In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk is joined by Fraser Nelson, Helen Joyce, and Shashank Joshi to discuss the global fallout from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the different ways free speech is under attack in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the future of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Fraser Nelson is a British political journalist who was editor of The Spectator from 2009 to 2024. Nelson is also a columnist for The Times.
Helen Joyce is an Irish journalist and the Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters. She is the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.
Shashank Joshi is Defence Editor at The Economist, where he writes on a wide range of national security, defence and intelligence issues.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Welcome to this live recording of the Good Fight Club in London at the Sekforde pub. Thank you so much for joining me. We started to do this live podcast every now and again—and to do this panel format—because we thought there would be a lot of things happening in the world that we want to give listeners orientation about. So here we are.
Fraser, in the last week or so we have had the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We have had a big global debate in response to that, including this extraordinary march in London that had been planned previously, I think, but ended up using a lot of the imagery of Charlie Kirk. It really feels like American culture is being exported everywhere. You also have the astonishing rise of the Reform Party in the United Kingdom. Now, as we are recording, we are not too far away from Donald Trump on his state visit. So talk us through this moment and these events and tell us a little bit about the state of Britain at this point.
Fraser Nelson: Right now Britain is going through truly unprecedented change. When you look at the opinion polls, you see things that we have never seen before. Never have we seen a newly-elected government lose support so quickly. Labour is now at just barely 20% in the polls. Never have we seen a prime minister with such low approval ratings, -54%. Nobody has ever been there in my lifetime, let alone been so low and gone on to win.
Never have we had a new party come out of nowhere and be not just ahead but ten points ahead in the polls. Reform is now at 30%. At first I thought this was an opinion poll phenomenon—but Reform has gone on to win council after council after council. They won twelve councils in the May local elections, and the polls suggest they will do just as well in the Welsh government elections. Reform might be governing Wales soon and might be coming second in Scotland. When you add the next two local elections and the year subsequent to that, by the time it gets to the next general election it could well be that Westminster is the last piece of Nigel Farage’s monopoly board which has not turned turquoise blue. This is how things look right now. But the iron rule of British politics is that nothing ever stays the same for even a year. The wheel is still very much in spin. Who knows? This is why I exited the prediction business some time ago. Suffice it to say that anything could be possible.
When Labour won a little over a year ago, the majority was so big. Now it is very difficult to see Keir Starmer coming back in these approval ratings, and even harder to see who might replace him. When Labour were fed up with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown was waiting in the wings. Fed up with Gordon Brown, Miliband was waiting in the wings. Right now there is nobody waiting in the wings for Keir Starmer. When you hear Labour talk about a challenge from Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Manchester, you see how desperate that is, because he is not even in the House of Commons.
We are seeing things fall apart, and the phrase I hear most of all in Westminster is a line about how “the old is dying and the new is yet to be born.” Where this could all go is anybody’s guess, but right now we see a vacuum of political authority. And into that vacuum, of all people, we have Tommy Robinson. I do not expect anybody who does not follow British politics to know who Tommy Robinson is. I like to think that he does not show up in the non-British algorithm so much. Robinson has been in jail several times, he is unhesitatingly described as far right. Nigel Farage wants nothing to do with him, he will kick out of his party anybody who is close to Tommy Robinson. Yet Robinson has found a new patron in the form of Elon Musk.
Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you don’t miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app.
If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk’s Substack, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
And if you are having a problem setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email our podcast team at leonora.barclay@persuasion.community
To me this is quite significant. You can go back in British history and find out when the Daily Mail was interested in the Fascist Party and you can look at Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, but the most they ever got was to the Albert Hall. That was not very much. Tommy Robinson was able to lead a march just a few days ago of 130,000 people. That figure itself is not huge. It would not even make the top ten in the marches of the last ten years. The Palestine marches were almost half a million. The Brexit marches were about a third of a million. But never have we had somebody like Tommy Robinson lead something of that size.
