This interview was conducted in London in June 2025 by Pamela Paresky.

Transcript

Toby Young:
We had a verdict in the case of a Turkish political refugee called Hamit Koskun, who was arrested and prosecuted for burning a copy of the Qur’an outside the Turkish consulate in London. The Free Speech Union and the National Secular Society paid for his defence. The judge issued a written verdict, which he has just read out in court—literally minutes ago.

And it wasn’t the verdict we were hoping for. He has been convicted on one count, and the judge has adjourned making a decision about the second count, pending whether or not there’s an appeal. So it’s quite a complicated verdict. I’ve been working with my team to figure out how to respond on our socials, and we need to do so quickly because the story is just breaking.

But it’s obviously disappointing, and we will help Hamit get that judgment overturned. If that means appealing all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, then that’s what we’ll do.

PP: What’s the law under which he could be convicted for that?

TY: Well, he’s been accused of a criminal offence under two different laws. One—I’d literally have to check—but one is Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, and the other is under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. The actual offences are very similar. I’m not sure I fully understand the difference between them.

The gist is that he used disorderly behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm, or distress—which is a pretty broad standard, and is, in fact, very broad. And his behaviour was deemed to be religiously aggravated—that is, he was motivated in part by a hatred not just of Islam, but of Muslims. So it’s a religiously and racially aggravated offence he’s been found guilty of.

It won’t mean a prison sentence. The judge hasn’t sentenced him yet—that’s happening as we speak—but he’s likely to be given a fine. The National Secular Society and the Free Speech Union will pay that fine.

I attended part of the trial last week. One piece of the prosecution’s evidence that his burning of the Qur’an had caused harassment, alarm, or distress was that two members of the public—both Muslims, one wielding a knife—attacked him.

It’s a truly extraordinary argument: if a devout Muslim violently attacks you because of something you’ve done, then you’re guilty of having caused him harassment, alarm, or distress. It’s not quite a heckler’s veto, but something quite similar.

It effectively means that non-believers must respect Islamic blasphemy codes—or risk causing offence by violating them in public. That feels like a Trojan horse for reintroducing a blasphemy law by the back door—a law that only applies to Muslims, or to other religious groups that respond similarly.

The police have generally given much wider berth, much more latitude, to pro-Palestinian protesters than to anti-Islamic protesters. You’ve likely heard the accusations of two-tier justice and two-tier policing in the UK. Often, what people mean by that is the extraordinary tolerance shown by authorities toward pro-Palestinian protesters, and the intolerance shown toward other, less fashionable causes.

PP: Just one more question about this case. Were the people who attacked the Turkish protester arrested?

TY: He’s been attacked four times now. The Free Speech Union paid for his security when he came to court and will also pay for his transport back to his safe house. Of the four people who attacked him, only one is being prosecuted.

PP: What you’re describing—this legal defence and protection—the Free Speech Union is actually protecting someone’s life. That’s not something I envisioned when you started the Union. Tell me, what was your original vision, and how did you come to be so passionate about defending free speech in the UK?

TY: There were a number of factors that led me to set it up in 2020. One was Niall Ferguson’s call to arms, in which he said there needed to be a kind of “NATO of intellectuals”—so that if any one intellectual was targeted for cancellation, every other intellectual would come to their defence. I thought that was a great idea and needed operationalising.

I remember attending a conference at Oxford organised by Nigel Biggar. Among the people present were Douglas Murray, Konstantin Kisin, Amy Wax, Bret Weinstein and his wife, and Bruce Gilley—various people who had been either targeted for cancellation or actually cancelled. We were discussing what we could do to push back against these censorious mobs on university campuses.

PP: And that made you think you needed to get on with this NATO for intellectuals idea?

TY: Exactly. Later on, at the dinner following that conference, Douglas agreed to be one of the directors, and so did Nigel—Nigel agreed to become the chair. But when I thought about it, I initially asked myself: why confine it to academics? After all, they’re not the only people in danger of being cancelled for speaking out of turn or saying something unorthodox.

So initially, I thought: why not extend it to anyone who makes a living by promoting, defending, or attacking ideas? That would include journalists, playwrights, novelists, podcasters. And then I thought: why even put the boundary there? Why not make it available to anyone who wants to join?

That was the evolution of the concept.

But I myself was cancelled in 2018. I wrote about it, in fact, in Quillette. I wrote a piece called “The Public Humiliation Diet” because, as a result of being cancelled, I lost half a stone in a week. It was pretty traumatic.

PP: What happened?

TY: In 2018, I was given a job on a new higher education regulator. It was a public appointment, so technically, I’d been appointed by Theresa May, then the Prime Minister. I was a non-executive director on this new regulator. Lots of people in higher education, who didn’t welcome the idea of being regulated by me, immediately set about what’s now called “offence archaeology”—trying to dig up things I’d said or written over the previous thirty-plus years to show I was unfit for this role.

