Why Britain Arrests 30 People EVERY DAY For Speech

29:39Toby Young:No, it's just that you're really slow at talking and my brain's already finished your sentence. But my perception isn't that. You walked out of the room and when you walk out of here, I'm going to turn to these guys and say, Well, that was a lot of hate speech, wasn't it? That's fine. You can say that that's hate speech. And then you can be prosecuted. It's absolutely fine for you to say that's hate speech if you want. And then you can be prosecuted. If me interrupting you is hate speech, and that's your definition of it, I tell you what, you are being disrespectful to the people who do receive hate speech.

30:06Toby Young:The enormous number of people who receive hate speech. Real, clear, undeniable hate speech. So do I. And your sophistry right now is both transparent and deeply disrespectful. And I warn you that most of your listeners will think to themselves, actually, Constantine's being a bit of a dickhead right now. That's interesting that you say that, because what I'm doing is I'm stress testing your argument. And the point I'm making to you is a person's self-perception can be manipulated. People can lie about how they perceive the things that they experience. And sometimes people will use the law against other people when it's badly written.

30:43Don't you think that's true? I do think it's true. That's what I'm saying. So I'm not really being a dickhead. I'm stress testing your argument. And calling me a dickhead might be considered hate speech.

30:52Toby Young:No, no, it's not hate speech. It's just good observation. Fine. Toby, I actually think as well, if we put a good faith spin on this, I think that's kind of how the left look at it, in that they have quite a paternalistic attitude to people. And their instinct is to protect, is to keep people safe. And the people who tend to vote for these kind of policies or governments want to be kept safe. So for these types of people, it is actually quite a mutually beneficial relationship, isn't it? Well, I think, yeah, we saw we saw that kind of dynamic at work during the pandemic with the, to my mind, surprisingly wide public acceptance of the lockdown policy.

31:37People were willing to have their liberties temporarily suspended in order to keep themselves safe, keep vulnerable people safe. Very different to the reaction to previous pandemics in the kind of second half of the 20th century. And it does feel as though as we've become a kind of more comfortable, affluent society, so people have begun to prioritise safety over liberty. and I think people are willing to kind of make that trade often because they don't think it will affect their liberties or if it will it will only affect their liberties temporarily. I mean a lot of the restrictions that were imposed during the lockdown weren't lifted you know when the lockdown was lifted so turned out not to be temporary suspension of liberties at all.

32:25But I think one of the impacts of the Online Safety Act in the past few weeks is that people are beginning to realise that, you know, when they make this Faustian pact and agree to sacrifice some liberty for safety, they don't think of their own liberties as being kind of sacrificed. But now they're beginning to discover that actually it does involve their own liberties. I think people are waking up to the fact that actually this is a kind of harder trade than they imagined because, you know, it isn't just affecting the liberty of people on the kind of far right to rabble-rouse and disseminate myths and disinformation and hate speech on social media platforms.

33:06It's actually affecting their ability to access content that they want to see, like people being arrested at anti-immigration protests. But no, I have to take issue with both of you making this about the left. Let's just go back to where we started this. This bill was brought in by the last conservative government. Let's just be honest about it, right? So this isn't about the left. This is about, as you say, the country is becoming more pro-restrictions. The country is, and you mentioned the public supported it during COVID. I don't know if they support this. I imagine at the surface level, without delving into it, a lot of people will support this as well.

33:42And so I don't think it's about the left at all. I think we just live in a country that's pro-censorship. Well, if you look at surveys, people's attitude towards censorship obviously depends on how the questions are phrased. Yeah, there's a massive part of it. A massive part of it. But when you ask people whether people are too sensitive, people are too easily offended, people should be able to kind of speak more freely without being worried about jeopardizing their livelihoods. Generally, there seems to be a lot of public support for free speech. I'm sure. So have we become more pro censorship?

34:20I mean, yes, I think we have. But our elite certainly are more pro censorship. Our elites, certainly. I mean, one curious change in the attitude of the elites is that until about 15 years ago, the kind of prevailing orthodoxy when it came to censorship was what's known as the counter speech doctrine. So the Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, in a landmark First Amendment case in the early part of the 20th century said, and I'm paraphrasing, the best way of countering misleading and harmful speech is not enforced silence, but more and better speech. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Suppression doesn't work.

