Free speech is under threat because Britons feel they cannot speak out for fear of offending others over race, religion, and immigration, a study has found.
Nearly half of those polled (49%) believe people are too easily offended, particularly if they speak out on race and immigration issues, according to research for the Commission for Countering Extremism, which advises the Government.
The more outspoken people’s views, the more likely they were to feel constrained by the risk of offending others.
Older, white males without a university education are among the groups who feel the most restricted.
The study, based on interviews with 2500 people, was conducted by Ipsos to establish the state of free speech in Britain.
It follows controversies such as 2021 protests against a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who received death threats and went into hiding after showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad from Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, during a religious studies lesson.
Similar concerns over the right to freedom of expression and protest have been raised in the aftermath of the October 7 2023 Hamas terror attack on Israel and the ensuing Gaza conflict.
More than a third (36%) felt they had to hold back on expressing their views on race or ethnicity, while 32% said they did not feel they could freely speak out on immigration or religious extremism.
I think it was Brexit.
The online culture war that erupted over that gave the Right an insight on how to use the extreme of the woke to destabilise the Left.
It really says something about us as a movement on the Left, that the moment we gained a tiny amount of power that we immediately used it to punish those we believed were more ignorant than us with social media cancel culture Lynch mobs.
It was 2016, the woke had control of Twitter and Facebook and instead of use those platforms to challenge the neoliberal capitalist hegemony, our left wing middle class woke activists decided to have people sacked from their jobs over MeToo, BLM and militant Trans feelings.
With Brexit, older white Labour males from the North who had been betrayed by free market globalisation clashed online with young Labour cosmopolitans from London who saw them as bigots and accused them of that.
The Right, using Cambridge Analytics, realised they could exploit the anger of older men from the left with the fission of the woke youth and played to those tension points in a way that became a template The Atlas Network and Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The rise of social media hate algorithms manipulated by the Right has created a wounded cultural landscape of all tribe no village politics, of which there can be no turning back.
The middle class woke provided the identity politics ammunition, by removing class as the bonding solidarity, identity politics drives pure temple politics, not Broadchurch unity and the millisecond men started seeing themselves in the same victim mentality as the woke, we were fucked!
Not one poor family is sitting around the kitchen table cancelling each other for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills, and when the working poor turn to us on the Left for solutions and see only alienating identity politics dogma being served up as a solution, they turn away in anger at us.
The Right have no weaponised Free Speech for their own political ends and that truly drives me insane because WE on the left should be the champions of Free Speech.
The Woke caused an enormous amount of damage to the Left, the challenge is how we win men back to the Left.
Dear NZ – a kid transitioning isn’t your enemy – the Billionaires and Banks are!
I have been a lone voice on the Left in NZ highly critical of the tactics middle class woke identity politics activists, fourth wave feminists and their non-binary allies have used since 2016 to alienate and drive many into the arms of the reactionary right in their pursuit of ‘Trans Rights’.
I have argued the Trans Community and their kaleidoscope of grievance pursued insane Pure Temple politics at the cost of Broadchurch Class Solidarity for the narcissism of petty difference.
I argued the roulette wheel of intersectionist victimhood, Outrage Olympics and Social Media Lynch mobs might make us on the Left about as electorally attractive as a cup of cold sick and that the backlash will spark something dark.
No one listened to me.
Now we have an immense cultural backlash generated by the woke after they had their first taste of cultural power in 2016 and that backlash is insane with rage.
For the millionth time.
The idea that there are some women who believe they are men and some men who believe they are women and some people who believe they are neither and some who believe they are both is as uncontroversial to me as the range of eye, skin and hair colour in the human species.
As a matter of basic human curtesy we should always refer to a person by what ever pronoun and name they wish us to use and we should make it as easy as possible for people to legitimately be able to gain the paper work they need that states their gender and identity so they can go about the lives like everyone else.
This is a liberal progressive democracy, and everyone is promised the same agency and we want our Trans whanau to enjoy the same fruits of human rights we all enjoy, and for those who identity is a real issue, we want them to flourish, however when a middle class identity cult takes over the cultural debate to try and enforce a medical solution to their gender dogma, that’s where the adults in the room have to collectively stand and say, ‘hold on’.
