Were there to be a modern, British equivalent of Rip van Winkle, falling into a coma during, say, the 1980s, and being awakened via some new medical advances in our present day, he (not unlike his fictional predecessor) would surely be astonished at much of what lies before his renewed consciousness.

To take the information and viewpoints available to him: following amazement at the range and ubiquity of electronic media, and it having been explained to him that not only had the side of freedom and democracy triumphed long ago in the Cold War, but that the major armed conflict within the territory of the UK had been ended by consensus between the government and the IRA, he might become somewhat perplexed at the range and scope of bans and restrictions on what is now allowed to be publicly said or presented. For example, on our protagonist exploring his curiosity about the popular culture of the second quarter of the 21st century, the phenomenon of musical performers being denounced by the government, investigated by the police and even put on trial – not for using obscene language or references to sexual activity, but for their expressions on the treatment of Palestinians by Israel - might come as a surprise to him.

There is space here to consider only a very few of the wide variety of institutional means and methods currently used to narrow the window of permitted information and discourse, alongside the increasing treatment of expressions outside that window as equivalent to treachery.

Having a particularly chilling effect is the extension of anti-terrorism legislation. It has been used to ban Hamas and Hezbollah, movements which do not conduct armed operations in the UK or outside the Middle East, and Palestine Action, which conducts direct action, e.g. spray painting military equipment, in order, as the activists would no doubt express publicly if allowed to do so, to disrupt or hamper the mass murder of civilians in Palestine.

As Jonathan Cook has observed, “The Terrorism Act 2000 has a series of provisions that make it difficult to voice or show any kind of support for an organisation proscribed under the legislation, whether it is writing an article or wearing a T-shirt. Recent attention has focused on Section 13, which is being used to hound thousands of mostly elderly people who have held signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They now face a terrorism conviction and up to six months in jail. But an amendment introduced in 2019 to Section 12 of the Act…is even more repressive. It makes it a terrorism offence for a person to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and in doing so be “reckless” about whether anyone else might be “encouraged to support” the organisation.”

Notably, unlike with the law on defamation, neither truth nor honestly held opinion (previously denoted as ‘fair comment’) are defences against prosecution under the terrorism laws. Thus a situation is created in which conveying particular information (even if factual), analyses and views, or even attempting to counter misinformation or false information put forward against a banned group, becomes impossible without incurring some risk of a prison sentence, which in the case of a breach of Section 12, is of up to 14 years. Whatever the actual likelihood, in any specific instance, of a prosecution for the making of a speech, writing an article, or posting a social media comment, the effect is to intimidate and restrict. The non-availability of truth and honest opinion as defences harks back to the proceedings of the Star Chamberin the early 1600s, which acted for the English Crown against offences including ‘seditious libels’ as printed media was emerging on a mass scale, and which explicitly ruled that neither truth nor intent could be a defence in such cases.

While evoking the need to protect random and defenceless civilians from being blown up in bomb attacks, the UK’s terrorism legislation, which has its roots in concepts and measures developed to protect British colonial power (e.g. in Ireland, India, Egypt and Malaya), continues in our modern times as a means of serving strategic and cynical interests.

Among revealing examples of this is Britain’s designation in 2019 of the political wing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. The then Home Secretary Sajid Javid explained, “Hizbollah is continuing in its attempts to destabilise the fragile situation in the Middle East – and we are no longer able to distinguish between their already banned military wing and the political party. Because of this, I have taken the decision to proscribe the group in its entirety.”

To which Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary at the time, added, “The government is sending a clear signal that its destabilising activities in the region are totally unacceptable and detrimental to the UK’s national security…Hizballah was established during the Lebanese civil war and is committed to armed resistance to the state of Israel. It continues to amass weapons in direct contravention of UN Security Council Resolutions, putting the security of the region at risk. Its involvement in the Syrian war since 2012 continues to prolong the conflict and the regime’s brutal and violent repression of the Syrian people.”

The motivation here barely even requires one to read between the lines of these statements. Britain’s ‘national security’ interests, and bizarrely, ‘Middle East stability’ and ‘security’ were seen as bound up with backing the armed depredations of Israel in Lebanon and Palestine, and the branches of Al Qaeda in Syria, to both of which Hezbollah was presenting an obstacle. If such decisions were actually about terrorism as commonly understood, would not the Israeli Defence Forces, Mossad, the CIA and branches of the US military be under consideration for designations as terrorist forces?

Also clearly connected with supposed national security interests, though disguised behind regulatory considerations of ‘impartiality’ and ‘independence’ were the banning from British TV viewing of PressTV (Iran) in 2012, CGTN (China) in 2021, and RT and Sputnik (Russia) in 2022.

The reasons given by the regulator OFCOM for removing the broadcasting licenses of these outlets stand out as particularly absurd, given that the chair and board members of OFCOM itself are appointed directly by the British government. Furthermore, control of the BBC is now so tight that, in one example, the corporation sent explicit written instructions to its journalists banning them from reporting that Venezuelan President Maduro had been kidnapped in the attack by US forces, instructing them to refer instead to him being “captured” in the USA’s “operation”.

Such restrictions are now par for the course among Western nations. EU and NATO members and allies, particularly in central and eastern Europe, prove their adherence to freedom not by how they allow competing views to flourish, but by the extent to which they block and restrict ‘pro-communist’ or ‘pro-Russian’ views, and by cancelling elections or banning candidates as required in order to ensure the continuation of democracy.

