of two years, investigative journalists and eminent biologists who were collecting evidence for the so-called lab leak theory were censored by major social media platforms.

That same German government minister I mentioned earlier reported over 800 citizens to the police over the course of his three years in power. In Britain, there were at least 12,000 arrests based on things that people had said online—and that’s just in 2023. And yet, many speakers at this gathering, which calls itself the World Expression Forum, have dismissed anybody who defends an “absolutist” conception of free speech. Some have even cavalierly asserted that any reasonable person should of course favor democratic governments censoring so-called “misinformation.” So let me, in the rest of these remarks, say a few things in favor of that much-maligned “absolutist” conception of free speech. When we talk about the value of free speech, we like to dwell on its positive contributions. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill emphasizes that free expression isn’t just necessary to allow us to search for the truth or protect us from error; it’s also necessary so that we hold pre-existing beliefs which turn out to be right as “living truths” rather than as “dead dogmas.” He was, I think, very prescient in suggesting that, should everybody agree on some important subject, we should have to encourage some devil’s advocates to argue for the opposite point of view—lest all of us forget why our beliefs were well-founded in the first place. Mill’s arguments are convincing to me. But I understand that they can seem a little bit abstract at a time when there is a genuine threat from extremist political forces—a time when many people, rightly or wrongly, are blaming the rise of these forces on the prevalence of so-called “misinformation.” That’s why, in the chapter on free speech in my last book, The Identity Trap – a sttory of ideas and power (2023) I did not focus on the positive things that come from having free speech; I focused on the negative consequences that flow from not having free speech. And the first of these is simply that we have to ask ourselves very carefully about who is actually empowered to make decisions about what people can and cannot say in any regime of censorship.

A lot of the time, opponents of free speech say: “These restrictions are necessary to protect the most vulnerable members of society, those who are most at risk from online hate.” But who actually has the power to make decisions about what is censored and what is allowed? Is it the weak and the marginalized? Or is it executives at tech companies who decide what kind of content you can post on Twitter and Facebook and TikTok? Is it, perhaps, legislators and bureaucrats and judges who determine which acts of online communication are so “malicious” that they justify locking people up?

The other point I want to make as somebody who has long been deeply concerned about the stability of our political systems relates to the fundamental promise of democracy. In a democracy, we can tolerate it when somebody on the other side of the political spectrum wins because we retain the ability to make the case for our own ideas and values. Over the course of the next four years, we are able to fight for our own vision of what our country should be, of what kinds of policies we should pass. The fact that the losers of an election know that they will still be able to make their voices heard is key to stabilizing the system.

When you take away freedom of speech—even if it is just forms of political speech that most of us in this room would find to be deeply distasteful—you jeopardize this momentous achievement. Under those circumstances, losers are much more likely to say: “The stakes of this election are existential. If I lose, I may no longer be able to argue for the things that are important for me. So why should I just step aside?”

This is the strange paradox about invoking threats to democracy as a reason for censorship, as so many at this forum—some explicitly, many implicitly—have done over the last day: By and large, the crackdown on free speech that we citizens of democratic countries have tolerated over the last decades is motivated by genuine concern about the rise of extremism in our politics. But ironically, the result of this crackdown has been to make many citizens more mistrustful of democratic institutions, more mistrustful of the media that won’t let them think for themselves, and more mistrustful of politicians who claim that they can decide for others what they should be able to say or read. And that mistrust, in turn, is one of the main reasons why more and more people are voting for these extreme political forces.

As I was preparing these remarks, I remembered a relatively minor text by one of the major thinkers of the 20th century: George Orwell. In 1946, Orwell attended a congress by PEN, an organization supposedly devoted to defending free speech. But as e recorded in a lovely little essay called “The Prevention of Literature” he did not get the impression that this congress really was all that devoted to the defense of free expression:

Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. [There was no] mention of the various books which have been “killed” in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favor of censorship. There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.

