I see with extreme displeasure that the foul UKgov has finally managed to suffocate the brilliant Kathy Gyngell and her wonderful newspaper, The Conservative Woman.
Did they do it by an outright ban? Noooo that would have been the manly thing to do, and would have caused a massive backlash — and rightly so.
Instead, they did it by stealth:
TCW is closing as a daily site because the British state and its allies have made honest dissent increasingly impossible to sustain. The cowardice began under a Conservative government. During covid, lawful doubt was treated as a public danger. Citizens who questioned lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, school closures and the destruction of livelihoods were smeared as cranks or extremists. Platforms were encouraged to police opinion. The MSM supinely obeyed. The BBC was, as usual, complicit. Conservative ministers talked about liberty while presiding over one of the greatest assaults on free speech in modern British history.
Then the Tories put the machinery on the statute book.
The Online Safety Act was driven through under a Conservative government and received Royal Assent in October 2023. The Act passed into law on October 26, 2023, and made Ofcom responsible for implementing the new online safety regime. It was sold as ‘protection for children’. In reality, it created a vast regulatory structure for online speech and made Ofcom the policeman of the internet. Platforms were pushed into permanent risk-avoidance. Lawful speech became a compliance problem. ‘Safety’ became the master word. Once that word rules, freedom withers. Free speech has never been ‘safe’.
This was one of the great betrayals of modern Conservatism. The party that should have defended liberty built the legal runway for censorship. It handed power to Ofcom, trained platforms to fear liability, and wrapped the whole operation in the language of harm prevention. The result was predictable. Companies do not defend free speech when regulators are watching. They protect themselves. They over-remove, over-block, over-filter and over-comply.
That is how dissent gets buried.
The same Act reinforced Ofcom’s media literacy role. That matters. Media literacy sounds harmless. It is not harmless when the regulator, the Government, public broadcasters and tech platforms are all marching in the same direction. It becomes the polite name for teaching the public which sources to trust and which to distrust.
This is the bridge to the next phase. First the state regulates platforms in the name of safety. Then it works with broadcasters, tech companies, charities and public bodies to shape what citizens are taught to regard as reliable. Then it proposes to promote ‘trusted news’ above rival voices.
That is the censorship escalator. Labour is now riding it with enthusiasm.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s 2026-2029 Media Literacy Action Plan, A Safe, Informed Digital Nation, dresses control in the language of confidence, safety, critical thinking and resilience. Published on March 16, 2026, it sets out the steps departments across government are taking to strengthen media literacy over the next three years, including helping people ‘think critically about online content’ and ‘find trustworthy information’. The state wants to shape how citizens consume information online. It says it wants people to find trustworthy information. That sounds innocent until you ask the only question that matters: trustworthy according to whom?
Well, there you have it. If the above doesn’t make your blood boil, we can’t be friends.
And this, children, is why we have a First Amendment Over ere, despite the many efforts by Gummint, the Left and their lickspittle allies to undermine or bypass it.
Am I angry about this? You bet your ass I am. It’s bullshit like this which moves people from:
…to:
And note that had I published this post in the UK, I would have been shut down and/or arrested for “inciting violence” or some such twaddle.
It’s also another reason why I have eschewed any form of advertising on this particular website: I’m not going to hand the cocksuckers a means to shut me up.
Range time? What do you think? I had planned on doing some .22 plinking anyway, but now I think I may have to expend something of a somewhat larger caliber.
