Free Speech for me - but not for thee.

In the wake of the killing of the far right influencer Charlie Kirk, the right wing has revealed the truth about its attitude to free speech. The hypocrisy of the right on freedom of speech was there all the time, but their response to the killing of Charlie Kirk has exposed it plainly for all to see. The right is only opposed to cancel culture and restrictions on freedom of speech when they are restrictions on their ability to be abusive, insulting, and threatening towards minorities and anyone else who stands in their way. 

Over in America, things are getting increasingly febrile, and as, what happens across the Pond generally comes over here sooner or later, we can not afford to be complacent. This week, JD Vance has given his support to a far right campaign to harass, cancel, intimidate and sack anyone the right deems not to have sufficiently mourned the killing of Kirk or who has dared to quote Kirk’s own words as evidence that the newly canonised saint of the American MAGA movement was, in fact, a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe and an extremist whose views were until recently far beyond the bounds of political respectability. No one can be permitted to criticise the Patron Saint of Republican Intolerance or to cast doubt on the halo bestowed upon him since his murder. 

The US State Department has announced that it will use AI to trawl the social media accounts of foreigners applying for visas to go to the USA and will deny them to anyone that the Republican-run State Department considers to have ‘mocked’ Kirk’s murder. You can be quite certain that the definition of ‘mocked’ will be extended to include any criticism of Kirk or any failure to worship at his shrine.

The motivations of Kirk’s killer remain murky, but Trump’s allies have rushed to link the killing – even although they have no real real evidence – to what they claim is a coordinated left wing “terror” movement that supports political violence. They claim that this supposedly coordinated and organised “terror” movement is funded by progressive and liberal charities. This conspiracy theory has the backing of the American Government and has led to fears of a draconian crackdown on free speech.

America is, and always has been, a violent country, and both those on the left and the right have committed acts of violence. But it remains a fact that most victims of politically motivated violence in the USA are attacked by those on the right.  The data show that most political violence in the USA is committed by those on the right. Excluding 9/11, figures from Time magazine show that of the 620 politically motivated murders committed in the USA since 1975, 63.0% were perpetrated by those on the political right, and just 10.5% by those on the political left. 23% were carried out by Islamists, 1.3% by foreign nationalists and most of the rest by those whose motives were unclear.

Colin Clarke, senior researcher at the Soufan Center focusing on domestic and transnational terrorism, told Time that the data show a clear disparity in lethality between left and right when it comes to political violence. He said:”There’s no question that, if you look at the numbers in terms of lethality, it is the far right that’s been far more lethal—Tree of Life, the El Paso Walmart attack, the Buffalo supermarket shooting.” Each of these attacks was committed with extremist, white-supremacist motivations. Prior to 9/11, the worst terrorist attack on American soil was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, carried out by far right white supremacist and conspiracy theorist Timothy McVeigh.

However Trump’s speech in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder made no mention of right wing political violence, even though just forty days before Kirk was killed, Melissa Hortman, a Democrat lawmaker in Minnesota was shot and killed with her husband and another Democrat state senator was shot and wounded along with his wife. The perpetrator was a MAGA devotee of Donald Trump. Asked about Hortman’s murder, Trump claimed he was “not familiar” with the case.

Republicans grieve the loss of Kirk and demand that everyone else grieves for him too, but for the most part they have ignored the violence against Democrats, including Hortman’s assassination, the arson attack on the home of Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, the violent assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a thwarted plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer. The attack on the 81 year old Paul Pelosi, who was struck on the head with a hammer by a far right intruder who was looking for Nancy Pelosi, was met with widespread mockery and derision from the right. Speaking to a TV audience days after the attack on Pelosi, a grinning Charlie Kirk called for the attacker to be released from jail and said: “If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out.”

The US Republicans, like Reform UK and the Tory right here, are only interested in freedom of speech for themselves. What they really want is to be able to make racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or other bigoted comments without fear of any consequences. They are very keen to censor or silence anyone who criticises the sacred cows of the right, whether that’s Charlie Kirk or their sanitised, indeed, whitewashed, view of history. Don’t let it happen. Stand up for real freedom of speech, even if you have to hold your nose when you apply it to those you vehemently disagree with.

