I found myself reflecting on this question after reading a recent article by Matt Goodwin. Whatever one’s political position, the subject deserves serious consideration: how free are we in Britain to express unpopular, controversial or unfashionable opinions? Have a look at his Substack – well worth subscribing.
Goodwin drew attention to the government’s proposed National Centre for Information Defence, intended to counter misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes and hostile-state information operations.
The government presents this as a matter of national security. Critics, including the Free Speech Union, are concerned about the possibility of mission creep: who decides what constitutes misinformation, and where is the boundary between protecting the public from deliberately false information and policing legitimate dissent?
This is not an entirely theoretical concern. Britain already has a substantial collection of government, military and security bodies concerned in various ways with communications, information, cyber-security and hostile influence.
There has also been controversy over the role of the Army’s 77th Brigade during the COVID-19 period. Questions were raised in Parliament after reports that social media posts by British citizens had appeared in monitoring reports. The government’s position was that the unit was concerned with disinformation rather than legitimate opinion.
More recently, civil liberties campaigners have reported that 62,199 people were arrested under communications laws during the five years from 2021 to 2025. Arrest, of course, is not conviction: the same research reported considerably fewer charges and convictions. Nevertheless, the scale of police involvement in matters of communication raises legitimate questions about where the boundaries should lie.
Where does this leave someone like me?
I have been writing publicly for many years. Some of what I write is controversial. I don’t regard that as a reason to stop writing.
I sometimes wonder whether websites such as mine appear somewhere on automated monitoring systems. Given the enormous amount of material indexed by search engines and analysed electronically, I would be surprised if algorithms were not routinely searching public material for particular words and subjects.
But I have no evidence that I personally am on any government “watchlist”, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.
The more interesting question is what distinguishes legitimate public discussion from material that genuinely deserves the attention of the authorities.
Is somebody presenting evidence or deliberately fabricating it?
Are they expressing an opinion or encouraging others to commit violence?
Are they questioning government policy or threatening individuals?
Those distinctions matter.
My own approach has generally been to collect information, point towards material that I consider interesting and encourage readers to investigate for themselves. This is particularly true of my large Covid and 5G archives. They contain thousands of references to material produced by other people representing differing positions.
I regard myself primarily as an observer rather than a campaigner.
My hope is to encourage people to think fearlessly, examine evidence and separate the wheat from the chaff.
The difficult subjects
Immigration, Islam, policing and national identity are among the subjects where emotions now run particularly high.
I have serious concerns about immigration levels and about the long-term effects of demographic and cultural change in Britain. I also believe that questions about Islam, integration and the relationship between religious beliefs and British institutions should be capable of being discussed openly.
But there is an important distinction between criticising ideas, religions, policies and institutions and treating millions of individual people as though they were an undifferentiated group.
That distinction is worth defending.
The government’s recently adopted definition of anti-Muslim hostility has itself become part of the free-speech debate. It is important to note that it is a non-statutory definition rather than a new criminal law. The accompanying government guidance explicitly says that criticism, ridicule and even expression that Muslims may find offensive can remain protected speech.
Whether the definition will always be applied in that spirit is a legitimate subject for scrutiny.
Fear is the real enemy.
Perhaps my greatest concern isn’t that somebody will knock on my door tomorrow morning.
It is that people will gradually begin censoring themselves because they are frightened of saying the wrong thing.
Once that happens, formal censorship may hardly be necessary.
A healthy society should be capable of tolerating disagreement. People should be able to question immigration policy, government decisions, religion, vaccination programmes, environmental policy—or indeed anything else—without automatically being treated as dangerous simply because their conclusions differ from prevailing opinion.
Equally, freedom of speech does not relieve any of us of responsibility for what we say. Accuracy matters. Evidence matters. Context matters. The distinction between criticising an idea and attacking a person matters.
I don’t particularly want everyone to agree with me.
What I want is for people to think.
My father, when he was a vicar, wouldn’t allow election posters in the windows of our vicarage. Perhaps something of that has remained with me. I have never felt comfortable being a party-political campaigner.
I would rather observe, question and occasionally provoke.
There is a line in John’s Gospel which has always struck me: people who do wrong avoid the light because they don’t want their deeds exposed.
Perhaps that offers a useful principle for public life as well.
Bring things into the light. Ask questions. Examine the evidence. And don’t surrender your judgement to somebody else simply because they claim authority.
That, for me, is what freedom of thought is really about.
The National Centre for Information Defence really was announced yesterday, 23 September 2026, and the stated remit is to “detect, attribute and disrupt” hostile-state information attacks; ministers have also said it is not intended to police domestic political dissent.