That is where you have to stop and ask yourself what is happening. Are we seeing the far right taking off in a way they have never taken off in this country before? Right now I am not so sure it would fit that description, because when I saw it—not so much Robinson, but the people joining the march—people who spent time in that march, who spoke to others, did not see things that would really fit the description of the far right. It was called the “Unite the Kingdom” march—it was called a pro-patriotic march. There were a lot of people in a celebratory mood. There was a gospel choir singing Jerusalem. There were placards about immigration, about the small boats, but that is not exactly an extremist position.
Perhaps the most dangerous moment of all is that Tommy Robinson has captured quite a lot of mainstream political opinion. Whether he could lead his own party or not, I do not know. It was one of the things I never thought I would live to see.
Mounk: What does the Reform Party represent? We are in a moment in which there is a rise of right-wing populist parties, as they are called, in a slightly catch-all phrase. Across Europe you have Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella at least getting to the second round of presidential elections in France, and quite likely to win the second round of the election at this point. You have the AfD in Germany ahead in many recent polls. You have Giorgia Meloni in Italy. But there are important differences between them. For a non-British audience, how should we think about the Reform Party and Nigel Farage in comparison to those other political movements, in comparison to Donald Trump?
Helen Joyce: Can I offer you an answer? It is the problem with every foreign correspondent to always think of things in terms of wherever they were a foreign correspondent. South America is my answer. To me, this is very familiar from the time I spent in Brazil, which was 2010 to 2014. I was there for the tail end of Lula. I was there when Dilma was president. I left before Jair Bolsonaro became president, and I could not believe that was going to happen. Yet when I got in touch with my old friends from Brazil, they were all going to vote for Bolsonaro.
I could not believe it. The one thing I knew about Bolsonaro: he was in the Senate when I was out there, and the only thing he ever made the news for, in the four years I was there, was telling another female senator that she was too ugly to rape. That was literally the only line that made it into the papers. Yet he became president. So I became convinced that there are these times when people say that it cannot get worse, or “I want change at all costs,” or “I have tried everything that we know,” or “everything is broken.”
There is a word for it in Portuguese or Spanish. I am sure it is a word in other languages. They call it Voluntarismo. Voluntarismo is the belief that politics is done by the power of will. If somebody tells you that you cannot do something—you cannot stop the small boats, you cannot balance the budget, you cannot keep pensions rising at the same time as getting young people into good jobs, you cannot fix everything at the same time—that is because you did not try hard enough. If you had had the will, you would have been able to make it happen.
I know people who went on that march, by the way, and they were not far right. They just wanted to go along and see what was going on.
Shashank Joshi: All I would add is that the common thread across all the bits you touched on is that fixation with borders, sovereignty, and control. That is the common theme. That is not new, that has been the case for a number of years, and you can trace it back in British politics ten years. It is that absolute fixation on—there are wider parts of it—the sense that the country has changed beyond recognition for these people, the sense of a disorienting shift in their communities, but a very inchoate sense of what to do about it.
To your point about the power of will, there is a sense of frustration with the constitutional order and dealing with it. Not to immediately drag us straight back to America, having said we are importing American ideas, but I am thinking of Trump’s strike on a vessel allegedly carrying drugs, which as far as I can see is very difficult to justify as being compatible with law. It looks like an illegal strike, clearly not a legitimate act of war.
This was a Venezuelan boat allegedly connected to a Venezuelan drug cartel, which was struck in international waters where normally the Coast Guard would stop it and say, excuse me, you are carrying drugs, and instead they just blew it up. When J. D. Vance was asked, is this a war crime? he said, I do not give a shit what you call it. That touches at the heart of that sense of, we do not have to do it by the book.
Joyce: Yes. We’re tired of you giving us excuses. We want you to act. It’s very Trumpian.
Mounk: Shashank, you spoke about the obsession with control and borders and so on. One way to think about this is that for decades, European publics have been asking for policies that politicians, whether out of real constraints or out of reasons of an ideological gap, have not been delivering. Eventually the public ran out of patience.
