Anonymous
The author is what used to be known as a ‘regular bloke’ living in Britain who has asked not to be named for reasons cited below.
I have wanted to write for the Daily Sceptic for a long time. It should be a straightforward ambition to fulfil. I have opinions, I support free speech and scepticism, and here is a publication built for exactly that. Instead, my first contribution arrives unsigned. I think the reason why is, in itself, the article.
Ann Widdecombe’s murder has reopened a question that surfaces from time to time: should politicians with ‘unfashionable’ views get extra protection? The investigation continues, so I won’t comment on that, but the fact that the question is even being asked in response to a 78-year-old woman being killed in her own home tells you something regardless of how the investigation concludes. We have been here before. Jo Cox in 2016. David Amess in 2021. A pattern is forming, whatever the final facts of this particular case turn out to be.
The debate this triggers is usually framed narrowly: what security do MPs need? I want to push it wider: what if politicians are not actually the group most exposed? They have protection officers, party machinery and a public profile that makes an attack on them a national story. I have none of that. Neither does anyone else who simply has an opinion and a job to protect.
I recently listened to Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, who argued that Britain may be entering a period of increasing internal conflict in which political violence becomes more likely. Whether or not one accepts his analysis, it’s difficult to ignore the growing sense that our public discourse has become more hostile and less forgiving. If expressing political disagreement increasingly carries the risk of intimidation or worse, the answer cannot simply be to provide more security for an ever-expanding list of public figures. That treats the symptom rather than the disease.
The view from nowhere and a nobody in particular
I consider myself an ordinary person. Thirty-plus years ago I would have considered myself slightly left-leaning. I liked to think of myself as one of the good guys. But somewhere in the last three decades the Overton window slid sideways, and views I’ve quietly held throughout – that mass immigration, legal and illegal, hasn’t obviously benefited the culture I grew up in, that free speech should mean everyone’s speech, including the people I disagree with – are now filed under ‘right-wing’.
I don’t think I’m unusual. Look at the Brexit vote, which for many people was as much about sovereignty and control over immigration as it was about Brussels. Look at any poll on migration levels. There is a large, ordinary, non-extreme constituency that holds views broadly like mine. And a good number of them, I suspect, keep quiet for the same reason I’m staying anonymous here: weighing up whether speaking out is worth the risk. Silence can easily be mistaken for consensus, and I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening here.
Which raises a question I’ve had to sit with while writing this: am I a coward? Publishing anonymously, after all, is a way of having the argument without paying for it. But I don’t think cowardice is really what’s on display here. A coward stays silent. What I’m doing is closer to something else entirely: deciding that saying this at all matters more than saying it under my own name, while still not being willing to bet my livelihood on it. If that’s cowardice, then I suspect it’s shared by a very large, very quiet number of people who hold perfectly mainstream opinions and have simply done the same calculations that I have. That, in itself, might be the more troubling finding than anything else in this piece.
Fear arrives before the crackdown
This is the part I think gets missed in the security debate. We talk about authoritarianism as something that happens to you: a knock on the door, a lost job, a police caution for a tweet. But before any of that, there’s the version that happens inside your own head. You draft the post and delete it. You bite your tongue at the dinner table. You calculate what a client, a neighbour, or a local WhatsApp group might do with an honest opinion, and you decide it isn’t worth finding out.
That calculation isn’t paranoid. The variables feeding it are laid out in article after article in the Daily Sceptic. Prevent’s own material cites “cultural nationalism”, defined as the belief that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by specific ethnic and cultural groups, as a sub-category of extreme Right-wing ideology. Two-tier policing is underpinned by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Anti-Racism Commitment, which states that policing should not be “colour blind”, a principle many officers and members of the public have read as licence to treat people differently according to race. It is perhaps no coincidence that public trust in these institutions has been falling sharply. Gallup found that Britons’ confidence in the courts dropped 12 points in a single year to 57 per cent, while confidence in local police fell 11 points to 64 per cent, the largest year-on-year declines on record for either measure. When the referee looks like it’s picking sides, people stop trusting the game.
Campaigners have logged tens of thousands of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ a year, the great majority of them originating from something someone posted online. And after events like the Southport riots, an entire category of people were branded ‘far-right thugs’ as a matter of editorial habit. None of this needs to end in a prosecution for it to work. Its function is to make you flinch before you speak, not after. And it’s working: a YouGov poll found that 57 per cent of Britons admit to sometimes holding back their views for fear of a negative reaction, and research published earlier this year found the same pattern setting in even among teenagers, with around one in five saying they hide their political opinions at school to avoid being ‘cancelled’. Self-censorship of this kind isn’t a fringe habit. It’s now closer to a majority experience.
Nothing dramatic has happened to me. Nobody has knocked on my door. I have not been arrested, cautioned or sacked. I have simply chosen, before any of that could happen, to leave my name off this piece. That is precisely the point. Fear doesn’t need to become reality to change behaviour. The anticipation of it is enough.
That’s the self-censorship no one puts a number on, and I think it’s doing more to shrink public debate than any single policy or piece of legislation. Its success isn’t measured by how many people it punishes, but by how many quietly change their behaviour hoping never to be punished at all.
What the Free Speech Union can’t do
I say this as a member and supporter, not a critic: the Free Speech Union does something genuinely valuable. It represents people who get victimised for exercising their right to free speech, such as those facing job losses, disciplinary action or no-platforming for holding a lawful opinion. It lobbies against bad policy before it’s enacted or written into law. Both of those are real, useful functions.
But none of it reaches the moment someone decides to act with their fists rather than a complaint form. If an opinion gets you followed home, or attacked in the street, the Free Speech Union cannot stand between you and that. Nothing currently can, if you’re not a high profile figure with a protection detail. I don’t say that to be alarmist. I say it because it’s the honest answer to ‘What happens if this goes further?’ and I don’t think we’ve collectively worked out what we do about it.
It’s worth adding: this isn’t only a problem for people like me. Journalists and broadcasters who’ve been pushed out of mainstream outlets over their views have, in plenty of cases, faced worse, genuine, sustained threats, and some have built independent platforms only because staying inside the mainstream tent stopped being an option. I don’t want to suggest their situation is easy. But for many at least, it is a chosen fight, with an audience and often an income attached to it. Mine isn’t. I have a job, clients and neighbours, and none of them signed up for my opinions to become their problem.
So, anonymously
Which brings me back to where I started. I am not a public figure. I have no security detail, no platform to defend and no appetite for becoming a story. What I have is an opinion that used to be unremarkable and now apparently isn’t, and a reasonable fear that saying so under my own name could cost me clients, friction with neighbours or worse. So I’m saying it without my name attached, in a publication built specifically to defend my right to say it with my name attached.
If that strikes you as a contradiction, it should. I think it’s the clearest evidence I can offer that something in this country’s relationship with free expression isn’t working: not a theory about it, but a person quietly acting on the fear of it, in real time, in this very article.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