Othering, demonising and empathy

I've just read an interesting article on "How Othering contributes to Discrimination and Prejudice"  You can find it here and it's well worth a few minutes of your time reading it and thinking about it in terms of current events, both local and in the USA. 

Othering and demonising opponents has always a key part of Trump's modus operandii, long before he became interested in politics. It's simply what he does. And the right, particularly the far right which Charlie Kirk represented, is defined by it. It's simply what they do. And in the process, any empathy for the 'other' is lost and the 'other' are dehumanised.

Charlie Kirk had a long history of espousing morally questionable views in the supposed name of Christianity – a form of Christianity which seems to be alien to the precepts of the Gospels as is commonly understood over here. I don’t think that when Jesus said: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” there was an additional verse saying – “Unless they are a migrant or gay or trans or left wing.....” Kirk’s openly racist views are well documented. He said civil rights hero Dr Martin Luther King was “awful… not a good person.” He also called the Civil Rights Movement “a huge mistake.” His views on abortion went beyond the bounds of reason or human decency. He once said that if his ten year old daughter became pregnant as a result of rape then she should be forced to carry the baby to term. He also insisted: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.”

Actually his etymology is wrong: the English word empathy was coined in 1909 in order to provide a translation of the German word Einfühlung, which goes as far back, at least, to the 18th century in the writings of the Prussian philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Of course, something exists long before there’s a name for it. The dwarf planet Pluto has existed for billions of years, even if there has only been a name for it since it was discovered in 1930. Indeed, Jesus’s injunction to 'love thy neighbour as thyself' is a commandment to practice empathy, 2000 years ago. But that fact doesn't fit in with Kirk's narrative.

Long before the New Age movement was a thing, Hannah Arendt wrote: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” That is where we are now in 2025. The barbarians are not at the gates, they are on social media and in our mobile phones.

The hard right is seeking to destroy empathy. The far right’s tactics of demonisation and dehumanisation can only work when we cannot be allowed to feel empathy for the victims of their hatred. We cannot be permitted to feel empathy for trans people or migrants. Kirk sought to deny the validity of empathy, a sentiment also shared by Elon Musk. To deny empathy is to deny humanity. 

Charlie Kirk was a deeply unpleasant individual with some deeply unpleasant views but that, of course, does not justify or condone his murder. There is no excuse for murdering an individual because of his views and, of course, his murder should be condemned. Since his murder, the media has set out to sanctify Kirk, presenting him as a mainstream Christian and a mainstream Conservative, a modern martyr. Kirk’s views were not mainstream and, if we allow them to become normalised, we are in deep trouble as a society. 

Empathy is in very short supply across British politics, but we can still try to keep its flame alive. Let's not forget that our politics, although it might not seem like it at the moment, are based on the cultural tradition of communitarianism and the deeply empathetic belief that we all help our neighbours. Perhaps this will give us a strong foundation from which to resist the selfish and alienating cynicism upon which the far right feeds?

The deliberate attempt to create a narrative centering around “us” and “them” and to mobilize violence against that 'other' was on display last weekend. Elon Musk kindly helped encourage the most unstable people imaginable to join the protest. He bravely incited violence from the safety of his desk in the US, telling the mob, "Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die." Don't worry, it's fine when rich white people use this sort of language so Elon is not in any trouble. The protesters were so inspired by Elon's words that they patriotically threw rocks at police vans. This was to show how mad they are that foreigners come here and don't respect our laws. One protester even held up a banner demanding that we make Sharia Law illegal. Think about it. Yes, we should make a law that is not the law illegal to stop it being the law, even though it is not the law and wasn't going to be the law. Only people with the biglyest and bestest brains can process what I just said there.

And here's a description of the event from a friend who was there: "Any pretence that "raising the flag" is anything but intimidation of minorities is dispelled. It's against refugees, against migrants, against Palestinian flags, against LGBTQ+ flags, against trade union flags".  

And we were all fooled.