There was an interesting paper published a few months ago by a researcher at Bocconi University who was looking at the cultural representation gap between politicians and voters. He shows that throughout Europe, politicians had very different preferences about a set of cultural issues, including migration, than average voters. The most striking graph he has is that in 2013, not just the average member of the German Bundestag, but even the average MP for the Christian Democratic Party, the CDU—which at that time was the most right-wing political party in the parliament—had a view about immigration that was far more permissive than the average view of the voters. The CDU was way to the left of the median voter.
What happened was that the AfD stepped into that space. So is that a big part of what is going on here? The Tories ran and governed for ten years on the promise of tamping down on migration, on the promise that Brexit would lead to less migration. In fact, Brexit led to more migration. Is that the major point of contention here, or is it really about something else?
Nelson: I would say that is the biggest single point. With migration, I do not think it is xenophobia. I think these two are different. One of the factors behind the Brexit vote was that the British economic model was going the wrong way. Companies were employing not locally but importing instead. There was a sense that companies were not really investing and that the social contract was being eroded. I think that was a large part of it. Not all of it, but a large part of it.
If you look at British social attitudes towards immigrants, we are one of the most welcoming countries in the whole of Europe. Of course, that does not mean that people are okay with small boat arrivals. That is an obvious daily violation of borders. It feeds a sense of unfairness and it gives a sense of disorder. Successive governments promised to deal with it. Brexit was supposed to take back control, and the first unspoken part of that was of our borders.
The Conservatives got a new set of migration tools which they did not know how to use. By the time they worked out what was going on, net migration had gone from about 200,000 up to almost a million. They slammed on the brakes, but by that point it was too late. To me one of the good points of Brexit is that it focuses responsibility, and the Conservatives received the full brunt of that responsibility.
Right now I do think that the small boat arrivals are a daily reminder of Labour’s failure to deliver what they promised on this. If Labour were to get migration to net zero, which it could do, and if it were to deal with the small boats problem as Australia did, which again it could do, I think support for Reform would collapse very quickly. But I do not think Labour is going to do either of those things.
Mounk: I have a few thoughts on this. One is, we are in central London right now. I remember, especially around 2015 and 2016, spending a lot of time in London. Every time you were in a coffee shop, in a restaurant, in any kind of environment where you would encounter a service worker, it was never somebody who grew up in England. For the most part, because of the euro crisis and so on, it was very pleasant and nice-looking young literature students from Italy and Spain. I understand that if I was running a café in the center of London, I would probably hire the person who was in the middle of a literature degree in Bilbao rather than a working-class person from the outskirts of London. There are obvious reasons to do that.
But it did, in a very clear way, crowd out opportunities for people in the country. It made it unnecessary to skill up people, to invest in them, and so on. I am someone with a European passport who went to university in this country, very saddened by Brexit and certainly opposed to it. But I do understand that piece of it.
The other thing, since you mentioned small boats, is that these are small boats coming across the Channel from France and Calais. It is the first time in a while that Britain has really faced illegal immigration at scale, not through people coming from the airport and then staying on, but in this kind of way where it feels like there is no physical control of the border. Of course there are European regulations which make it quite hard to fight against that.
I do have this fear, which I would love to hear your thoughts on, that we are increasingly giving European voters a choice between favoring the rule of law and being able to control their borders. Because of how expansive many court judgments have become, and because of how constricting some of the European conventions have become through those judicial interpretations, we are basically saying: if you care about the rule of law, sorry, we cannot do much about illegal immigration. The only people who promise to actually deal with illegal immigration—even if they often do not end up doing it—are the ones who are saying, we have to break the rule of law to do that.
As someone who cares about the rule of law and who cares about judicial review, my sense is that often you need to limit how much judges have to say, so that in the moments when you really need them—for example, because you have a dangerous authoritarian in power who is trying to expand power in deeply dangerous ways—they have some authority left to do that.
