Challenging the decline of liberty. Against censorship, coercion & collectivism. For free markets, free nations & free people. Author of The Green Cage.
Joined July 2025
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In the UK today, free expression is narrowing. Peaceful critics face raids, gagging orders, and restrictions on what they can say online. Speech is increasingly treated not as a right, but as a risk to be managed.
Climate policy is vital — but when it becomes a shield for censorship or a tool of control, it raises profound questions about liberty. The danger is not environmental action itself, but the willingness of authorities to suppress dissent in its name.
That is the world I explore in The Green Cage. A dystopian novel set in a society where environmental rhetoric justifies surveillance, obedience, and silence.
It is fiction — but intended as a warning. Once speech is conditional, democracy becomes fragile. If we cannot debate freely, we cannot govern freely.
amzn.eu/d/1nIR8aq
Edward Ashfall retweeted
Bar leaders’ statement on government’s response to the Leveson review of criminal courts
We fundamentally disagree with the government’s plan to restrict the deeply entrenched constitutional principle of a jury trial.
The government faces two problems: bearing on the backlog and ensuring we’re never in this position again. We support efforts to do that but have seen no evidence that curtailing jury trials will solve either problem.
We do not see how restricting jury trials will have an impact on the existing backlog. The government itself acknowledged on numerous occasions this week that this proposal will not make a difference any time soon. It hinges on Sir Brian Leveson’s recommendation which has not been piloted or thoroughly modelled.
Crown Courts such as Liverpool have shown that efficiencies and investment of time and resources do make a difference. In Wales, there’s no meaningful backlog due to close and effective co-operation between the Bench and Bar. All the efficiencies we suggested in January – including different case management and defendant delivery time, that have also been recommended by Sir Brian Leveson – do not require legislation. We know they work and would have an impact now.
Resources need to be focused on rebuilding the system and allowing other measures to embed.
Criminal trials being decided by a single judge goes further than the recommendation by Sir Brian which recognised the importance of judgement by peers. The Lord Chancellor’s own 2017 report made plain that juries are free from bias and provide diversity.
This draconian approach undermines such a well-founded sentiment and attacks a constitutional freedom namely, trial by jury.
Barbara Mills KC, Chair of the Bar Council
Kirsty Brimelow KC, Vice Chair of the Bar Council
Riel Karmy-Jones KC, Chair of the Criminal Bar Association
Andrew Thomas KC, Vice Chair of the Criminal Bar Association
Claire Davies KC, Leader of the South Eastern Circuit
Jaime Hamilton KC, Leader of the Northern Circuit
Sarah Jones KC, Leader of the Western Circuit
Jason Pitter KC, Leader of the North Eastern Circuit
Caroline Rees KC, Leader of the Wales and Chester Circuit
Harpreet Sandhu KC, Leader of the Midland Circuit
Lachlan Stewart, Chair of the Bar Council Young Barristers’ Committee
@Kirsty_Brimelow @TheCriminalBar @NECircuitleader
@ne_circuit @SECircuit @CircuitNorth @WandCcircuit @midland_circuit @YoungBarristers
Good news! My dystopian thriller The Green Cage is free on Kindle for the next few days. 📚
Download your copy here.
amzn.eu/d/0a7IeaU
Digital ID is ABSOLUTELY not a safeguard - it is the key infrastructure of control.
Once the state holds the keys to identity, access, and movement, every freedom becomes conditional on compliance with Government policy.
Anyone in favour must look at the reality in China.
One of the deadliest results of socialism was Mao’s so-called ‘Great Leap Forward’ in China between 1958 and 1962.
The government forced farmers into collective farms, banned people from growing their own food, and lied about crop yields to impress party leaders. Officials even took grain away from starving villages to fill quotas.
Around 40 million people died in a man-made famine.
Why is socialism not talked about in the same way fascism is?
I suspect Charlie’s death will turn more people to Christ than the left could ever imagine.
The UK must finally confront a truth: the old “gentlemen’s agreement” constitutional model is no longer fit for purpose. Unwritten conventions, once protected by shared norms, have been eroded in a climate where ideological extremes can bend institutions without clear legal limits.
A modern democracy requires certainty. A codified constitution and Bill of Rights would safeguard individual freedoms, restrain arbitrary government, and restore public confidence that power is exercised under law, not by tradition.
The time has come to replace convention with clarity, and courtesy with constitutional certainty.
Pam Bondi is now pushing hate speech bans. That’s wrong. The left usually leads that charge — the right should know better.
Free speech is not the problem. It’s the solution.
Censorship fuels radicalism. Open debate ends it.
Don’t ban speech. Defeat bad ideas in the the open as Charlie Kirk did.
There’s no such thing as “hate speech” in the Constitution.
Either there is free speech, or there isn’t. To start framing speech that you disagree with as “hate speech” is a dangerously slippery slope that will likely come back to bite.
Incitement to violence is a separate issue entirely.
Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), it is a federal crime to transmit “any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.” Likewise, 18 U.S.C. § 876 and 18 U.S.C. § 115 make it a felony to threaten public officials, members of Congress, or their families.
You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as “free speech.” These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law.
Free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.
It is clear this violent rhetoric is designed to silence others from voicing conservative ideals.
We will never be silenced. Not for our families, not for our freedoms, and never for Charlie. His legacy will not be erased by fear or intimidation.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The US Constitution protects most violent speech.
The Supreme Court ruled it legal to "justify" or celebrate violence or "advocate or teach the duty, necessity, or propriety" of it; but not "incitement" to "imminent" violence (eg telling a mob with weapons to kill someone).
supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/…
Odd to see Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension now framed as a ‘free speech’ issue by the left, after years of them backing cancellations and silencing dissent.
Anyone else get excited when Starmer and Trump hold a press conference? Should be a good’un now that Trump is more clued in on the free speech crackdown in the UK.
Digital ID must be stopped in the UK.
In China, it has become the primary tool of control:
•No anonymity: every phone and internet account tied to your ID.
•Blacklists: people blocked from trains, planes, loans, and schools.
•Health code abuse: protesters silenced by turning their app status “red.”
•24/7 tracking: cameras and facial recognition linked to ID profiles.
•Movement control: hotel bookings and travel tickets denied at the swipe of an app.
Once these systems are in place, freedom cannot be restored. They give the state permanent power over daily life.
Britain’s tradition is liberty under the law and digital ID would destroy that balance.
A society that abandons free speech chooses tyranny and poverty. It is the first freedom and without it, all others collapse.
For all of human history, humanity knew only poverty, disease, and early death—even the wealthiest lived in conditions today’s poor would find unbearable.
Then, in the tiniest fraction of time, capitalism lifted billions out of that misery. It does have flaws, but without it, history was nothing but suffering.
All of this just screams theatre.
We have no supreme law in the UK.
We have no single written constitution.
Parliament is sovereign – it makes the law.
If Parliament dislikes the way the lawyers or the courts are used against its policy, it can legislate to prevent it. Yet it does not.
Violence against ideas is a confession of weakness. If we trust truth and reason, we should welcome open debate. Dangerous ideas die in daylight, not in the shadows of censorship.
Violence and censorship will never win.
The coverage of the Unite the Kingdom march this weekend is a clear example of how free speech can be chilled without a single law needing to be passed.
Demonising language, sweeping labels, and framing ordinary citizens as violent serves the same purpose: to delegitimise voices that challenge the prevailing narrative.