34:59You know, if you're concerned about, you know, various narratives kind of getting abroad and having a kind of toxic effect on public life, on the functioning of democracy, the best way to respond to that is not enforce silence, but to actually engage with the people making these arguments. And that was the kind of prevailing orthodoxy amongst our elites till about 15 years ago. But suddenly they seem to have come back around to censorship as the best way of dealing with, of countering kind of harmful and misleading speech. And I think it's a huge mistake, not least because it's always counterproductive.

35:40I mean, the kind of paradigmatic example is the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, the early 1930s, banning Nazis, banning Nazi propaganda in various German states. Hitler was banned from speaking in various German states. anti-Semitism was a criminal offence in various German states. And this was thought to be the best way to kind of suppress the rise of the Nazis. Didn't work. And you can see that these various efforts to censor social media in particular, not just here, but in Australia, in New Zealand, across the continent, as a way of kind of countering kind of populist insurgents, has been just completely ineffective.

36:22The rise of populism continues unabated. In this country, I don't think that suppressing anti-immigration content on social media is going to in any way impede the progress of Reform UK. I mean, they're topping the polls. And the efforts of the authorities to kind of suppress, you know, public anger about mass uncontrolled immigration, about the small boats, etc., etc. It's having the opposite of its intended effect. You think, when are they going to learn that suppression, censorship doesn't work? Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If they want to defend their policies, if they want to cling on to power, then get out there in the public square, make as good a fist as you can of defending these policies.

37:09Don't just try and smear your opponents as far-right lunatics, because that doesn't work.

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39:03Toby Young:We're talking about this. And then a couple of days ago, you had Peter Kyle, who we said, the science minister for Labour, he made the argument on national television that Nigel Farage, who criticised this bill, is on the side of paedophiles and most pertinently of all, Jimmy Savile. And you're just watching him make this argument. I mean, have you lost your mind? As I said, if you want to overturn the Online Safety Act, you are on the side of predators and paedophiles. Nigel Farage wants to overturn the Online Safety Act that puts in it the duty to prevent children from being groomed by paedophiles, that prevents adults from contacting children who don't know each other, strangers contacting children.

39:56This is an act that is the biggest step forward in the experience that children have online since the creation of the Internet the biggest step forward in the safety of children across Britain since the Internet was created and Nigel Farage wants to overturn all of that to send it back to the days when predators and paedophiles could contact children so I am NOT going to apologize for pointing out the obvious he wants to overturn those measures I will stay steadfast to make sure that children are kept safe in the digital age just as we strive to keep children safe in the offline world as well.

40:31I think, Peter Kyle, what Nigel Farage is asking you to apologise for is saying earlier this morning that if Jimmy Savile were still alive, he would be perpetrating his terrible crimes online and that you're saying Nigel Farage is on the side of Jimmy Savile and people like him. There are people like Jimmy Savile who are trying to get access to children online that will be prevented from doing so by the Online Safety Act. Nigel Farage wants to overturn the very laws that are preventing that from happening. He is on the side of people like Jimmy Savile and I'm not going to apologise for saying so.

41:10It is about time that Nigel Farage was held to account for the words that he says, the actions that he takes, because this is politics. We have taken the action to prevent those things happening to children in our country and Nigel Farage wants to throw all of that away, to turn the clock back. I will not apologise for pointing it out. Nigel Farage needs to be held to account for the dangerous policies that he is trying to impose on children across our country. It was, I mean, quite a bold argument to make, given, you know, that Keir Starmer's track record as director of public prosecutions when it came to prosecuting Jimmy Savile isn't, you know, completely unblemished that we could get into that.

41:50But, yeah, and you initially thought that he's overreaching here. This is a political blunder. But actually, various other senior Labour ministers have doubled down on it. I think Angela Rayner, the most recent one. Yeah, it's such a tenuous argument. I mean, the idea being that I suppose that modern day groomers, the kind of contemporary equivalents of Jimmy Savile, are going to use unregulated kind of, I don't know, user to user services on the Internet to kind of groom children and find their victims. So if you're opposed to age gating content and protecting under 18 year olds, then you're basically on the same side of Jimmy Savile.

42:41I mean, a real stretch. And I just can't imagine that argument is landing with the public and making them think, oh, well, crikey, yeah, Nigel Farage, if he repeals the online safety app, we're going to have a kind of tsunami of Jimmy Savile's kind of stalking our children on the web.

42:57Toby Young:What it shows to me, I find it very interesting, actually, because I was watching an episode of the news agents where they were talking about this. And even they were saying that this is completely ludicrous. Wow. If even they're saying it, then yes. And you just look at it. And to me, it looks like a government that is completely rattled, doesn't have any answers. And like you said before, is just resorting to ad hominems. And I'm thinking, guys, you haven't even been in power for, what, barely a year? And you already look like you're losing the plot massively. I mean, I think one of the reasons various governments, not just our government, are so quick to press the censorship button is because they are becoming more and more brittle, less and less confident.