Joyce: I completely agree. I think there is a big chance that the UK leaves the European Court of Human Rights, and I think the same of my home country, Ireland, even though I cannot see the route. I do blame journalism a lot for this. Not in this country, but when I go to Ireland what I see is a country that has changed extremely fast. Obviously I am a migrant myself, I am not making a normative statement. Journalism is not about telling you what should not be happening. It should not be about suppressing unpleasant truths.
What I see in a lot of journalism is not saying inconvenient things because you are afraid of giving comfort to people you do not like. If you go to Dublin you will see, for the first time in the entire history of Ireland, foreigners camped on the streets. Dublin has never been a high-migrant city. There were no migrants when I was a child, none whatsoever.
Mounk: Back then, with all love and respect for the country, why would you have migrated to Ireland?
Joyce: Exactly, we went abroad. Something massive has changed and no one is writing about it. That sense of, I can see it when I open my front door, but when I turn on the national broadcaster or when I open The Irish Times or The Irish Independent, it is not there. It gives you a weird sense of disconnect that makes you angry. In the end, when somebody says to you, we cannot get rid of them, or we cannot change this because of the European Court of Human Rights, or because of the EU, or because of the rule of law, people go, very well then. Not the ECHR.
Nelson: The problem, though, is we see two European countries getting it right: Denmark and Sweden. In Denmark you have a social democratic government which is very tough with immigration. The rule there is if you are seeking asylum, you go there and they put you in a hotel or whatever, and then they will sell your jewellery to pay for the hotel. These are things that sound quite extreme, and that is why they have a social democratic government which has survived a couple of elections.
Mounk: The right-wing populist party, which was on track to eventually form the government, is now down in the low single digits.
Nelson: Exactly. In Sweden they are the first country in Europe to have achieved net zero migration. That is quite something. That is my concern about talking about the ECHR as if it is the problem. It is not. If it was, then the other countries would not have been able to make a success of it. What I can see now is the revival of the Brexit argument: if it was not for this terrible thing, everything would be great.
Mounk: So what are these governments doing right? What should other governments do? What do you think about the actual normative case if they want to make sure that Nigel Farage is not going to be the next prime minister of the UK, the AfD is not going to rule Germany, and the Rassemblement National is not going to rule France?
Nelson: There were a whole bunch of things. Sweden is taking the position now where it will give you something like £25,000 to remigrate, even if you are a naturalised migrant. They have a whole set of policies aligned toward deterring migration and stemming the flow, and they have managed to do it. They have hit net zero because there is so much out-migration right now. As in Britain, 440,000 foreign nationals left Britain forever last year.
In Denmark they are writing laws in a proper way so the courts are less likely to overrule them. When the courts overrule a law in this country, you think it was badly drafted. There are ways of making clear that parliament is pretty much sovereign, and Strasbourg, the ECHR, is very unlikely to overturn the expressed will of a national parliament. There is a way for a better government to get control of the situation. The paradox is that here we are with a lawyer as prime minister. He should be able to deliver legal reform.
What Britain needs most of all is legal reform in the same way that you needed trade union reform in the 1980s. You need legal reform now. The judges do not want the power they have ended up with. What happened is politicians parceled power to them for a long time. They wanted to put things above politics. That has led to a sense of democratic deficit and the blaming of things like the ECHR. You could abolish the ECHR tomorrow and it would not change the migrant situation. That is the UN Refugee Convention, which obliges us to give refuge to anybody with a well-founded fear of persecution. In my view, that is what has to go. When that rule was written in 1951, it was a completely different world. Right now that would apply to almost everybody in Somalia, every woman in Afghanistan. It is practically not possible, with 170 million displaced people, to accommodate all of them. I think somebody somewhere needs to reset this and come up with a progressive case for how we handle asylum.
Mounk: Two thoughts on this. The first is that I am troubled by the hard choices we have to make on the topic of migration. I come from a family that has needed refuge for many generations in various ways. I think we need to dispense with the myth that the status quo is in any way moral. The status quo is that if you are in need or persecuted somewhere, you are unlikely to be able to get help.