They did it partly to winkle me out, partly to embarrass Theresa May, and partly out of sheer spite. And since I’d been a fairly provocative journalist for more than thirty years, it didn’t take them long to uncover a sort of Tutankhamun’s tomb of offensive material. It was hurled at me over the course of a week.

After that week, I stepped down. I was told by the Conservative minister who had created the regulator—Boris Johnson’s brother—that all the other non-executive directors were threatening to resign if I didn’t. The whole thing was in danger of collapsing. So I felt I had no choice.

Stupidly, I apologised for some of the more sophomoric things I’d said in the past—which, I now realise, is always a mistake. That emboldened the mob, who then came for me in four other positions. In total, I had to resign from five roles, including my then-day job running a free schools charity.

PP: Which you had founded?

TY: I didn’t sell the charity, but I had co-founded it—what in America you’d call a charter schools organisation. That was actually one of the reasons I was appointed to the regulator.

But when all that was happening, I desperately wanted impartial, professional advice—advice from people who knew how to handle these crises. My career was burning to the ground before my eyes, and I had no idea how to put the fire out. It all seemed to be escalating with each new revelation.

I didn’t know whether to go on air and defend myself, or keep schtum. I didn’t know if apologising would make it better or worse. I wanted to talk to people who’d been through this. The best I could do was ring Jon Ronson—who wrote So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed—and ask: of all the people you interviewed, who handled it best?

PP: And what did he say?

TY: He said the person who handled it best was Max Mosley—son of Oswald Mosley—who had been caught in a tabloid sting paying prostitutes in an S&M dungeon to dress up as Nazis and whip him, or vice versa—I can’t remember. There was an Oswald Mosley resonance, anyway.

But he just refused to be shamed by it. He literally went into newsagents when it was on the front page of the News of the World, tearing down copies. He shamelessly carried on, then launched a campaign against the tabloid press and helped bring about the demise of the News of the World.

Jon said, “You’ve just got to be incredibly thick-skinned, unembarrassable, shameless, even sociopathic about it. That’s the way to deal with it.” I wasn’t able to do that, and that’s not always the advice I’d give people—but I think, in those circumstances, it was good rule-of-thumb advice.

Because no organisation like that existed at the time, once I’d recovered—and after attending the Oxford meeting—I thought: I really need to set this up. And it wasn’t like cancel culture was going away.

TY: The current government wants to ramp up the number of non-crime hate incidents the police are recording. That’s when you’re reported for a hate crime, the police investigate, conclude that you haven’t committed a crime, and then record it as a “non-crime hate incident.” That attaches itself to your criminal record. If you apply for a job that requires an enhanced criminal records check, it can show up and stop you from getting the job.

We think about a quarter of a million—probably more—of these have been recorded in the past ten years or so, which is an average of more than sixty a day.

PP: A non-crime hate incident is, for example, like posting something on social media?

TY: Correct—posting, yes. Most of them are for posting things on social media that come nowhere near the threshold for a criminal offence.

One of the reasons free speech is still in huge peril, particularly across Europe—but not only Europe—is that the regimes which have embraced radical progressive ideology as their legitimising creed, their overriding purpose, what gives them meaning, are becoming weaker. They’re being threatened by various insurgent populist parties doing increasingly well in elections.

As those regimes weaken, they become more defensive, more likely to lash out, and less tolerant of dissent. It feels like various regimes in their death throes—becoming more paranoid, more sensitive, more defensive about any dissent from the prevailing ideology they’ve embraced.

PP: And you don’t have the same kinds of robust free speech laws here that we have in the US?

TY: No.

PP: You have hate speech laws, right?

TY: We do, yes.

PP: Can you say a little bit about how those are defined and how they’re abused?

TY: Yes. I sometimes say that one of the reasons the English-speaking world has got into such a pickle about free speech is that America has exported a particular ideology—an authoritarian one—which doesn’t set much store by free speech and is quite uninhibited in punishing people for dissenting from its shibboleths. You’ve exported that ideology without exporting the First Amendment.

So we’re where America would be if it didn’t have the First Amendment.

In the UK, speech crimes fall mainly under public order, which is a devolved area. So Scotland has different laws from England and Wales.

Broadly, offences you can be prosecuted for here—but not in the US—include stirring up hatred on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation. Those are offences under the Public Order Act 1986. The maximum sentence for intentionally stirring up racial hatred is seven years in prison.

A good example of how this works: a woman called Lucy Connolly put out a pretty offensive tweet on the day that three schoolgirls were murdered in Southport last year. It seemed to urge people to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers.