43:48You see, I think it's a historical fact that as regimes become more fragile, as they begin to lose authority, so they become more repressive. And that seems to be what's happening here. And they're becoming further from the people as well. I mean, your point about, I mean, anyone who thinks that you're going to suppress people's concerns about illegal immigration in Britain in August of 2025 is a moron. I mean, the entire country is concerned about illegal immigration. It's not because of online content. It's because they experience it on a daily basis. There's no suppressing that. And that will backfire, don't you think?

44:29Absolutely. I mean, even in the past few days, there have been a couple of cases, one I think brought to light by the Mail on Sunday, another by The Sun, of asylum seekers sexually assaulting, assaulting, kidnapping minors, efforts by the police to suppress the fact that these crimes were committed by asylum seekers only for it to then come out. I mean, talk about fueling anti-immigration sentiment. I mean, I think people are incredibly suspicious. Whenever there is a terrorist incident, whenever there's an attack on a sexual assault on children, people just automatically assume now it must have been carried out by an asylum seeker probably from a Muslim majority country.

45:20Not because that's more likely to be the case than not, but because we know there have been so many occasions on which the government have tried to cover up the fact that one of these attacks, one of these episodes, has been carried out by an asylum seeker from a Muslim majority country. Suppressing this information just has the opposite of its intended effect. It's crazy. And there's one other thing I wanted to touch on with you as well. One of the things I've read is that WhatsApp and Signal, I think, are two of the companies, but I'm sure others as well, who are saying it hasn't happened yet, but the government is effectively attempting to force these companies to give access to the government to up encrypted private messages.

45:58And this may be another consequence of the introduction of the online safety act. Can you talk a little bit about that? There's one threat to encrypted messaging apps is linked to a crime and terrorism act whereby which granted the the British police and security services access if the government issues a special notice to encrypted data on encrypted messaging apps. And that's currently being contested by Apple amongst other companies. And it meant that Apple said they could no longer offer the highest level of encryption to users of Apple services in the UK. But the Online Safety Act requires Category 1 providers, I think, when Peter Carl finally gets around to designating them, to do these risk assessments and annual risk assessments that they need to provide Ofcom with.

46:58And that will mean disclosing some of the or being a being in a position to disclose some of the messaging on their on their apps. And the argument is that groomers, the Jimmy Savills of today, are using encrypted messaging apps to kind of groom children undetected. So Ofcom has to have access to this content if it's going to protect children. But what it means is that unless Ofcom backs down, it could well mean that apps like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram are just geo-blocked in the UK.

47:38Toby Young:But, you know, the more I read this act, because I sat down and God bless my little brain, I sat down and I tried to read this act. Now, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert, but I was trying to go through it. And the thing that kept jumping out to me as I was reading through it, I was trying to make sense of it, was A, it's incredibly difficult to read. It's incredibly opaque. Now, maybe that might be because I'm not legally trained. I'm not bright enough. But the thing that also kept jumping out to me was the use of nebulous terms. Safety. I have a very particular issue with safety because the past couple of years, when everybody said the words, I need to feel safe or you've compromised my safety, They're not talking about safety.

48:24Toby Young:What they've said is, I don't want my ideas to be challenged. You make me feel uncomfortable because you challenge my ideas. Significant psychological harm. Well, who judges that? What does that actually mean? Does that mean that you get a form of PTSD? And that makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable. Yeah. I mean, I think to your first point, it isn't just you. I mean, the Online Safety Act is an incredibly dense, voluminous piece of legislation, really hard to understand. I mean, we've got a team of lawyers at the Free Speech Union going through it, trying to summarise it, trying to see what parts of it are legally challengeable.

49:01And, you know, our chief legal counsel has a PhD in classics from Oxford, and he's struggling with it. I mean, it is an unbelievably opaque and dense document. On the kind of frequency with which these kind of nebulous terms occur, you're quite right. And that seems to be a kind of recurring feature of kind of sensorial legislation. So Section 127 of the Communications Act makes it a criminal offence to communicate messages which are grossly offensive. Well, how to define grossly offensive? Section 179 of the Online Safety Act criminalises disinformation. So if you knowingly disseminate information which you know to be false and it's likely to cause psychological harm to a likely audience, then you can go to prison for two years.