In order to get help, you need to pay a lot of money to a criminal gang and then risk your life across the Mediterranean or across the southern border of the United States. When you arrive, particularly in Europe, you are given enough money to have a life that is probably better than where you came from if you are from a very poor country, with a roof over your head and enough to eat. But it is not a pleasant life. It is not a life where you have prospects in that society.
By the way, you are not allowed to work for years. In the moment when you arrive in a society and actually have the enthusiasm and the aspiration to make something of yourself in that society, you are told: sit around, do nothing, we will adjudicate your case in three years, in five years, perhaps in seven years. A lot of people get used to not doing anything and sitting around taking that money. Some of the most energetic people, some of the most enterprising people, say, I cannot just sit around. What is left to do? You can work in the black market or you can engage in crime. I do not know what the solution is, but I do know that it is a lie to tell ourselves that the status quo on migration is in any way moral.
Nelson: Look at the current situation: the UN Refugee Charter has become the people smugglers’ charter. This is what is happening now. The system is in no way moral.
Second, we do have a moral duty as a rich country to help the world’s dispossessed. The question is how we best discharge that duty in a way that carries public consent. Third, public consent, if it collapses, benefits nobody. So you take as many as the country can handle. You begin with the position that you are a strong, wealthy country with obligations. But the current system is based on people smuggling, which has become a great evil of our times, and it is legally possible only because the UN Charter is being exploited.
When it comes to moral duty, I would adopt an Australian-style deportation system. I think that would work. For every one person I deported as a small boat arrival, I would take two or three people from the camps. So it would be three in, one out. I would say: yes, we are not going to tolerate illegal arrivals, we are not going to tolerate criminal gangs, but we are going to be a compassionate country. Britain has many camps with refugees. We would take two or three vetted migrants for every one person we deport. In this way, you would deal firmly with illegal arrivals while also discharging your moral responsibility.
Mounk: I do think there is a fundamental difference between saying, we are going to do everything we can to control our borders, and asking how to deal with people who are already legally in the country. That is a totally different question. Even in the United States, with people who may have been in communities for a long time, I think that if you want to buy a little political space to avoid extremely cruel policies toward those who are already in the country—including those who may have been there illegally but without breaking other laws for a long time—you must be very tough in showing that there will not be an ongoing flow of illegal immigration. Otherwise, as David Frum put it years ago, if liberals do not enforce borders, fascists will.
Now let us move on to our second topic. The other big debate we have had over the past weeks has been about free speech, occasioned in the United Kingdom by the extraordinary arrest at Heathrow Airport of Graham Linehan by, I believe, five armed police officers. Linehan, who created wonderful television shows like Father Ted, has been very outspoken and at times, I have to say, rather intemperate and, to my political tastes, not especially pleasant—a provocateur on Twitter about certain issues in his style and tone. Still, it is an extraordinary way to respond to somebody’s tweets.
We have also seen in recent days the decision, under some government pressure, of ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel, a major late-night show, off the air for the foreseeable future because he wrongly said in a Monday monologue that Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, was not a left-winger but part of a MAGA crowd—for which there was no evidence at the time, and which further evidence now makes very unlikely to be true.
So free speech is under assault in Britain and the United States, and I think around the democratic world in many ways. Helen, you have a personal story to tell about that.
Joyce: I do indeed. When Graham was arrested, I knew immediately who had reported him to the police, because the same person had reported me. Since the murder in the 1990s of a young black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, this country, with the best of intentions, thought that we should be tracking incidents that fall short of crime.
I do not think it was the right way to do it in the first place, but I also do not think the people who were trying to do it were doing anything wrong. They were not setting out to create a police state. But we have arrived at a point now in the mid-2020s when we have a parallel, shadow crime-reporting system that most people do not even know about. I know about it because it happened to me.