She was prosecuted. She pled guilty to intending to stir up serious violence. She shouldn’t have pled guilty—she later said she was poorly advised by her solicitor and wouldn’t have pled guilty had she known the implications.

As a general rule, those who pled not guilty to speech offences relating to the Southport murders were more likely to be acquitted by juries than found guilty. And the Free Speech Union defended some of those individuals.

Lucy Connolly, having pled guilty, was sentenced to 31 months in prison—over two and a half years. Some of the people convicted for serious violence in the aftermath of the Southport attacks received lower sentences. People convicted of being in rape gangs, of having sex with children, or of running child prostitution rings have received less severe sentences.

It seems extraordinary that you can receive a harsher sentence for a single tweet—which she deleted within four hours and apologised for—than for raping a child.

Her prosecution wouldn’t have survived a First Amendment challenge. Under the First Amendment, the Brandenburg test says you must show that what someone has said is overwhelmingly likely to lead to imminent lawless action.

How that works in practice is: if she had said, “You have to go out now and burn down this specific hotel,” and had printed the address, and had a following likely to carry it out—then she might have been prosecutable in the US. That would maybe pass the Brandenburg test, the incitement standard.

But she didn’t do that.

There’s a good rationale for why people shouldn’t go to prison for generally advocating violence: it’s extremely difficult to show a causal connection between a social media post and the violence that follows, especially if the post doesn’t name a person or place as a target.

If you say, “Well, what you said might have had a connection to the violence,” that’s far too broad a standard. It opens the door to the prosecution of countless people for speech crimes.

The Times recently did some research and found that there are two key speech offences on the statute books. One is Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. The other is Section 127 of the Communications Act. An extraordinarily large number of people—around 10,000—have been arrested on suspicion of those offences. They’re almost always related to online posts.

The majority of arrests, investigations, and prosecutions are under those three laws—those two plus Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which was one of the offences Hamit Koskun was accused of.

Some of these arrests happen simply because a post is considered extremely offensive—not because it’s intended to stir up anything.

Under Section 127 of the Communications Act, you can be prosecuted for saying something “grossly offensive”—an extremely subjective and nebulous standard.

A few years ago, the Law Commission of England and Wales proposed replacing the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 with a new “harmful communications” offence. If you said anything likely to cause a likely audience serious psychological distress, you could be sent to prison for two years.

The Law Commission tried to persuade the Free Speech Union that this would be a more attractive alternative. But we didn’t agree.

Has there been any effort to strike these laws? The short answer is no.

With the stirring up offences: the Race Relations Act initially introduced the offence of stirring up racial hatred. That was a kind of crossing-the-Rubicon moment, because in order to be convicted, you don’t have to have actually stirred up hatred—just intended to.

That’s extraordinary, because until then, the intention to stir up a particular emotion had never been a criminal offence under English law.

That provision was later incorporated into the Public Order Act. And since then, new categories have been added—sexual orientation, religion, and, in Scotland, several more.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, passed a few years ago and activated last year on April Fool’s Day, added four additional stirring up offences. So now in Scotland, there are seven categories—you can be prosecuted for stirring up hatred against seven different groups, including the intersex community.

That’s quite extraordinary. It shows how ideologically driven and unevidenced these new laws are. I mean, how many intersex people are there in Scotland? Fewer than a dozen, I’d imagine—and that’s probably an overestimate.

It would be very difficult to even know who they are.

I’ve wondered whether anyone will actually be prosecuted in Scotland for tweeting disobliging things about the boxer who won a gold medal at the Olympics—who is intersex. But perhaps no one has, because even the police don’t understand what “intersex” means.

Clause 20 of the Employment Rights Bill amends the Equality Act. At the moment, employers are liable for the harassment—very broadly defined—of their employees by other employees. Since the Equality Act was passed in 2010, this has led to an exponential growth in the diversity training sector. Employers try to limit their liability by making employees undergo anti-racism, anti-oppression, trans-inclusion training. Then they can point to that in court if one employee sues over being harassed by another.

What Clause 20 will do is extend that liability to harassment by third parties—i.e. members of the public, customers. If someone delivering food to a home overhears a conversation or joke they find offensive, they could sue their employer for not taking “all reasonable steps” to protect them.

There’s also something else. Under the Public Order Act, in England and Wales, you can’t be prosecuted for stirring up hatred in your own home. That’s called the “dwelling defence”—a common law defence going back centuries.

But one of the innovations of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act was to scrap that defence. So now, in Scotland, you could be prosecuted for stirring up hatred—even in your own home.

A parent could be dobbed in by their child for saying “trans women aren’t women” at the kitchen table. Or a child could threaten to do so unless they’re allowed to stay out all night or get more pocket money.