Another use of regulatory bodies in the clampdown on discourse is their role as a vehicle, mainly at the instigation of a group entitled UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), to harass, intimidate, and threaten with loss of employment, professional people who have spoken out on Palestine. Targets have included doctors, dentists, solicitors and academics. The UKLFI modus operandi is to complain simultaneously to the target’s regulatory board, to their employer, to the police, and to the press, using a letterhead comprised of lords, ladies, knights, baronesses and other legal luminaries, to achieve, if not the target’s professional suspension or exclusion, at least to tie them up in huge legal costs, process and litigation for months on end.

For example, Dr Abu Sittah’s vindication at a ‘fitness to practice’ tribunal in January 2026, followed a year in which that renowned surgeon, who is also the elected Rector of Glasgow University, had been pursued by the General Medical Council, on charges of antisemitism and support for terrorism instigated by UKLFI. To attend the tribunal he had flown in from Lebanon, where he had been treating war-wounded patients. The head of Dr Abu Sittah’s legal team commented that the case, “illustrates the growing misuse of regulatory and legal mechanisms to silence and punish those who speak out against grave injustices in Palestine, and the serious chilling effect such tactics have on humanitarian, medical, and academic voices.” (6)

But why should people in the UK be allowed to hear information and points of view other than those within the range that is welcomed or countenanced by the British state and establishment? The philosopher John Stuart Mill, summarising a key element not only of the liberal ideology upon which the principles of the Western world are supposedly based, but of the British values in which British governments and main political parties claim to wrap themselves, was succinct:

"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

Now to return for a moment to our updated Rip van Winkle figure. He might recall, from his earlier life, that Sinn Fein - the political wing of a movement that was conducting a campaign of armed struggle within and against the UK, involving the killing of over a thousand British soldiers, the deaths of many civilians and the attempted assassination of the prime minster and leading cabinet members – was never banned. Even when the government decreed that its spokespersons could not be heard on radio or TV, the BBC in those days retained enough independence to subvert that ruling by using actors' voices to continue giving the advocates of ‘terrorism’ the ‘oxygen of publicity’.

He might possibly remember also, that despite it being an ideological opponent of the ‘free world’, having a very different economic system, funding and arming states and movements that were at odds or even in military conflict with the West and its allies, the Soviet Union was not legally or officially prevented from conveying its views and information to people in Britain via the available means at the time - although its viewpoint was not exactly given an even handed presentation in the mainstream press and television.

Thus, even while Western governments and virtually the entire Western media, including some left wing publications, were denouncing the Soviet military action in Afghanistan as an expansionist invasion, Soviet Weekly was openly available in W H Smiths and public libraries, and the English language programmes broadcast by Radio Moscow were not subject to electronic jamming. To their relatively small British audience, they sought to explain that the USSR had sent troops to Afghanistan at the request of its own government, which was working to give land to the impoverished peasants, liberate women in the countryside, and improve the country’s appallingly low rates of literacy. It also explained that the freedom fighters lauded in the West were in fact an international force of jihadi extremists, mobilised and armed by the US and its allies, and devoted to a medieval and repressive ideology.

Our protagonist could also have had some knowledge that there was race relations legislation, enacted in 1965 and 1976, which included bans on incitement to racial hatred, but if so, he might well have been unaware that there were very few prosecutions. And even among those, a significant number were against black people who had expressed resentment against the white majority.

It would of course be mistaken to exaggerate the freedom of political expression and association allowed in the UK and the wider West during the Cold War period. The biggest restrictive factor (then as now) was the ownership by wealthy companies or individuals, or institutional control by establishment forces, of mass media outlets.

In addition, television programmes critical of the role of the British state in Ireland were banned at the behest of the government, and state-backed death squads operated alongside the army in the north of Ireland itself. Left wingers and active trade unionists in Britain were routinely prevented from earning a living via the use of secret blacklists by employers. State infiltration of, and spying on, left, trade union, and anti-capitalist organisations was (and continues to be) rampant.

Among our NATO allies, fascist and military dictatorships ruled where and when expedient in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey. In West Germany, the Communist Party was banned in 1956 and, although communist activity eventually became legal again, a Nazi era measure (the Berufsverbot) was reinstituted to block people with left wing views from working in public sector professions. Of course there was no expectation that regimes in Third World countries that were installed by or allied to the West would operate according to principles of political liberty.

Yet there was sufficient content to claims of freedom of expression, in most of the richer liberal democracies, to give the Western side in the Cold War the aura of consistency with its professed values. And that - alongside a rising prosperity extended to working class people via the post-World War 2 economic compromise involving nationalisation, economic regulation and taxation of the rich – formed the major ideological element of the winning package in the great battle of the mid to late 20th Century.

After the defeat of the threat of communist revolution, the widespread prosperity began to follow it into history quite soon afterwards. The brief promise of ‘trickle down‘ became an upwards gush of wealth and income to further enrich the very rich. In the wealthiest countries, individual aspirations for a better future are collapsing alongside the material and social infrastructure. The space of collective hopes (such as were represented in Britain by Corbyn’s Labour Party in the late twenty-teens), when crushed, is filled by culture wars and ethnic hate.

And disappearing too now are the edifices of political liberalism - thrown over the side everywhere in the West. The USA under Trump openly dispenses with the illusions of democracy promotion, seeking support instead from a jaded electorate by openly boasting of grabbing other countries‘ resources.

Perhaps our national and world economic system, and its beneficiaries, can continue to run on quite well, bereft, or perhaps even unencumbered by, liberal political ideology and practices.

Jeremy Corbyn, despite the upsurge supporting him, was politically defeated. He did not need to be kidnapped or ‘captured‘.