I think that, here at the World Expression Forum, we have a choice to make as to whether to resemble that PEN Congress back in 1946. And so, to use an Americanism, I would urge all of you to walk and chew gum at the same time. We can and we should denounce the terrible dictators who are throwing people in jail around the world. We can and we should point out that the Trump administration is infuriatingly insincere when it invokes the cause of free speech to justify deporting people from the country due to their political views. And at the same time, we can and we should also recognize that the severe limits on free speech which have over the course of the last decades been normalized in countries like Germany and the United Kingdom are deeply antithetical to any idea of “free expression” worth defending.

Democratic BackSliding?

Thomas Fazi is an interesting German who has just produced an article How Western Democracy Died which reminded me of a couple of books which presaged the current disenchantment with western liberalism - David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (2019) and Steve Levinsky’s How Democracies Die (2019)

Whether in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalised and legal systems are weaponised to suppress opposition. In recent months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar measures too.

In theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only. 

 As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalisation — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. The historical defeat of socialism shrank the ideological space in the West, foreclosing any fundamental challenge to capitalism and enabling the emergence of a technocratic, depoliticised governance model underpinned by the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) consensus around neoliberalism — centred on individual responsibility, market hegemony and globalisation. 

Geopolitically, meanwhile, US “hyperpower” status allowed it to aggressively assert global hegemony, creating a unipolar “new world order”. This was underpinned by structural economic shifts within the West: the decline of traditional manufacturing, and the Fordist-Keynesian social contract, replaced by services, labour dispersion, precarity and fragmentation. Most Western countries saw manufacturing employment decline by a third-to-half in absolute numbers. This pulverised the working class as a unified political subject — along the way wrecking trade unions and other material symbols of postwar mass politics. Beyond these institutional shifts, meanwhile, unelected elites increasingly interfered in the democratic processes of member states. The ECB’s “monetary coup” against Berlusconi in 2011, where the central bank effectively forced the prime minister to leave office by making his ouster the precondition for further support for Italian bonds and banks, is one good example here. The financial blackmail of Greece’s Tsipras government is another. Taken together, anyway, these events led some observers to suggest that the EU was becoming a “post-democratic prototype” — one fiercely opposed to national sovereignty and democracy both.

Western liberal democracy, even minimally defined as representative government based on universal suffrage, is a very recent phenomenon. Full male suffrage emerged in a limited number of countries only between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Women’s suffrage generally came after the Second World War. Effective voting rights for racial minorities, such as African Americans, arrived decades later. In short, democracy as universal adult suffrage, regardless of wealth, property, race or class, has existed for mere decades. Previously, it was the exclusive domain of propertied elites, or else based on sex or skin colour. All the same, it’d be wrong to idealise the mid-century West. Even then, democracy in its substantive sense remained heavily constrained. Though the ruling classes were forced — under pressure from popular movements, the Cold War, and the threat of social unrest — to extend voting rights and acknowledge a range of political and social rights, they did not do so willingly. On the contrary, they were often driven by the fear that the masses could pose a real threat to the established social order — that workers might use democracy to overturn existing power relations. As a result, alongside economic concessions, Western elites also constrained democratic participation in various ways. Modern constitutional systems — including nascent supranational ones like the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 — explicitly limited popular sovereignty. Elected governments were prevented from enacting certain economic or social policies, or even challenging existing international alliances. All the while, power shifted. Parliaments got weaker, and technocrats and judges grew more powerful, each in their way proving capable of overriding national laws. This was often justified as a way of protecting democracy from what elites feared could be the irrational or destabilising demands of the masses — a longstanding argument in liberal political thought that equates too much popular participation with the risk of populism, mob rule or economic irresponsibility.

This challenges common conceptions of the state: across the Western world, we 

are accustomed to identifying the state with the executive and with parliament, 

assuming that these institutions act in accordance with constitutions and the rule 

of law. But this is a misunderstanding: the state doesn’t coincide with the 

institutions of representative democracy. Rather, the two belong to entirely 

distinct spheres of politics. On the one hand, there is the politics of the state. 