49:55And how do you define psychological harm? I mean, could you be prosecuted for causing psychological harm to someone who's particularly psychologically vulnerable because they're suffering from mental illness? Do we have to take their possible reaction into account? Could you be prosecuted for that? And as you say, the concept of safety, the concept of harm have been just stretched to breaking point, particularly in the last decade or so. It's no longer just about physical harm, about protecting people's physical safety. It's about protecting people from psychological harm. It's about protecting their psychological well-being.

50:30And as you say, that can include not challenging people. I mean, we see it again and again in university students claiming they need safe spaces. They need trigger warnings and so on and so forth, because if their ideas are challenged, they find that psychologically traumatising. They find that undermines their psychological well-being. I mean, that's that's that's taking the concept of safety and harm to ludicrous lengths.

50:54Toby Young:And it's also as well, they go, oh, they were talking about truth and something that may not be true. And I was thinking, and I think Nigel Farage made this point, what about humor? Humor and satire is taking something that we know to be true and then exaggerating it. And you're going, what, so are we now going to get rid of humor because you made a satirical joke and somebody would say, well, actually, if you look at it, maybe David Cameron didn't have intimate relations with the pig. And the reality is that David Cameron would find that particularly upsetting. Yeah. One way of looking at this is to distinguish between tolerance and respect.

51:32So when it comes to different religious faiths, being able to practice in the UK, we pride ourselves on religious tolerance. It's why the UK is such an attractive country for migrants from other countries, particularly Muslim majority countries, because we have this tradition dating back, you know, more than 100 years of tolerating people of different religious faiths, of tolerating the practice of different religious faiths in our midst. And that applies to all kinds of beliefs, all kinds of traditions, customs, communities. We have this great tradition of which we're rightly proud of tolerance.

52:14But that in the past few decades has somehow segued into respect. So now it's not enough to tolerate people with different beliefs to the mainstream, various minority groups practicing their own customs and religions. Now they demand to be respected. And I'll give you just two examples. One obvious example is Muslims wanting their blasphemy codes to be respected by non-believers. And one of the Free Speech Union's big cases recently was defending Hamit Koskan, a Turkish political refugee who was prosecuted for burning a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge. and unfortunately that prosecution was successful, we're now going to appeal it.

52:56But we don't want to see the reintroduction of blasphemy codes via the back door, particularly blasphemy codes that only protect people of one particular faith. But Islamophobia, another example, the government is currently tasked this group with coming up with a definition of Islamophobia slash anti-Muslim hatred, which seems to be a way of embedding and forcing non-believers to respect Islamic blasphemy codes in the public square. But the other example I'm thinking of is trans rights activists and trans people. It's not enough that they should be tolerated. They also want to be respected. And that means they want to compel people to use their preferred gender pronouns.

53:34I mean, that's one of the forms it takes. So I think we've gone from a society which was very tolerant of all these different communities, these different religions, and we prided ourselves on being tolerant. But that didn't mean that non-believers had to respect them. We might tolerate people of different faiths. That doesn't mean, particularly if you're an atheist, that you have to respect people of different faiths or respect their religious beliefs. But we seem to have segued into a society in which everyone is required to respect everyone else. And that means tiptoeing around. It means biting our tongues, not saying what we think, for fear of offending someone by disrespecting them.

54:12And that's a recipe for disaster. That's not a recipe for making a multicultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic society work. The way to make a society like ours work is to promote the value of tolerance, not to demand that every different identity group respect what are in effect the blasphemy codes, the sacred values of every other identity group. That just means a society in which no one talks to each other. I mean, if you look at these communities like Leicester, where, you know, there are these kind of sectarian religious conflicts which currently break out into the open, not just Leicester. I mean, virtually every town and city in the UK.

54:46But the way to resolve this, the way to bring about a kind of lasting kind of peace and tranquility in these communities to avoid these kind of sectarian conflicts breaking out is not to force everyone to kind of tiptoe around, tread on eggshells, respect each other's blasphemy codes, not trespass on each other's sacred values. The way to make sure these communities get along, to forge some sense of common identity and common purpose, some new sense of kind of Britishness rooted in our multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith society, is for these people to talk to each other, to argue, to negotiate, you know, to promote free speech, not to suppress it.

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56:08Toby Young:Plus, did I mention that iconic purple ShopPay button used by millions of businesses around the world? It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. Your customers already love it. Turn your big business idea into... with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.co.uk slash trigger. Go to shopify.co.uk slash trigger. One more time, that's shopify.co.uk slash trigger. And it's a great point because you think, let's take the example of blasphemy laws. If Labour implements blasphemy laws, would some Labour MPs want to do like Tahir Ali?

