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The Thought-Gulag: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Muzzle

In 1688 William of Orange landed on the shores of the UK equipped with a mobile printing press and the aim to depose the Catholic King, James II. Upon landing, William's forces utilised the printing press to produce and distribute materials that shaped public perception and mobilised support for his cause.

By Christmas every coffee house in London was roasting the king in rhyming couplets. Prior to 1688, the Licensing Act, enforced strict pre-publication censorship, requiring government approval for most printed works to suppress dissent.

This act of defiance against censorship laid the groundwork for modern free speech traditions in the UK. It ended absolute monarchy and established parliamentary sovereignty over the Crown. The result was the Bill of Rights 1689, the single most important statute in British constitutional history, which is still law today.

The Bill of Rights 1689 is the statutory DNA of:

• Parliamentary supremacy
• Absolute free speech within parliament
• The legal duty to hold elections
• The power to sack a tyrant king.

Exactly 336 years later, we appear to be re-creating the same circumstances that led to the Glorious Revolution by pushing the spirit of the Bill of Rights to a breaking point. Has parliament become the tyrant king, free from accountability and working against, rather than for, the interests of the British people?

Most recently we have seen the implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023. A law so technically illiterate it mandates the impossible, funds the unworkable, and fines the unbreakable. Then they vilify teenagers for downloading VPNs to watch a YouTube video. It is a 300-page love letter to 1984 written in crayon, by people who once heard the phrase “dark web” and think you’re referring to 4chan.

They don’t understand the technology they are trying to regulate; they don’t understand VPNs, Tor, and how dangerous a universal back door would be. They don’t understand that the internet is not bound by the borders of a country and that open protocols cannot be bound by legislation.

Worse, the law grants internet platforms a de facto licence to censor first and ask questions later. Instead of waiting for a court conviction, platforms must remove what they consider offensive material before any judicial finding of illegality. Almost as if they saw the flagrant censorship and tramping off free speech on Facebook and Twitter during the pandemic and decided it was a good thing to codify it in law.

Now, enter the proposed Digital ID, the “BritCard”. Starmer's shiny new toy, that's less about streamlining bureaucracy and more about turning social media and online forums into a gated community for the 'right' sort of citizen with the ‘right’ sort of speech. Rolled out under the guise of curbing migration and child safety, these IDs risk morphing into mandatory keys for online life, enforced via the Online Safety Act's age-verification mandates.

History is a circle, and we are back at the Licensing Act of 1662, only the Star Chamber now runs on AWS. The lesson is brutal and repeatable. Every empire that strangled speech, first built a registry. The census bureaucracy in action. Roman proscription lists, Stalin’s NKVD, the Spanish Inquisition, Communist China; dissent = asset forfeiture + open-season murder.

The pattern is identical: census → registry → quota → purge. Today the census is your naked browser history, the registry is the Digital ID, and the quota is Ofcom’s “harm & offense” slider. The only upgrade is latency, milliseconds instead of months. The purge is your ability to work, to open a bank account, buy a house, to post online or access local services.

Every panopticon starts with a spreadsheet, and registries always weaponise. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws began as “identity clarification”. The 1940 Vichy census began as “administrative efficiency”. Starmer’s Digital ID begins as “streamlined access”. The goal of the UK’s digital panopticon is to create a system that makes people think they are always being watched. To force them to self-regulate their behaviour and speech under the constant ‘possibility’ of surveillance and the threat of punishment.

In 2018 China rolled out the Social Credit System. By 2020 you needed a QR code to buy a train ticket. By 2022 you needed a clean speech score to post on Weibo. Today 1.4 billion people self-censor before breakfast. Britain’s Digital ID is the same software, just compiled for rainy weather.

Edward Snowden is famously quoted as saying, "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say". Both are deeply entwined. Without privacy we cannot be free in our speech, without free speech we cannot be honest with ourselves or others. John Stuart Mill nailed it in On Liberty, suppressing 'bad' ideas starves society of the friction needed to sharpen good ones.

Orwell wrote in 1949: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Ours wears a lanyard and asks for your pronouns.

Appeals to authority aside, who’s standing up for the little guy in all this? Thankfully we do have free speech groups who believe in the fundamental right to express ourselves honestly. In the UK we have the Free Speech Union. In 2025 they have already dragged three councils, two universities, and one quango into court and forced them to read their own censorship rules aloud. They are the only outfit that sues the State for breakfast. In 2024 alone the FSU issued 47 pre-action letters and won 41.

Every FSU skeleton argument cites Article 9 of the Bill of Rights: “That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.” The FSU’s rule is simple: if the State is the bully, they take the case. That is the Voltaire clause in action.

If you believe that both privacy and freedom of speech are innate rights, and wish to defend them, perhaps you could consider supporting the Free Speech Union. You might one day find yourself needing their services.

You don’t have to learn to love the muzzle. Let’s fight back!