I know I'm getting on a bit so forgive me if I’ve got this wrong, but I seem to recall the country voting the Tories out last year. But now I begin to doubt my recollections. Keir Starmer’s Labour party was elected on a promise of ‘change’, in retrospect, a vacuuous slogan which allowed voters to interpret it however they liked. Of course, they didn't say it was a change for the better but most hoped for a change from the pettiness, self-serving cronyism, callous cruelty and corruption which characterised the previous Tory government. A year on, it’s clear that all that has really changed are the names and faces of those presiding over the pettiness, self-serving cronyism, callous cruelty and corruption. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. This supposedly Labour government has proven itself to be every bit as authoritarian and nasty as the Tories it replaced, prohibiting a direct action protest group as a “terrorist” organisation, leading to the mass arrest of hundreds of demonstrators, mostly 'of a certain age', for the terrorist crime of holding up a placard protesting against genocide, a genocide which the UK Government continues to support militarily and diplomatically. Labour vies with the far right in its enthusiasm for flag hugging and the demonisation of migrants as it chases the tail of Nigel Farage, normalising the politics and talking points of actual fascists in the process.

Under Starmer, the UK isn’t just drifting towards fascism, it seems to be hell bent on driving there at top speed while waving flags out of the window. We are witnessing the implosion of the British political system. The destination is either authoritarianism or, perhaps, for Scotland, and possibly Wales too, independence. This so-called Union cannot survive the capture of the institutions of the British state by far right English 'ethno-nationalists'. But instead of challenging the far right Anglo-British nationalists who drive Reform UK, this Labour party privileges them, legitimising them at every turn. There’s a stark contrast between Starmer’s eagerness to pander to the hard right and Brexit supporters and his marginalisation of the larger number of those on the liberal left who support stronger ties with the EU. The fact that polling consistently shows that a clear majority of people in the UK believe Brexit was a mistake is ignored by Labour, the Tories, and of course by Farage’s fan club.

Presiding over all this is the charisma free zone that is Keir Starmer, robotically intoning platitudes, driven solely by whatever the latest focus group has told him he needs to say. To say that Starmer is inauthentic is an insult to waxwork dummies which barely resemble the celebrity they are supposed to represent. Starmer is so lacking in emotional intelligence that he is incapable of realising that everyone perceives his lack of authenticity and that his words are hollow and performative. So he ploughs on, continuing to dig himself, and everyone else, even deeper into the grave that Morgan McSweeney has dug for him.

Following the defenestration last week of deputy Prime Minister Angela Raynor, Starmer embarked upon a wide ranging reshuffle of his government, because apparently one year on after being appointed because the incumbents were ideal for their jobs, they are no longer ideal for their jobs. Given that we are talking about dozens of individuals here, and the one common denominator is Keir Starmer, who clearly must have made some serious errors in judgement just a few months ago, the obvious conclusion must be that the person who is unfit for their job is Keir Starmer. The 'Mandelstam Affair' probably reinforces that view.

This real crisis is not the crisis that Reform UK, a name as emblematic of political lies as Better Together, hasn't the slightest intention of addressing. Should Reform ever take power, the public anger and disappointment at their lies and deceit will be orders of magnitude greater than that which ensued following Starmer’s election victory. However, Reform will wreak huge damage on public services, institutions, and human and civil rights, taking advantage of the UK’s non-existent constitutional checks and balances to entrench themselves in power. Look across the Atlantic and think about the Trump Playbook. It's Farage's bible.

Notwithstanding all the ordure that's flying around, I hope you all are doing okay. Well, as okay as is possible. Pet a dog, pet a cat, hug a loved one. We will get through this. Stay informed, help others.

And let's play out with The Who and with what could be my theme song. Enjoy!

Power to the wrinklies - and Rev Sue Parfitt

It's only been a matter of a few weeks since the leader of Hamas UK, 83-year-old Rev Sue Parfitt, clashed with counter-terrorism police outside Westminster. When the retired reverend was taken into custody, we thought that was the end of her reign of terror, but we were wrong. Oh so wrong. It appears that, at some point, the riotous reverend escaped custody and police didn't tell anyone because they didn't want to spread fear. That is, after all, the goal of terrorists.

In a nightmarish scene on the weekend, Rev Sue Parfitt reappeared at a Palestine Action protest outside Westminster. And she again committed the atrocity of hurting the feelings of war criminals by practising free speech in clear defiance of the law. She ruthlessly held up a sign bearing words that are illegal to repeat. This left heroic police officers with no choice but to engage in round two. Not wanting to take any chances, multiple officers escorted away the elderly woman who is so dangerous, she can barely walk. It took everything the officers had to bring her walking stick under control, but they somehow managed it. Thank goodness for their riot training. 

