The Sharia thought police
PN
Everyone on Twitter thinks they'll be brave and disobey any future blasphemy laws.
Most won't though. A few will to begin with, but the police will round on them and there'll be exemplary prosecutions. People will go to jail, others will be heavily fined and publicly shamed. They'll pick you off one by one, and if you've got anything to lose, you'll self-censor.
There will be some online protest (as there's been over Sam Melia), but the media will go into full character assassination mode so however noisy the protest, it will be written off as far right activism - and the likes of the Free Speech Union will stay quiet on the matter.
The authorities will be clever about this. They won't provoke a mass protest by bagging everyone with a spicy opinion. If you're below the line, with just few followers, you'll get away with it, and they won't go after anyone who would otherwise become a free speech martyr. They'll do it quietly and selectively, initially bagging people who are already regarded as "far right" so as to dampen public sympathy. They'll then start leaning on social media companies to suspend accounts or shadow-ban them.
We can expect cautious condemnation of this from the likes of Farage and Reform, but I don't imagine there will be a full-throated defence of freedom of speech because Farage always stays inside the lines. Like him or loathe him, the only hope we have is if Tommy Robinson can mobilise a mass demonstration.
In the past I've been indifferent about Tommy Robinson, and often critical of his methods, but we're past all that now.
Our only salvation will be to mobilise the British spirit of defiance (if it still exists) and TR lot will be key to that. If Labour attempts to install the APPG definition of Islamophobia into law, then we're all going to have to drop our petty differences and get behind him. I'm sorry I took so long to realise this.
This has always been debated as something for far in the future, but what we're seeing in this election is the foundations being laid for an Islamist takeover of British politics.
The Muslim Vote organisation is engaged in a highly coordinated campaign to put enemies of British liberty in parliament, and they're going to succeed. This is just the beginning but by 2029 they will have their ducks in a row and could even have dozens of MPs. They have already made the Labour Party their gimp on a leash. Starmer might land an impressive majority this time around, enough to keep the Islamists at arms length, but as Labour tanks in popularity, he will turn to them to stay in power, and they will make their demands. They'll do it piecemeal, but they'll keep going until they get everything they want.
This, incidentally, is why I'm so critical of Reform. They keep playing it safe, and they haven't done their homework. Unlike the Muslim Vote, they don't have a set of equivalent demands for a time when they wield leverage over the Tories. The Islamists know how to play the game, but the British right is just playing at it. The Islamist enemy is playing the long game, they are better organised, and have a ruthlessly efficient ground game, when all Reform has is an ageing rabble-rouser. Having an intellectual foundation, and a coherent set of demands is absolutely pivotal to movement-building and you can't wing it with populist tropes. The Islamists are showing us how it is done. We need to learn from them. But there will be no equivalent movement-building under Farage because he's always winging it.
This is very rapidly becoming a national emergency, and these could be the last years of Britain as a liberal democracy. This could be what puts us on the road to civil war, as our politics is completely colonised by foreigners.
This is why we need to be super careful about handing Labour a supermajority. I appreciate the seductive nihilist sentiment of "zero seats", but in the next parliament we need every ally we can find. If Farage is determined to run Reform as an incompetent civnat/populist party with no plan, then we are likely to be completely outmanoeuvred by the enemy. We can't afford to play it safe any more.