What happened to Graham was that he tweeted, and his tweets were about trans issues generally. Trans is the last of the five protected strands under hate-crime or non-crime hate-incident legislation, which is completely parallel to actual crime reporting. It started off as keeping track, for example, of places in London where there were a lot of racial incidents. That was the thinking after Stephen Lawrence. It has turned into something very different. Because it is compulsory, because the way it was written made it compulsory, it has ended up taking a great deal of police time. They are ignoring actual crimes to deal with this separate parallel thing.
What happened to me was that two years ago, not far from here in London, I agreed to do a panel event at the Institute of Economic Affairs. There were two other panellists. Foolish me, I had not realized it was a panel. I thought it was one-on-one, and I would not have said yes if I had known who else was on the panel. One of those people was a trans woman called Freda Wallace, who is a self-described “pervert.” He tweets about going to the Torture Garden. I will spare you. It is all out there. I have written about it and talked about it.
He turned up to this event drunk. He was wearing ripped fishnets and a tiny miniskirt, flashing his groin at the audience. He talked about the husbands of women like me, who go to the fetish club where he goes, saying, they support you during the day, but at night they fuck me in the torture club. This was at a live event. It is on YouTube. You can look it up.
With great restraint I tweeted a few times afterwards about this man I had blocked for a long time. I called him Fred rather than Freda. I called him a man, and I said he was a fetishist. Someone else reported me for this as anti-trans harassment. These were recorded not just as a non-crime hate incident but as criminal harassment, and I was never told.
The way I found out was that when the police decided not to prosecute me, I was named as an interested party in the judicial review that another trans woman brought against my local police force. I was served with papers, and I discovered that my name was against the crime of criminal harassment on the Police National Database.
I did not even know this could happen. I did not know this existed. My name is against it. You have gone through the looking glass. You are not prosecuted for it, you are not even informed about it.
It will only turn up against my name if somebody does an enhanced DBS check, which is the one you do for sensitive jobs. Nobody ever meant for this to happen, but it is the way it has happened. I know about it, and I got all the paperwork for it, and I saw what happened. I saw the way that, step by step, the weaknesses of this parallel crime-reporting system were weaponized.
The guy who reported me is actually an ex-cop, and he was kicked out of the police in 2023 for gross misconduct for criminal harassment. He took this judicial review of the police for not prosecuting them. I am an interested party. I only found out then.
Somebody got in touch with me when I first talked about this. I talked about it on the weekend on a TV station, and someone got in touch with me and said, I now think this is what happened to me, because I turned up with a friend last week who was being interviewed under caution for a crime, and I was told that I am not allowed to be with her because a similar crime has been recorded against my name. I’d never heard about this. She said to me, I am actually a home tutor, and I have not been getting jobs, and I did not know why.
There is this parallel system, and this is a long and crazy story. Honestly, if it was not happening to me, I would not necessarily believe it. But what it shows me is that the police are more of an issue. It is not the police as such. People think it was crazy police who just turned up at Heathrow for the fun of it, with guns, and five of them arrested Graham. No, they were doing what politicians over the years have instructed them to do. I now think this is the biggest problem with free speech in this country, that we have this shadow system.
Mounk: Help me assess how to think about the subject in Britain and more broadly in Europe. J. D. Vance went to the Munich Security Conference and gave an extraordinary speech about the lack of free speech in Europe. As tends to happen in politicized moments, you currently have one of two off-the-shelf views. You either think that Europe is a fascist hellhole in which the police round you up for anything you say, and the Trump administration is standing up for the God-given rights of man. Or you think that J. D. Vance is completely off his rocker, that there is no problem in Europe at all, and that the Trump administration is the only threat to free speech.
I like to think we should be able to pick and choose our beliefs to accord with reality, not with the political interests of two tribes. It is absolutely true that the Trump administration is deeply and fundamentally hypocritical in claiming to stand up for free speech. We saw that this week with a statement from the Commissioner of the Federal Communications System saying, we can do this the easy way or the hard way about ABC and Jimmy Kimmel. That is clearly an attempt to use state power to intimidate a broadcaster in ways that are very concerning.
