Kemi Badenoch will on Monday take the free speech fight to Labour as she launches a commission to stop the Right being stifled.
Writing in Monday’s Daily Mail, the Conservative leader warned that ‘offending someone has effectively been turned into a crime’ and said policing has become politicised.
She has vowed to fight to protect free speech, and her new policy task force – to be led by Toby Young – will review laws restricting freedom of expression.
The commission is expected to report back to Mrs Badenoch by the end of the year and will look at areas affected by free speech – such as universities, social media and broadcasting – and question whether the rules are necessary, fair and in line with British values.
Lord Young is set to meet campaigners, journalists, academics and ordinary people who have experience of how free speech is being stifled throughout the UK.
His recommendations will form a central part of Conservative Party policy. The Tories will also challenge Labour to put the proposals into practice.
Mrs Badenoch’s commission comes in the wake of the killing of high-profile US conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot dead last week at an event.
And it follows the arrest of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan by armed policemen at Heathrow earlier this month on suspicion of inciting violence in posts he had made on X, wherein he said: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space… Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.’
Kemi Badenoch will on Monday take the free speech fight to Labour as she launches a commission to stop the Right being stifled
It follows the arrest of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan (pictured) after posts he had made on X, wherein he said: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space… Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls’
Mrs Badenoch said while ‘what happened to Charlie Kirk and Graham Linehan are on different scales’, both are ‘symptoms of the same sickness: a culture that seeks to silence, not debate’.
‘Worse, we have a government that sneers at those who dare raise the alarm about the erosion of free speech,’ she wrote.
Lord Young, director of the Free Speech Union, told the Daily Mail on Sunday night: ‘The recent arrest of Graham Linehan by five armed officers at Heathrow for three tweets mocking trans rights activists shows how urgently we need to overhaul our free speech laws.
‘The police shouldn’t be wasting their time on tweets when they should be policing our streets.
‘Some of the laws regulating our free speech are over 50 years old and no longer fit for purpose. We need to make sure they protect free speech, not suppress it.’