It raises the spectre of children being called as prosecution witnesses against their parents. It conjures up Maoist China or Stalin’s Russia.

PP: You’ve ended up really—I hate to use a war metaphor—but on the front lines of this. And you’re now in the House of Lords. What does that mean? Is it helpful? Does it give the Free Speech Union more teeth?

TY: I was made a Lord by Kemi Badenoch, the current leader of the Conservative Party. Keir Starmer wants to create a Labour majority in the House of Lords. The Labour Party doesn’t currently have a majority—no party does. And that means the House of Lords can delay legislation, not indefinitely, but for a while. That really frustrates governments, especially ones in a hurry like the present Labour government. If they’re a one-term government, they want a packed legislative programme, so they don’t want any delays.

Keir Starmer was determined to flood the Lords with Labour peers, but constitutionally he couldn’t do that without also giving Kemi the chance to nominate a few peers of her own—though not nearly as many. So he created thirty new Labour peers in January this year, and in return Kemi was allowed to nominate seven. I was one of the seven.

What does it mean? It means I can table amendments to legislation going through the Lords after it’s passed through the Commons. There’s a chance I can get enough cross-party support to have those amendments passed. When the bill goes back to the Commons, it goes with the amendment attached. The Commons can take the amendment off and send the bill back without it, but then we can reattach the amendment and send it back again—a process called “ping-pong.” It definitely delays legislation and can frustrate the government, so sometimes they make concessions.

One of the things that’s been occupying me recently is the Employment Rights Bill, which the government is trying to railroad through Parliament. It includes Clause 20, which the Free Speech Union calls the “banter ban.” It extends employers’ liability for the harassment of their employees to harassment by third parties—not just sexual harassment, which they’re already liable for, but non-sexual third-party harassment.

And harassment has already been defined very broadly by the Employment Tribunal. It includes overheard conversations. So publicans, for instance, will have to make sure their staff don’t overhear conversations or jokes or remarks that might be offensive to someone with protected characteristics.

I’ve tabled various amendments to Clause 20 to either scrap it altogether or lessen its impact, and I’ve tried to drum up support. It’s a long process—it’s not over yet. But having the opportunity to do that, even if you don’t ultimately succeed, helps to boost a campaign, raise the salience of an issue, and set the agenda for the next election. From that point of view, I’ve been thinking there must be a way of synthesising a media campaign with lawfare and parliamentary activity—creating a kind of laser beam of attack against something the government’s doing that seriously erodes free speech, like the “banter ban.”

I haven’t quite figured out the magic formula yet, but I’m hoping I will before long.

You can also ask the government questions. Before each day’s activity, there’s about forty minutes in which a government minister has to answer oral questions. Once they’ve answered, you can then “bob up”—there’s no one deciding who gets to speak. You literally leap to your feet and shout “My Lords,” along with everyone else doing the same. There’s this sort of osmosis by which someone gets picked. There are vague rules that are followed. I’m learning the ropes.

It’s a tremendous opportunity to hold ministers to account and make them explain themselves. Of course, they obfuscate and dodge questions, but still, the opportunity to put them on the spot is valuable.

You can also sit on various committees, make recommendations about legislation, publish reports on legislation as it goes through the Lords. So there are many opportunities—not just to change or kill off bad legislation, but to campaign, to signal campaigns you’re conducting elsewhere, all that sort of thing.

It’s given the Free Speech Union a real boost. It’s great to have that recognition. And at the same time that Kemi made me a Lord, she also made Nigel Biggar—a member of our board—the chairman of the Free Speech Union, a Lord too. So the FSU got two of the seven peerages she had to offer, which was fantastic. She’s a strong believer in free speech and an admirer of our work.

There are now Free Speech Unions in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. One has just opened in Switzerland. We’ve set up FSU International to help groups establish Free Speech Unions in other parts of the world. We’re in the process of agreeing a constitution.

If you’re in Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, and you’re concerned about free speech—about being investigated, about losing your job or your university place because you’ve challenged orthodoxy, whether left-wing or right-wing—then get involved in these Free Speech Unions. They’ve already won important victories in all those countries.

The Free Speech Union is a membership organisation. It works a bit like a union. It’s not technically a trade union, though the Free Speech Union in New Zealand is. That means people join. The membership dues aren’t high—£30 for a concession membership, £60 for full membership. And if you get into trouble, we’ll have your back.

It’s a good model—part insurance company, part lobby group. We get involved in legislative affairs, organise events, send out newsletters. It’s like the “friendly societies” of the nineteenth century, which provided people with some protection, pooled resources, and offered a sense of community and common purpose. That model seems to work, and I think it’s one of the reasons we’ve succeeded in replicating it internationally.

PP: Toby, thank you so much.