Seventy-Five Years After Orwell, Fighting for Free Speech is as Crucial as Ever

To mark the 75th anniversary of the death of George Orwell, Laura Perrins interviewed Toby for the Irish alternative news site Gript about the prospects for free speech in the age of Starmer and Trump. Here’s how it begins.

George Orwell, the acclaimed and visionary author famous for such works as 1984, and Animal Farm, died 75 years ago today. To commemorate the death of a man renowned for the importance he placed on preserving free speech, I sat down with Lord Toby Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union, to discuss the state of free speech in the west today, and Orwell’s legacy.

Toby,

Thanks so much for doing this interview. You are the founder and director of the Free Speech Union. You also run the Daily Sceptic. And you set up four free schools in London.

First, I want to say congratulations on the peerage (Lord Young was recently made a member of the House of Lords). I was delighted when I heard of it as you really do deserve it. I also admit to having a bit of a chuckle for two reasons: first I do remember you writing after your anti-lockdown stance that you had surely torpedoed any chance of a peerage, and (it may have been the same piece but I always remember it) every time you see a friend succeed part of you dies inside (or was that your friend James Delingpole?) How unexpected was the peerage and do you think part of James died inside when he heard the news?

It was a surprise. When someone from Kemi’s office first called me and began, “You know how Keir is about to nominate 30 Labour peers…” I thought he was going to ask my advice about nominating one of my friends, e.g. Douglas Murray. Did I think he would accept it? So when he asked if I’d be interested it caught me off guard. But it didn’t take me long to say yes.

James sent me a congratulatory email, which was nice. I still feel very warmly towards James and I hope it’s mutual.

(For the record I freely admit to small parts of me dying inside when a friend or indeed frenemy succeeds.)

We probably disagree on a fair few issues but I always admired you for the stance you took on lockdown, which was the same as the one we took when I was Editor of the Conservative Woman, namely it was wrong and damaging. How long do you believe the UK will continue to suffer from the damage of that policy error?

I’m beginning to doubt whether Britain will ever recover. If you look at the percentage of the working population on long-term sick now compared to before the pandemic, it’s a staggering increase – about three million, up from two million in 2019-20 – and shows no sign of returning to pre-pandemic levels. That’s partly why there was record-breaking inward migration under Boris’s premiership – the Treasury told him we need to import people to do the jobs native Britons either can’t or won’t do. Then there’s the huge uptick in the number of schoolchildren classified as ‘persistent absentees’, the explosion in mental illness, the people who’ve been injured by the Covid vaccines etc. NHS waiting lists climbed to 7.77 million in September 2023 – and that’s just in England – and show no signs of returning to pre-pandemic levels. Wherever you look, we’re still living with the fall out. The killer stat is how much public expenditure has increased by as a percentage of GDP. In 2019-20, total managed expenditure as a share of GDP was 39.6%. It climbed to 53.1% in 2020-21, then fell back to 44.7% in 2023-24 and will probably climb again in 2024-25. Thanks to the U.K. Government’s mismanagement of the pandemic and its subsequent failure to correct for any of its mistakes, we’re on the fast track to bankruptcy.

Moving on to your work at the Free Speech Union. I really admire that organisation as you support people who would otherwise have no support in protecting their right to free speech. You and your lawyers were incredibly helpful to us at TCW when we had a dispute with Ofcom, so thanks again for that.

How many members does FSU have now and how many people have you helped over the years?

We now have 25,000 members, up from 12,500 at the beginning of 2024. As you can imagine, we’ve seen a big increase since July 2024. On one day in August last year, more people joined than in the whole of June. That has meant taking on more staff and we’re now up to 25. We’ve fought over 3,300 cases in the last five years and achieved a favourable outcome 78% of the time.

Tuesday marks the 75th anniversary of the death of George Orwell, surely one of the most important writers of our time. Orwell once said, in an attempt to get Animal Farm published, that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear”. Why do you believe other people are so eager to stop other people saying what they do not want to hear?

Human beings aren’t naturally tolerant creatures, particularly when people are attacking values they regard as sacred, or which they think of as threatening their group, or challenging concepts that are central to their identity. That’s why the right to free speech is so rare, both historically and in non-Western countries today. It needs to be constantly nurtured and supported across every part of society and once you stop doing that – as most British institutions have – it begins to die. What comes next isn’t hard to predict – it’s what came before: the persecution of heretics. It’s already happening.

Do you think we have passed peak cancel culture?

Not judging from the Free Speech Union’s case files. I’m not sure how much comfort to take from the Republicans’ victories in November. Left-wing political parties that become captured by radical progressive ideology have never done well at the ballot box, but that hasn’t impeded the spread of that dogma through our institutions. Those citing Trump’s victory as a sign of the end of woke are exhibiting a naïve faith in democracy. You can’t win back power from unelected bureaucrats, corporate HR departments and public sector DEI officers by winning at the ballot box. It’s encouraging that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are planning to take on the Deep State, but they’re about to discover that wresting back power from a well-entrenched public official, with 30 years of bureaucratic in-fighting under his belt, is a lot harder than landing a rocket ship on Mars.

Why are young people so puritanical when it comes to policing speech?

It’s partly because they’ve signed up to a particularly authoritarian strain of Left-wing thought, partly because they’ve been molly-coddled by their parents and don’t know how to cope with any kind of challenge and partly because they’ve lost the ability to discuss alternative points of view without becoming offended. But I’ve noticed that children born after 2004 are less woke than the previous generation, so there is hope.

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