On the other, there is what we might call popular politics, embodying popular 

sovereignty and typified by political parties, trade unions, social movements and 

civil society. The state operates with a significant degree of autonomy from the 

latter, meaning it is not only largely independent of civil society, but also of 

parliaments and even governments themselves.

In theory, after all, state bureaucracies act as neutral executors of government 

policy. In reality, they often act independently of, or even in opposition to, elected 

parliaments and governments, particularly when it comes to protecting institutional 

continuity, legal norms or elite interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for 

example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes 

to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England 

derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is another example here. This phenomenon 

is obviously much more pronounced when national governments are subordinated to 

supranational institutions, as in the European Union. And then, of course, you have 

the military and intelligence bureaucracies, which today arguably exercise more 

influence than ever before (see, for instance, the Russiagate hoax).
The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and 

continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those 

declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true 

— even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state 

may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics. 

In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse, 

but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western 

democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state 

power into blindingly sharp relief.

Further Reading; In the past decade, we have been deluged by hundreds of 

books on the decline of liberal democracy and the various threats it faces – 

very little of it worth much. 
- The book I recommend as a guide through this confusion is David Runciman’s 

How Democracy Ends (2017) which uses the metaphor of a “mid-life crisis” to explore 4 different 

ways in which democracy might end – a coup; catastrophes such as ecological or pandemics; 

technological takeover; or “improved systems”. One of its nice features is embodying guides to 

other books. Violence stalks the fringes of our politics and the recesses of our imaginations, without ever 

arriving centre stage. It is the ghost in this story. Second, the threat of catastrophe has changed. Where the 

prospect of disaster once had a galvanising effect, now it tends to be stultifying. We freeze in the face of our 

fears. Third, the information technology revolution has completely altered the terms on which democracy 

must operate. We have become dependent on forms of communication and information-sharing that we 

neither control nor fully understand. All of these features of our democracy are consistent with its getting 

older. I have organised this book around these three themes: coup; catastrophe; technological takeover. 

I start with coups – the standard markers of democratic failure – to ask whether an armed 
takeover of democratic institutions is still a realistic possibility. If not, how could democracy be subverted 

without the use of force being required? Would we even know it was happening? 
The spread of conspiracy theories is a symptom of our growing uncertainty about where the threat really lies.

 Coups require conspiracies because they need to be plotted by small groups in secret, or else they don’t 

work. Without them, we are just left with the conspiracy theories, which settle nothing.
Next I explore the risk of catastrophe. Democracy will fail if everything else falls apart: nuclear war, 
calamitous climate change, bio-terrorism, the rise of the killer robots could all finish off democratic 
politics, though that would be the least of our worries. If something goes truly, terribly wrong, the 
people who are left will be too busy scrabbling for survival to care much about voting for change. 
But how big is the risk that, if  confronted with these threats, the life drains out of democracy anyway, as we 

find ourselves paralysed by indecision?
Then I discuss the possibility of technological takeover. Intelligent robots are still some way off. 
But low-level, semi-intelligent 	machines that mine data for us and stealthily take the decisions 
we are too busy to make are gradually infiltrating much of our lives. We now have technology 
that promises greater efficiency than anything we’ve ever seen before, controlled by corporations 
that are less accountable than any in modern political history. Will we abdicate democratic responsibility 
to these new forces without even saying goodbye? 		
Finally, I ask whether it makes sense to look to replace democracy with something better. 
A mid-life crisis can be a sign that we really do need to change. If we are stuck in a rut, why don’t 
we make a clean break from what’s making us so miserable? Churchill famously called democracy 
the worst system of government apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time. 
He said it back in 1947. That was a long time ago. Has there really been nothing better to try since 
then? I review some of the alternatives, from twenty-first century authoritarianism to twenty-first 
century anarchism.