Okay, maybe I’m being ageist here. Maybe Sue Parfitt has got more about her than I realised. Would I be committing a crime if I high-fived her? Because I really want to. I think it’s really impressive that someone of Sue’s age has such get up and go. 

There has been a huge increase in the number of counter-terrorism arrests this year with police capturing 1,339 terror suspects so far. To put that in perspective, police only make around 200-300 counter-terrorism arrests in an average year. No one knows why the number of arrests increased so dramatically after Yvette Cooper made it illegal to be frail and elderly and have a conscience. Personally, I blame social media for radicalising our wrinklies. If it wasn't for social media, wrinklies would only be getting their information from GB News and the like and would therefore have no idea about the reality. While we fretted about social media exposing our children to the truth, we slept on the threat of wrinklies being radicalised. And now, here we are, in a situation where retired reverends are making signs, and disabled people are racing along in wheelchairs powered by enriched uranium. 

The organisers of the demonstration, Defend Our Juries, have insisted it was "the picture of peaceful protest", but police are claiming that 17 of the arrests were for assaulting a police officer. Given the average age of those arrested was about 92, I’m finding that hard to believe.

You probably didn’t notice, but the UK has a new Home Secretary and this presented the perfect opportunity to say maybe we’ve got the balance of this law wrong. Maybe a proscription that causes us to make record numbers of arrests of the most harmless members of society is a bit nuts. Maybe we should quietly amend the legislation and hope everyone forgets how ridiculous we were. But no, Shabana Mahmoud is doubling down. The silver-haired brigade are, in fact, terrorists, don’t you know. “Supporting Palestine and supporting a proscribed terrorist group are not the same thing", she has tweeted. But supporting Israel and supporting a genocidal regime are very much the same thing, and no arrests are being made for that…

Some police are gloating that the frail pensioners they arrested could be looking at six months imprisonment, although in many cases they should probably be returned to their care homes. I mean, do we really need to be protected from people who can’t stand unaided? In fairness to the police, some officers have privately admitted that they feel ashamed by the arrests and even their managers don’t support the legislation, but they’re obligated to uphold the law. Now that’s all well and good, but they do realise this is fascism, right? And when fascism arrives, "just following orders" is not an acceptable defence.

Police have even been arresting people for wearing Plasticine Action t-shirts because even taking the piss out of draconian legislation is terrorism. Thankfully, Plasticine Action’s leader, who is known only to authorities as “Morph” is still on the run. I’m no detective, but I’d bet my life he’s hiding in Sue Parfitt’s garden shed.

Perhaps the weirdest aspect of all this is how actual proscribed terror groups are allowed to hold marches. The Ulster Volunteer Force, for example, held a march in Belfast on 12th July this year without a single arrest being made. It seems police know the difference between protest and terrorism and they apply the law selectively. It's starting to look like they are being so heavy-handed to protect Israel. What other explanation could there possibly be?

Not AR but AI

Let's take a break from the Angela Rayner affair and all its consequences and turn to something else that the Labour Party seems to be mismanaging - the impact of Artificial Intelligence.

The government’s position on AI is, in my opinion, delusional. A Starmer aide has been quoted recently as saying that on AI "the UK needs to move forward and seize the opportunity of not being in Europe"; that AI will deliver "a level of productivity growth that means everybody in the world, in ten years’ time, is going to be more productive than the most productive person in the world today"; and that these preposterously unlikely advancements will help Rachel Reeves "balance the books".

It’s clear that AI can be extremely useful in automating painstaking data collection and aggregation processes, as well as many other things, but it’s incredulous to imagine that it’s going to transform the economy so dramatically that, within ten years, every single worker is going to become more productive than the most productive worker in the world today. Just think about it.