At the same time, I read in The Times of London that in 2023 there were over 10,000 arrests based on online communications in this country. Perhaps it is true that Europe, and Britain in particular, have a genuine problem with free speech. How do you think about this without going nuts?
Nelson: I guess I come at this from a journalistic point of view. There are countries in Europe and the world where journalists are not free to say whatever they want. Britain is not one of them. I have never once felt that I could not venture an opinion about Islam or anything else for fear of a law. Where it tends to come down is in relatively silly things, like somebody doing a tweet. I think the media is pretty free in Britain. That said, I have also been investigated for criminal matters.
Mounk: I’m feeling left out. I’m leaving the country tomorrow, but I guess I’ll come back to Heathrow. So why don’t we abolish this law tomorrow?
Nelson: There is something quite significant here, and again I completely blame Keir Starmer. A few days ago the police themselves made a plea to the government. They said, we do not want this job. Our officers have better things to do, real crimes to investigate. We do not want to be enlisted in your stupid culture wars. Can you please come out with some guidance? Changing the law can be a big deal. It can take months and needs the King’s Speech. This does not need that. All it needs is clarification to the College of Police, in other words the operational guidelines, or the Crown Prosecution Service.
I have the press release. I think it is significant. The National Police Chiefs’ Council, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, the head of the Royal College of Policing—all of them were appealing to the Home Secretary, saying, stop this madness. Give us the guidance we need. Nobody thinks Graham Linehan should have been arrested. None of the officers who went in wanted to do it.
Quite often you will see video recordings of police. They did not join the police to do this, to go to somebody’s house and say they should not have said something. The police think this is a travesty of the basic notion of justice. They cannot say that, but they think it. Here we have a badly drafted law, again the mother of all evils. In this case it was the so-called Hate Crime Act, introduced by Tony Blair. Blair himself, by some extraordinary twist, was investigated for a hate crime when he was Prime Minister. In a biography he is described as watching the Welsh election, shouting “bloody Welsh” at the television. Somebody reading that reported him for a hate crime. Welsh police went to 10 Downing Street to investigate.
Surely at that point Blair should have realized, this is not what I intended, and changed the law. But he did not. Right now we have a system in which Britain is a fairly liberal country. You can say what you want. It is nowhere near the police state of MAGA caricature. We have messy laws, which our lawyer Prime Minister could clean up at any moment of his choosing.
Joyce: He just fixed the Home Office statutory guidance, which I spent last week reading to try to work out how this happened.
It was written in 2023, updated the last time there was one of these scandals. You can find the things in it that led step by step to how I ended up being recorded. They can just rewrite it.
Joshi: To caveat your point about press freedom, we do have atrocious libel laws. Fundamentally, saying something true is not necessarily a defense. You can still be prosecuted for libel. For example, if you call someone a liar and they have lied, you can still be subject to punitive action.
There is a chilling effect. For instance, if I am writing about Russian interference in British politics and there are people who we suspect have taken money from Russian intelligence services, I would have no trouble reporting that in a U.S. newspaper. I would have to be very careful reporting that here.
Nelson: Financing is another topic. It is a brave man who approaches this, because they will sue you, and unless you can prove it to a very high degree, you will lose. The burden of proof is on you if you say it.
When I was editor until recently, Douglas Murray was sued again by some rabble-rouser and molester. We had to spend an absolute fortune for a small magazine. We had to put something like £200,000 on the line. Either we gave this man £10,000 or £15,000, or we risked £200,000. We did that because there is a horrible asymmetry that pressures journalists either to settle with the bad guys or not go after them at all.
I would say the libel situation is slightly different from the free speech situation. I can venture opinions I like, but if you want to go after the bad guys—especially Islamist extremists—they have many tools and they want another one. The Islamophobia definition, which is coming down the line, could be a very major tool that would genuinely chill free speech. The government is considering bringing it in again, for good-hearted reasons, because it wants to move against anti-Muslim prejudice. But incitement to anti-Muslim hatred is already illegal.
