Let’s just say that, the further any government moves to the left, the more things it wishes to ban, especially things private.
Our own Marxist government is palpably waging war on everything private: private medicine, private education, private pensions, private transport – and now apparently also private parts.
If you instinctively look down in trepidation, relax. The Starmer gang isn’t in favour of castration, unless it goes by the name of sex – pardon me, gender – change.
No, our Marxists only want to ban from X the Grok AI tool that can take people’s clothes off at the touch of a key. And, to use Donald Trump’s favourite expression, Starmer can do it the easy way or the hard way.
The easy way is for Elon Musk, the owner of X, to agree to remove the strip-teasing software. The hard way is for Musk to refuse to do so, and for Starmer then to ban X in Britain altogether.
Sir Keir is so deeply worried about XXX on X that he disregards the obvious fact that any number of AI packages can do exactly the same thing. He also forgets that Britain used to regard free speech as a fundamental aspect of free society.
In today’s article, Lord Hannan cites an appalling statistic: apparently, more people are arrested for something they say on social media in Britain than in Russia or China. Admittedly, those on the receiving end of such prosecution here don’t yet get long prison sentences as they do in Russia. But the trend is unmistakable.
I, everyone and his brother never cease to repeat that freedom of speech mainly refers to freedom of offensive speech. The most oppressive government in history wouldn’t censure anyone saying how wonderful it is, and how happy the people are to be its slaves.
HMG, Tory as well as Labour, has been veering leftwards for decades, having finally ended up in the gutter of minority politics. Every minority, no matter how tiny or objectionable, can now claim enforceable freedom from offensive speech as its basic right.
Thus calling someone like me a ‘fattie’ could be grounds for criminal prosecution if I claimed that the sobriquet offended me or, worse still, traumatised me for life. When a government steps on the path of prosecuting things of this kind, it will in due course start banning any speech that deviates from what was called ‘the Party’s general line’ in Stalin’s Russia.
Since that line tends to zig and zag, people will be expected to perform non-stop verbal calisthenics to keep up. If it’s suddenly declared that the word ‘Eskimo’, used since the 16th century, has become offensive and is to be replaced with ‘Inuit’, we’ll be expected to toe the line – or else.
Having said that, genuine, as opposed to feigned, offence should be discouraged. In relation to Grok, using AI to find out what your friend’s wife may look like with her kit off is tawdry. But it isn’t offensive to anything other than good taste. However, uploading on YouTube a fake picture of the same woman in flagrante delicto with a dog ought to be punished.
If our Marxist government were simply going to penalise the dissemination of such images, it would be hard to argue. But insisting on removing that tool from X and threatening to ban the whole platform should Musk predictably refuse to comply is tantamount to the denial of Britain’s centuries of constitutional history.
I don’t know how computer-literate Starmer is, but even if he isn’t at all, someone in his entourage should tell him that what he proposes to do isn’t only despotic but also useless.
Services like VPN enable viewers to get around state bans on dissident media, which any Russian will tell you. All anti-Putin websites have been banned for years, and yet thousands of Russians happily follow them every day through circuitous routes.
For all its manifest faults, the global net is definitely a weapon against tyranny. However, it’s useful to remember that it can also serve tyranny just as faithfully.
One has to admit with some chagrin that Starmer’s real problem with X isn’t so much its content as its owner. I see Musk as a libertarian radical, not a conservative, but such nuances don’t matter to Marxists.
What matters is that Musk is neither woke nor generally left-wing. Moreover, he doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for everything Starmer holds dear, including Starmer himself.
Marxists and other extremists see the world in the binary terms of friend or foe. He who isn’t a friend isn’t someone who has a different point of view. He is a mortal enemy to be silenced, punished or even eliminated – the difference among the three options is contingent on the Marxists’ hold on power.
I’ve mentioned a distinction between a libertarian and a conservative, but the line separating the two is thin. The two groups actually overlap in some of their desiderata. However, as is often the case, the valid differences are those not of kind but of degree.
So it is in this case. There exist two kinds of censorship, proscriptive and prescriptive. The former is the authorities dictating what people shouldn’t say. The latter is telling people what they must say if they know what’s good for them.
I spent the first 25 years of my life in a country where both types of censorship were enforced with singular brutality. Been there, done that, and it pains me to see Britain inching the same way.
Back in Russia, even learned treatises in fields like microbiology were routinely rejected if they didn’t feature the requisite number of quotations from Lenin. If the author protested too loudly, questioning Lenin’s authority on, say, photosynthesis, he could be reprimanded, possibly sacked, possibly even imprisoned. In the generation before mine, he could have been shot.
However, all political states, even the most liberal ones, practise some forms of proscriptive censorship. Incitement to murder, for example, is against the law everywhere, as is libel (differently though it may be defined). The question is where you draw the line.
A libertarian like Musk will tell you lines oughtn’t to be drawn anywhere this side of incitement. A conservative wouldn’t be so sure. He would define his view of Western civilisation not so much in political terms as in those of culture, temperament, intuition, style and taste.
If our politics disintegrates into an exchange of obscene insults, our manners disappear, our culture turns into an exercise of mass vulgarity, our tastes are dictated by the mob, and our ancient freedoms are replaced with loudmouthed claims of entitlement, then how is our civilisation Western – or indeed tautologically civilised?
Some forms of mild censorship may be required for us to cling on to the last vestiges of our dying civilisation. For example, the now ubiquitous four-letter word used to be banned from British broadcast media. Then the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan used it on a BBC programme in 1965 to prove that the word was so thoroughly desemanticised that it had lost all its shock value.
I agree: the word doesn’t shock any longer. But its unrestrained public use has an erosive and brutalising effect on taste, style and therefore our civilisation, that cognate of civility. That’s why I’d happily ban it from television, although I understand the ‘slippery-slope’ arguments of those who wouldn’t.
However, I’m sure that what our Marxists plan to do, ban a platform owned by someone they dislike, is the point on which conservatives, libertarians and even apolitical lovers of liberty converge. This is an exercise in typical left-wing despotism; something I’d call par for the course.