There is a new, deadly threat to democracy – and it’s bigger than Trump

A quiz question: what do Jeremy Clarkson, actor Brian Cox, Kemi Badenoch, and JD Vance have in common? Answer: they have all railed against “woke” censorship in Britain or Europe.

In a recent column for The Sun, Clarkson has defended Gino D’Acampo, Gregg Wallace, Wynne Evans and Phillip Schofield, who have all faced consequences for allegedly unacceptable behaviours: “They just said something or did something which someone found offensive… No chance to mount a defence. They’re just out. On the scrapheap.”

The man so concerned about cancel culture, and who still has a column in The Sun, wrote this in the same newspaper in 2022: “Dreaming of the day when [Meghan Markle] is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

The distinguished actor, Brian Cox, in an interview with The i Paper, also fulminates against this “shaming culture”, while championing his friend Kevin Spacey, who was accused and cleared of sexual assaults in 2023 and is facing a new civil suit. Cox, liberal and on the left, thinks Spacey was “misguided, certainly, in terms of his sexuality” but that “sometimes, people push their luck particularly in the sexual area of life”.

We have had Vance, the US Vice President, accusing European politicians of censoring free speech; and flailing Tory leader Badenoch banging on and on about woke attacks on freedoms.

Our civilisation, apparently, is dying because students veto certain speakers, or because trans people, Pride, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have hijacked institutions.

You might think that these oh so brave defenders of free speech would extend their support across all sections of society, but there is a dark contradiction at the heart of their pronouncements. For while they advocate for free speech when it suits their agenda, some are surprisingly relaxed about the state stifling protests and movements that do not align with their world view.

Such denouncers hate being contradicted or held to account. Likewise, they care little about ordinary citizens who take on the famous or politically omnipotent or about governments snatching our rights.

In Britain, Europe and the US, states have become more restrictive and punitive. Democracy is imperiled.

In September 2022, a British woman was arrested in Edinburgh and charged after holding up a sign reading “fuck imperialism, abolish monarchy”. Climate change protestors are in prison. Is peaceful protest now a crime?

Supporters of the Palestinian people are harassed by the police, and living in fear of losing their jobs or being ostracized. Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union, informs me they have defended an academic and teacher who were targeted by legal action, and that they have to remain anonymous because “they don’t want to jeopardise their careers any further”. Free Britain, eh?

Western liberal democracies are turning censorious. Australia has just cancelled its 2026 Venice Biennale artist, Lebanese-born Khaled Sabsabi, because the artist had previously depicted the deceased Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, blacklisted as a terrorist.

Germany has withdrawn literary prizes and ceremonies from authors for supporting the rights of Palestinians. Among them were the bestselling British writer Kamila Shamsie and Palestinian author Adania Shibli. Demonstrations against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza are policed with undue harshness.

Over to the US. My friend, the globally admired journalist Mehdi Hasan, left MSNBC after his show was dropped. That was announced at a time when Hasan was criticising Israel for killing civilians while fighting Hamas in Gaza.

In 2023, Joe Cohn, policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, warned: “We are seeing tremendous attacks on First Amendment freedoms across the country right now, at all levels of government. Censorship is proliferating, and it’s deeply troubling.” Drag acts in some parts of the US were stopped, school libraries forced to remove books, and growing numbers of faculty members were fired or punished for speaking freely.

Under Trump and his mad cowboys, the suppression is worsening. Associated Press reporters are banned from the Oval Office because they still use the term Gulf of Mexico instead of Trump’s term, the Gulf of America. School books are being proscribed in greater numbers and fear of the new McCarthyism is spreading. On Monday, [Elon] Musk said journalists on the US current affairs programme 60 Minutes should “get a long prison sentence”.

I am not a free speech absolutist. Speech can be deeply hurtful and disabling. We don’t raise our kids to say whatever they want. Civilized social spaces, real and online must be protected, and words that lead to violations, prohibited and punished.

But who can prohibit or punish speech and thought control by political leaders? This is a new, deadly threat to democracy. The complainants above seemingly don’t care about that. But we should.

This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, you can sign up here.