- Four Crises of American Democracy – representation, mastery, discipline, anticipation; 
Alasdair Roberts (2018) does look to be the best of the more detailed analyses of the deficiencies 

of the contemporary American system. Roberts produced recently the quite excellent 

"Strategies for Governing"
- I was not at all taken with ”The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how 

to save it”; Yashka Mounk (2018) but I’m biased since he worked for Tony Bliar’s Foundation. 

It has an index but no bibliography. 
- Empire of Democracy – the remaking of the West since the Cold War 1971-2017 by Simon 

Reid-Hentry (2019) was promising enough for me to buy it but was subsequently the focus of a 

brilliant and critical master-class review by historian Richard Evans (click title for that).

It too has an index but no bibliography. 
- How Democracy Ends, David Runciman (2019)
- How Democracies Die S Levinsky and D Ziblatt (2019)
- Democracy in America – what has gone wrong and what we can do about it Page and Gilen 

(2020 edition) 
- Twilight of Democracy – the seductive lure of authoritarianism Anne Applebaum (2020) 

reviewed by Quillette and by Helen Epstein  
- Autocratization turns viral (Democracy report 2021 - from V-Dem institute) gives a useful 

update of how democracy continues to slip globally…

- Autocracy – the dictators who want to run the world Anne Applebaum (2024)

The last 3 books remind me of a post I did 4 years ago about authoritarianism

The "authoritarian personality” was a major focus of academic interest in the immediate 

post-war period not only with Hannah Arendt (quoted) but, even more, Theodor Adorno. 

I was introduced to political sociology in the early 1960s by a Romanian, Zevedei Barbu  

who had produced in 1956 a book which drew on both social psychology and sociology 

- Democracy  and Dictatorship. 
One of my tests for a book is to go to the end and look at the bibliography and index. 

I trust those authors who refuse to follow the dreadful academic tradition of listing every 

book they know on a subject - and who have the confidence, instead, to select a small 

number of books they recommend for the reader’s attention. Particularly if they then 

add a few explanatory notes about each of the books. And this article suggested that I 

should use the index to check that the chapter headings promised in the book’s 

Contents are actually followed. 

A Sympathetic Look at Anarchism

Why do some of us have a positive view of the State – whereas others take a more negative if not anarchistic approach? Patrick Dunkelman’s recent book may be about the US situation but raises much wider questions of this sort. The book is Why Nothing Works – who killed progress and how to bring it back (2025) and argues that

• progressivism is defined not by one, but rather by two divergent impulses - the progressive head and the progressive heart are in different places. Alexander Hamilton, leader of the Federalists, worried primarily about chaos. He wanted to place more authority in the hands of centralized officials and financiers capable of developing America into an industrial dynamo—a “Hercules” on the global stage. His worry was that America would remain too disorganized, too divided, too chaotic to make the most of its opportunity. Putting power into a leadership class would deliver more for the public. Thomas Jefferson’s narrative, by contrast, was born of an entirely different frame. Horrified by the English Crown’s treatment of the colonies, he was determined to thwart overbearing authority—to protect individuals (or, at least, white, male, landowning individuals) from the abuses of public authority.

• the two impulses have waxed and waned through time such that the movement’s underlying zeitgeist has shifted, a bit like the tide.

• the balance that’s emerged since the late 1960s—the excessive tilt toward the Jeffersonian—is a seminal political liability for the progressive movement.

I have to admit to some ambivalence about the State – despite my fixation on it and how it might be “reformed” to ensure it better serves the interests of the ordinary citizen. Occasionally, I confess to a streak of anarchistic makeup in me.

