My Proposed University Speech | Are We Free In Britain?

I'm here to ask and try to answer a simple question, that question being a simple one by its pronunciation only and not an easy one to answer, is this country, the country that over sixty million call home, a free one?

Well let's look at the evidence. It's often said that a measure of how free a country is to measure how far you can take its jokes and indeed how dark said jokes can be. Can we make fun of the horrors of the past, say, Nazism and Stalinism? Can we poke fun at the pain and suffering in the world both past and present? Charlie Chaplin did in The Great Dictator, and was successful in making fun of aspects of Nazism before they were even known.

Well what about Stalin? It's perfectly alright to have a monument to Stalin, and Karl Marx in universities, offices and public squares, but not Hitler? Despite the fact that we have indeed banned Far-Right imagery from universities and colleges, the imagery of a man responsible for the massacre of fifteen million, the horrors of Stalin and Mau, and all of the other Far-leftist dictators are not documented nor punished nor taken seriously, the murder of 150 million people at least.

Can we joke about that? Yes we can and we should. Comedy is a remedy to the pain and suffering of us all. Comedy helps us digest otherwise indigestible material and to better understand what 150 million people means.

Well let's move on to freedom of speech. Freedom of speech, do we have that? We certainly talk about it a lot, but is it a physical feature of our society? In law, there are a number of articles and laws based on EU law, but none in UK law, in fact in UK law we have more laws designed to remove speech, such as hate speech laws than we do laws protecting it.

Count Danukla, a YouTube user who posted a video making fun of Nazism, not making light of it, but making fun of it, has been sentenced for a joke. As of writing we do not know how long or if he will be imprisoned but we know he's now got a criminal record for a joke, and will never be able to seek employment in the UK again.

Well then what about the ability to question horrors? To criticise people who deserve to be criticised? No, we don't have that either. If you question a certain kind of person in the UK, you can and will go to jail on hate speech charges. At fear of being arrested for speaking on that topic any further, I will move swiftly on and tell you to watch the harm done to Tommy Robinson.

Do we have the ability to question strongly held beliefs? Such as religious ones. As long as they're not Islamic ones, you're safe.

So in short, no we are not free. We have conceded too much ground to progressive activists, we have allowed our society to become limited by laws imposed by people who are overly sensitive and are nervous to offend, people who do not understand the value of causing offence.

The universe is offensive, reality is offensive, the tale of mankind is offensive, we are born we live and we fade into oblivion and we tell jokes, we learn from our mistakes and we allow people to speak or else you have no idea how dark reality can get. Freedom of speech is an absolute right which must be preserved, lest we destroy society piece by piece, day by day.

Everyone has the right to speak, and without it we can not expect nor assume that it will be respected for us in the future. Let Neo-Nazis speak, let people speak right up until they incite openly and verbally or through their actions, a crime. Let people make their own minds up, and stop allowing the government to decide what is acceptable speech.

It is only through speaking that we learn. Imprisoning people for wrongthink is the fastest way to societal stagnation and dogmatism. If you want that path, keep doing exactly and precisely what you are doing, be silent on the topic of censorship, be silent on the topic of freedom of speech and continue to arrest everyone for having a different opinion, and I can promise you society will be hurtled back into the dark ages in a matter of decades, not centuries.

Protect your speech, it's the only thing that will outlast you and may be the only thing that will transcend you. Thank you for listening.