Kemi Badenoch's "free speech" hypocrisy

You'd have to be intensely gullible to believe Kemi Badenoch's hypocritical posturing as some kind of free speech champion.

Kemi Badenoch has been mouthing off about how free speech is "under threat" in Britain, and complaining that the UK state has "over-reached" in policing people’s opinions.

It’s an interesting take given that she served several ministerial roles in the previous Tory government that did things like:

• Severely curtailed our long-standing rights to participate in non-violent political protest with new laws that are so obscenely disproportionate that environmental protesters who merely talked about protest tactics ended up getting longer prison sentences than loads of the extreme-right thugs who violently smashed up and looted our communities last summer!

• Snooped on public figures and held secret files on their political opinions in order to blacklist those who had criticised Tory government policy.

• Brought in the gagging law to ban criticism of government policy by charities, protest groups, voluntary organisations, trade unions, and religions.

• Implemented several crackdowns on workers’ rights to engage in industrial action.

• Issued a diktat to schools trying to ban them from criticising capitalism.

• Unlawfully withdrew Music Export Growth funding from the Belfast rap group Kneecap because of their political stance on Irish reunification (the Tory minister who decided to punish the band for their political views was one Kemi Badenoch).

With a track record like this the Tories, and Kemi Badenoch in particular, are profoundly hypocritical to cry that the UK state has "over-reached" in policing free speech, because it’s them who have been doing the over-reaching.

It’s obvious that she doesn’t really give a damn about free speech, otherwise she would have raised her voice in protest at all of her Tory colleagues’ draconian attacks on what people are allowed to say, do, and teach to children.

And she’s so opposed to some people’s free speech that she grossly abused her position as a government minister to unlawfully punish Kneecap for their political opinions.

The reality is that she’s just an empty vessel mindlessly echoing Elon Musk’s ravings about free speech in the expectation that her target audience of right-wing dullards are too ignorant and hard-of-thinking to notice the appalling stench of hypocrisy.

If a politician misuses her position in government in an unlawful attempt to crush the free speech of people she disagrees with, you’d have to be intensely gullible to believe her posturing about the importance of protecting free speech when she’s in opposition.