Overall I do not think we are the authoritarian hellhole that J. D. Vance and Nigel Farage portray us as being. But you are completely right that a British journalist faces constraints an American journalist would not, especially when exploring some of the murkiest and best-funded parts of the world.
Mounk: Let us bring this back to the United States for a moment. I have sufficiently acclimatized to America’s political culture, lovely as it is these days, to believe that the First Amendment is a godsend and a great protection. What the First Amendment ensures is that you can under no circumstances be arrested or put in jail for what you say, for expressing a political opinion, unless you very specifically incite somebody to commit an act of hatred—addressing people and saying, go over there to that house and beat up that person.
It also gives much greater protection to the press in libel cases, in part for First Amendment reasons. You could not have such restrictive libel law in the United States because it likely would be found in violation of the First Amendment. Yet there is a situation at the moment where concerns about state abuse of power are serious.
Those tend to come in indirect ways. They tend to apply not to students in general but to students on a visa, which can easily be cancelled by the administration. They also arise because the government gives extensive funding to universities and other institutions, or because two corporations may want to merge and need the approval of the Justice Department or Commerce Department to do so. The federal government uses those indirect levers to influence behavior.
How concerned should we be about those things, and how does that change the landscape in the United States compared to Britain?
Joshi: What concerns me most after this week, for the reason you described with the Kimmel case, is that we are seeing a kind of anticipatory obedience. It is not even that the state has to bring to bear its powers and say, I am going to punish you, or I am going to use regulation to hurt you. In anticipation of this, people are settling. In some cases they are settling very easily. We have seen this with news organizations. We have seen this with ABC News making major, bizarre settlements in which they promise to pay money. Law firms have been sued and have promised to do pro bono work on behalf of pro-Trump causes.
In the latest case, it is incredibly concerning when media organizations are pulling presenters and shows off the air because what they said made the president angry—without a shot being fired. There is not even a legal case. If you fought a legal case and lost, that is one thing, and that is bad enough. But if you are acting in anticipation, it shows you have a sense of where power is headed. You anticipate punishment by the state. That really frightens me.
Nelson: I think abortion clinics are another major focus of J. D. Vance. In this country it is illegal to protest outside an abortion clinic, and when you look at most of the fights the State Department is picking with us, they tend to be over that. To me this is quite important, because I am a practicing Catholic and, by and large, I agree with that. There is not much I agree with in the Catholic Church’s position on abortion, but I have changed my mind on this and come to agree that these protests should be banned outside the clinics.
We have achieved something important in Britain. For all our faults, we are the most successful multi-faith democracy in the world. We have learned to give each other space. Part of the deal is that when I go to my Catholic church, the Equalities mob does not come in and tell me who can and cannot marry, or who can and cannot be a priest. I think the religious activists should also give space to women entering an abortion clinic on the worst day of their life.
There is a kind of “give each other space” culture emerging in Britain which I do not think MAGA likes very much.
Joyce: I completely disagree with you on both of those things. I am an atheist who thinks that we should not have those spaces outside abortion clinics, because the arguments are exactly the same as those used against me when I speak. They say, this is our home. When I go to university, this is where we live, this is where we work. You are making me feel unsafe. You bring fear and hatred into my location.
It is just like—seriously, toughen up. I am not suggesting that people should be able to block the door. I am not suggesting that people should be able to shout at you, but they should be able, for example, to pray silently. One woman was arrested for silently praying. I do not think that is acceptable. I really do not. We have to accept that sometimes people are going to say things you do not want to hear, because as soon as we say that in this place you cannot hear something you do not want to hear, those arguments are used against other people. I have been at the sharp end of them.
Mounk: I’m always happy when there’s a little bit of a fight on the Good Fight Club. So, thank you for that.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Fraser, Helen, and Shashank discuss the fallout from Israel’s strike on Qatar, what the future is for Gaza, and the impact of the war on Israel’s diplomatic relations. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