This is the number of puberty blockers used in New Zealand alone…
…in the wake of the Cass Review, I don’t think the weaponised certainty of the woke is helping any longer.
There are genuine issues here that we have ignored in the rush to endorse woke Trans dogma, however what we don’t want is the excesses of the middle class cult to excite the transphobic right hate groups into any belief of justification.
My issue has never been anti-Trans, my issue is the radioactive manner in which the Trans activists and 4th wave cancel culture feminists went about alienating every voter.
I know many staunch Kiwi Feminists in NZ who feel deeply uncomfortable with the extremeness of some woke Fourth Wave feminists and who feel intimidated to express their true thoughts for fear of being torn to pieces online.
Remember how we on the Left had people sacked from their jobs during the social media lynchings of 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 for questioning Trans Dogma?
Isn’t it hilarious the first tiny bit of power our activists had they used to alienate almost everyone? Thank Christ they are all on Bluesky now which is the equivalent of screaming into a cushion that no one else can hear.
It is the woke middle class Identitarians who have generated the political backlash we saw in America and globally.
Here is how spastic the Trans debate became in America.
Trump consistently claimed Democrats would allow illegal aliens sex changes in prison, what’s the truth?
Yes the American Prison system allows those transitioning to access the medicines they require because that’s a health issue, but how many have actually accessed sex change operations?
2 FUCKING PRISONERS!
When challenged on this, Kamala Harris said “I will follow the law”, rather than explaining that there are only 2 examples of this and both were domestic prisoners, not ‘illegals’.
She didn’t point this out because the Dems were terrified of insulting the woke by mentioning the Trans debate in any way that didn’t worship them.
The Trans debate – thanks to the toxicity the Woke spent 8 years injecting into this issue, was manipulated by the Right to paint us as gender extremists FFS when only 2 prisoners have ever accessed it!
When you replace class and citizenship as our guiding values on the Left for identity politics, you make it impossible to get to the 51% democratic majority required to win power.
We want our Trans whanau to be able to enjoy the same agency that everyone is promised in a liberal progressive democracy, but the extremism of our woke middle class activists drove the debate off a cliff and now they are pissed off at the rest of us for not supporting them in driving off the cliff???
While I’ve been vocal against their woke alienation, I’ve ended up being one of the few still willing to stand with the Trans community against this Government threatening community funding for any amateur sports team having a Trans player because while I disagree with the Trans alienating tactics, I disagree much more with punishing community funding for their mere existence.
This whole debate needed to be far more rational and far less hating.
Unfortunately it’s Open Season for Hate.
The manner in which Trump has manipulated all of this culture war bitterness to eradicate Trans people from existence is dire and deeply fucking wrong.
We can have legitimate complaints about the way the middle class Woke went about alienating voters, but there is no way we can collectively agree with simply eradicating a class of people because people have been whipped up to hate them!
Trans people are people. I think in the hate of the debate we have lost that very simple truth.
Eradicating them in the way Trump has with the signing of his deplorable Presidential bully actions is ugly and an abomination of a Democracy locked into place by the tyranny of the bigoted majority.
First they came for the Trans people and I went out to punch Nazis because I know the rest of the poem.
Dear NZ – a kid transitioning isn’t your enemy – the Billionaires and Banks are!
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Why do people always equate woke with left wing?
If anything the “wokesters” I’ve come across are almost uniformly bourgeoise in outlook and upbringing and lifestyle.
But don’t get me started.
And yet, ‘woke cancel culture’ has nothing to do with this- at least as far as the British example goes.
Immigration ALWAYS increases under Conservative governments, because they are slightly more devoted to cheap labour for businesses than the equally evil (but slightly different) UK Labour Party under Keir Starmer (defender of Jimmy Saville, friend of Epstein associate Peter Mandelson).
‘Refugees’ come to Britain because of wars fought by Britain and other occupied nations for zionism. No zionism, no zionists, no refugees.
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