And what better way to do that than to dip into some of the books on my shelves here in the mountain house where I spend my summers -

Anarchy in Action Colin Ward (1973) – very much a British take
Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow David Goodway (2006/12) a very discursive UK text
Black Flame – the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism ed Lucien 

van der Walt and Michael Schmidt (2009) A bit too enthusiastic
Two Cheers for Anarchism James Scott (2012) a classic although a bit weak on the 

theory
The Government of Noone – the theory and practice of anarchy Ruth Kinna (2019) a more 

academic approach
Means and Ends - the revolutionary practice of Anarchism in Europe and the US 

Zoe Baker (2024) A pretty comprehensive study with an extensive bibliography

Damascus

In 2002 I spent a few days in Damascus – the latest capital which the crazy Israelis have decided to bomb (the others being Beirut, Tehran and Sana'a). 
I went to check whether I would be happy spending some years there on an EU funded project but decided it was not my thing on the basis of being pissed off by the obvious antipathy to women displayed by Arab men – particularly on the plane out. But I do remember being bowled over by the quality of the glassware I found in the small workshops in the city – and by the amazing mosque. 

 https://alastaircampbell.org/2025/07/429-question-time-gaza-genocide-and-global-hypocrisy/

This post puts it very appropriately – indicating that a 

new country is bombing a 5000 year old country.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is the only Arabist known to me who 

From 1982 to 2019, lived in an ancient tower house off the "Market of the Cows" in the old city of San'a, Yemen. As a consequence of the civil war in Yemen, he had to leave this home and temporarily relocate to Malaysia.[4] He is the author of the travel books Yemen: Travels in Dictionaryland (1997) and Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (2000). Further, he is one of the foremost scholars of the Moroccan medieval scholar Ibn Battuta. Mackintosh-Smith has published a trilogy recounting Ibn Battuta's journeys as published in his Muqaddimah (The Prologue): Travels with a Tangerine (2001), The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2005) and Landfalls (2010).

The Natives are Restless… again

For more than 60 years it has been evident that something was profoundly wrong with British society – a series of reports, official and unofficial, have plotted public alienation, starting perhaps with the Labour Government of 1964 which commissioned a series of Royal Commissions covering most aspects of society – not least industrial relations, the civil service, local and regional government and social services. All aspects were put under a microscope and found wanting. 

So we should not be surprised that yesterday’s papers were full of an official 

report which claimed that social tensions in the country were ready to explode
The report in question was The State of Us commissioned by British Future (2025) 

which starts -

Communal life in Britain is under threat. Some of these threats are driven by long term 

trends that have undermined connection within our communities over many decades: 

the degradation of community infrastructure and institutions, weaker family units, growing 

inequality, declining trust in institutions and chronic neglect from policy makers. 
But there is another set of threats that are more recent and are turning the chronic crisis 

of social disconnection into an acute threat of social division: the mismanagement of 

immigration, cost of living pressures and social media driven extremism. 

These forces are converging into something altogether more dangerous - leaving the UK 

sitting on a tinderbox of disconnection and division.

The report comes with a very comprehensive Literature review consisting of four
parts.

• The introductory section defines community strength and 

cohesion and looks at how these conditions can be measured. 

• The second part examines barriers to community strength and 

cohesion. 

• Part Three look at the delivery of community development and 

cohesion programmes on the ground. It examines the approaches used by different 

organisations and the evidence on the impact of different programmes. 
The strategic role of local authorities is also examined, as well as learning from outside the UK.

• Part Four draws together evidence on the economic and social case for investing in community development and cohesion and draws some final conclusions.

The review itemises such official reports as 

The Seebohm Report (on social services 1968)
Race Relations Act (to avoid indirect discrimination and establish 
Commission for Racial Equality 1976).
A Community of Communities and Citizens (the Parrekh report on racial equality 2000) 
The Cantle Report (on “community cohesion” 2001)
Our Shared Future (Commission on Integration and Cohesion 2007)
Casey review of Opportunity and Integration (2016)
Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience (The Khan Review 2024)

Let alone the unofficial reports such as 
Born to Fail (NCB 1971) 
Shattered Britain (More in Common July 2025)
Perhaps the real problem is that such reports are dealing with a variety of 

very different issues – whether poverty, racial inequality and discrimination, 

“community cohesion” (whatever that means) and lack of democracy. 

Little wonder that the efforts were so unfocussed. And that action consisted of 

little more than terminology, words and reification.