Of course it will help with time-consuming bureaucratic tasks, but how on earth is it going to create such staggering productivity gains for millions upon millions of ordinary workers with ordinary jobs? How will it lay bricks, unblock drains, or pick fruit so much more quickly? How is it going to vastly increase the productivity of chefs, hairdressers, retail workers, electricians, gym instructors, agricultural workers, HGV drivers, and all other kinds of workers, to such an extent that they become more productive in a decade than the most productive worker in the world today? Sure, it might help to make marginal gains by handling invoices, supply chains, accounts, and timetables somewhat more efficiently, if they all learn to use the technology, but this isn’t what Starmer’s aide is claiming is it?

They’re claiming that workers in every sector are all going to make such extraordinary leaps forward in productivity over the next decade that everyone will be more productive than the most productive worker is today. It’s such an extraordinary overstatement of the gains that they’re way into magic beans territory. It’s just plain stupid to imagine that the big benefit of such unbelievably unrealistic productivity gains would be that Rachel Reeves will be able to balance the books a bit better.

The UK economy is facing all kinds of real problems that hinder productivity. Crumbling infrastructure; the demographic ageing crisis; failing public services; privatisation profiteering; massive regional inequality; inadequate public transport outside of London; rampant property-hoarding ….... All of these real problems require real solutions, not some pie in the sky fantasy about AI curing the unbalanced books. It’s an imaginary solution to the wrong problem to be focusing on in the first place.

Starmer’s aide is stating that the UK government wants to turn its back on the EU, and try to follow the US approach to AI. The two things that have characterised Donald Trump’s second term so far have been fanatical deregulation and economic protectionism, so it’s absurd for the UK government to imagine that they’re going to be allowed to hitch a ride on Trump’s AI coat tails. Even before Trump came to power, the Biden administration was attempting to stamp out overseas AI advancements with measures like sticking embargoes on the export of AI chips to China. With Trump already hammering traditional US allies with tariffs and trade sanctions too, it’s vanishingly unlikely that they’ll be minded to allow another country like the UK to share in their AI spoils.

In seeking to distance themselves from the EU’s attempts to regulate AI use, and aligning with the US approach, Starmer’s government is signalling its intention to go down the unregulated route. Allowing AI engines to loot creative industry content is a dangerous road to go down, especially when the creative industries are one of the few remining fields in which the UK is still punching miles above its weight on the world stage. The UK creative industry sector was worth £124.6 billion in Gross Added value to the UK economy in 2022. That’s 6% of the economy, and an enormous number of jobs. It seems like a no-brainer to consider protecting our precious creative industries from the threat of unregulated AI content looting, but the mood in the Starmer camp seems to be a giddy delusion that AI is going to save Rachel Reeves bacon, so attempts to consider the potential damage and mitigate it are out of the question.

It should be obvious to all that, under capitalism, technological advances often work to the disadvantage of workers and communities. Consider how self-service tills in supermarkets mean fewer workers, which results in less cash in people’s pockets in the local community, which means less demand for other local businesses, while supermarket executives and shareholders divide up the gains for themselves.

Instead of fantasising about how AI is going to turn us all into super-workers, isn’t it worth considering how AI is more likely to replace a lot of workers, rather than augment them? And if AI performs the tasks that people used to receive salaries for doing, who gets the gains? If the gains are divided between the private owners of the AI engines and the private owners of the businesses, where does that leave ordinary people?

UK workers have already suffered the longest period of wage stagnation on record, and the mood of public discontent is palpable. How are people going to react if they see AI start erasing even more jobs, to deliver even bigger private profits, while our politicians tell us that it’s actually a magic cure-all that we should be thankful for?

Starmer’s inner circle seem to be constructing a house of cards of AI delusions. Yes, there are some big potential upsides in terms of easing bureaucratic tasks, but what’s the benefit if all of the gains are siphoned off in private profits, especially when the government seems so intolerant to the basic concept that wealth needs to be redistributed to prevent soaring inequality? It’s absolutely delusional to claim that within a decade AI is going to make every worker more productive than the most productive worker today. The child-like faith in AI saving Rachel Reeves’ skin demonstrates an unwillingness to even address, let alone deal with any of the country’s real economic problems.

Aligning with the US approach to AI looks particularly dangerous given the Trump administration’s protectionist agenda and fanatical zeal for extreme deregulation. And it seems extraordinarily short-sighted to focus on the profoundly unrealistic fantasy that AI is going to turn all of us into super-workers, while ignoring the threat that AI poses to jobs and Britain’s precious creative industries.