56:54Toby Young:Is it that really far of a stretch to go, well, you can't make a joke about this religion because I find this psychologically damaging? And then so what you have is just a censorship industrial complex, don't you? You do. Yeah. And another argument for why we shouldn't be forced to respect the blasphemy codes of different religions is that what about our tradition in this country of humour? of taking the mickey, you know, of deliberately disrespecting, you know, the sacred values of different identity groups, which creates a kind of good-humoured atmosphere. What about that? Why not? Don't our traditions deserve to be tolerated as well?

57:43I mean, you probably know about this, but one of the big campaigning issues that the Free Speech Union and me and the House of Lords have been kind of engaged in over the past six months or so is the banter ban. So clause 20 of the employment rights bill extends employer liability for the harassment of their employees to third parties. And I'm not talking about third party sexual harassment of employees. I'm talking about that's already, you know, employers are already liable for that. I'm talking about the non-sexual harassment of employees by third parties. Employers are now liable for that, meaning they could be sued by their employees for not taking all reasonable steps to protect them from non-sexual harassment by customers, by members of the public.

58:27And what do we mean by harassment? Well, it's one of these nebulous terms that just seems to be becoming more and more capacious. So in the Employment Tribunal, harassment has evolved to include now overheard conversations. So if a blue haired barmaid in a pub overhears a couple of gender-critical feminists talking about how unfair they think it is that biological men who identify as women should be able to compete against women in women's sports like boxing and football. She could claim, I feel harassed, and I feel harassed in virtue of one of my protected characteristics. You as my employer, Mr.

59:06Publican, should have done more to protect me from that, and I'm going to sue you because you didn't. How will Publicans react to this? They'll employ banter bouncers to eavesdrop on people's conversations to make sure they're not saying anything likely to offend or upset the kind of pink-haired barmaid. There'll be notices on the wall saying, don't assume my pronouns. You know, before you can buy a pint of beer, you'll be able to have to show you've had kind of the full suite of diversity training. I mean, it's ludicrous, but the kind of rationale for this, I mean, I've been arguing with Labour ministers in the House of Lords.

59:35How can you possibly justify the banter ban? You're going to kind of put every pub in the country out of business. It's not just pubs. It applies to hotels, restaurants, bars, football stadiums. You know, if a fan says to a linesman, are you blind? And there's a partially sighted steward who overhears it. The partially sighted steward will be able to sue the club for not doing enough to protect him from being harassed in that way by virtue of his protected characteristic, his partial sightedness. So, you know, if Keir Starmer has his way, every stadium in the country will become a library, not just his fucking, sorry, his beloved arsenal.

1:00:06And it's ludicrous. But the rationale for it is, well, we have to protect vulnerable people in the workplace. They shouldn't have to overhear offensive or upsetting conversations. We need to make the workplace safe for everybody. That's the argument. It's going to destroy, you know, it's going to destroy a hugely important aspect of our public life. But they think that that's toxic, banter's toxic, it's an excuse for being racist and misogynistic and homophobic. Of course people shouldn't be able to tell jokes in pubs. What about comedy? It's really going to affect the comedy industry. I mean, already people who work in comedy clubs essentially have a heckler's veto over what comedians can say.

1:00:51But this will be setting it in stone. Henceforth, if an employee of a comedy club overhears a comedian make a joke that they find offensive or upsetting by virtue of their protected characteristic, they'll be able to sue the owner of the comedy club for not taking all reasonable steps to protect them from overhearing this joke. So it means that, you know, it won't just be you that's required to sign a kind of contract before being hired. It'll be every comedian in the country. And if you have any risky material, if you're straddling that line between what's acceptable and what isn't, which makes comedy so exciting, you won't be able to perform.

1:01:27It'll wipe out a kind of vast swathes of our cultural life at a stroke, the banter ban. And of course, we've had no success in holding it back. Toby, before we wrap up, speaking of protecting people, one of the things you do at the Free Speech Union is help people who have been punished in some way for things they've said. What is the bulk of your caseload at the moment? Who are the people that are coming to you for help? Well, since setting it up about five years ago, we fought over 4 ,000 cases. And where they've come to a conclusion, we've been successful about 80 % of the time. And in our case database on Salesforce, by far the largest category is sex and gender.

1:02:10About 40 % of those 4 ,000 plus cases we fought over the past five years have been defending gender critical women who've complained about having to share bathrooms, changing rooms with biological men who think they're women. I mean, when I set up the free speech union, I thought, you know, I'd end up defending people like me for the most part, you know, male, pale and stale Tories. But actually, the front line, the people who find themselves cancelled more often, the people who find it more difficult than anyone else to kind of express how they feel about something, even if it's perfectly lawful, are women of a certain age.

1:02:57who... You're going to cancel for that one. Not always of a certain age. But they mainly identify as being on the left. That will change. That is changing. But increasingly, we find ourselves involved in criminal work. So defending people who are actually being prosecuted and face jail time. So one big success that I was really proud of is a former Royal Marine called Jamie Michael, who in the immediate aftermath of the Southport attack posted a 12-minute Facebook video in which he wrongly blamed the attack on an undocumented migrant, partly because there was a vacuum, as you know, at that time the government didn't say he'd actually committed the attack.

1:03:47And he urged his followers to protest peacefully about illegal immigration into this country, the small boats in particular. And a local Labour politician complained to the police about this Facebook post. And he was prosecuted for intending to stir up racial hatred, the maximum penalty for which is seven years in general. And the Crown Prosecution Service went through with it. We urged them to drop it. We said, you know, this doesn't meet the threshold for intending to stir up racial hatred. He was urging his followers to protest peacefully about illegal migration. And it took a jury all of – we paid for his defence.

1:04:29There was a proper trial, a jury trial. And it took the jury all of 17 minutes to unanimously acquit him. And we're doing more and more work like that as the authorities become more and more likely to prosecute people for challenging kind of the prevailing government narrative about things like immigration, asylum seekers, the small boats. And so that's been a relatively new departure for us. But one thing to say is that since Labour came to power just over a year ago, we've doubled in size. So we had about 14 ,000 members on July 4th, 2024. We're now up to over 31 ,000 members. So Sir Keir Starmer, bless him, has been a fantastic recruiting sergeant for the Free Speech Union.

1:05:19And we're now averaging 37 new cases every week. and it's often people who are, I think, perfectly reasonably worried that they're going to have their collars felt because of something they've said on social media. And, yeah, I mean, we do our best to help every one of them. Well, we've been big supporters of the Free Speech Union from the moment it was founded. It's a really important organisation. Toby, you're a very busy guy precisely because there's so much work for you to do, so we won't have time for questions from our audience, although we have incorporated many of them into this conversation.

1:05:54So we'll wrap up with this. In the context of speech in Britain, the Online Safety Act and all of that, what is the one thing that no one's talking about that they really should be? The one thing people aren't talking about? Well, I'm not sure the extent to which the police are arresting people for supposedly saying something unlawful online. I'm not sure the extent of it has fully sunk in. I mean, we do read from time to time about, you know, people who are arrested often by, you know, six or seven police officers who then ransack their houses, haul them down to the station, imprison them in cells for eight or nine hours, only to then kind of release them.

1:06:40But I don't think people realise quite the extent of it. So there was this piece in The Times a few months ago, which discovered quite astonishingly that over, I think it was over 12 ,000 people in the past year had been arrested under suspicion of having committed just two speech offences, an offence under, I think, Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act. That's just two of the many speech offences you can be prosecuted for. I mean, there are at least a dozen. That was just two. Over 12 ,000 people a year being arrested under suspicion of committing just those two speech offences, which is over 30 a day.

1:07:26So that's over 30 people a day being arrested under suspicion of having just broken two of these laws, criminalising what you can say. And invariably, it's stuff they've said online. And even when they conclude, and more often than not they do, that they don't have sufficient evidence to prosecute this person, it'll be recorded as a non-crime hate incident. So, you know, I don't think people realise quite the scale of non-crime hate incidents being recorded either. So through various freedom of information requests, the FSU has established that over the past 11 years, over a quarter of a million NCHIs have been recorded in England and Wales alone.

1:08:09And that's over 62, an average of over 62 a day. I I mean, you wonder why if your house is burgled or your car is stolen or your child has his phone stolen on the bus, the police will take very little interest. They'll at best send you a crime report number so you can claim on insurance. The reason they won't come around to your house is because they're far too busy policing our tweets to police our streets. If you want the police, if you get burgled and you want the police to come to your house, get a can of spray paint before you do anything else. And spray paint on the wall. Trans women aren't women.

1:08:40report it as a hate crime and literally have a helicopter overhead you'll have six police officers outside i mean then they'll investigate otherwise no toby young thanks for coming on thank you

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