I think that we live in strange times and that, from a certain perspective, one of the problems we suffer from is not a gradual erosion of free speech but arguably a surfeit of it.
For example, Viz Comic cartoonist Davey Jones had the character 'Inspector Paul Dacre' declare this in the last panel of one of his recent cartoons:
'I spotted that my newspaper has a circulation of over one and a half million, which reminded me that I am fabulously rich and can therefore accuse any f****r of doing absolutely any old b****cks that I choose to make up.
I can afford the top lawyers, and anyway if someone successfully sues me, I can just pay the damages out of my petty cash. So who gives a f*****g s**t?'
Given that Dacre was renowned for deploying the 'C' word in his interactions with all and sundry when he edited the rag, it's not difficult to imagine him actually saying something like that.
So we still have the perennial problem of a predominantly right-wing media passing off any old bollocks as the truth.
But in addition, we now also have populist politicians who make a big show of rejecting facts, who actively embrace the pleasures of spouting nonsense in order to make glum reality seem more attractive. One of the ways they do that - in addition to making hyperbolic claims about their own achievements- is by substituting nostalgia for utopia.
So Putin's troll farms attempt to sell dreams of a renewed Russian Empire, Trump vows to Make America Great Again, and Turkish and Hungarian media dream of resurrecting their own phantoms of greatness.
In other words, the powerful seem to be using information (or disinformation) abundance rather than scarcity to find new ways of maintaining the status quo and excessive economic inequality, and to take people's minds off things like climate change and economic stagnation.
So Instead of an alleged lack of free speech, from a certain point of view it could be argued that we might have too much of it.
In this kind of situation, one in which nobody can be certain of anything, the politics of populism then becomes one of the nearest branches that seems to offer a false sense of security, when instead it is a cure that is worse than the disease.
Don’t get me wrong. I also share the concerns that others have expressed about things like ‘cancel culture’.
But I do wonder whether the issues I have attempted to draw attention to above, ones that are emphasised in the recent publications of the Yale historian Tim Snyder and those of Peter Pomerantsev, are also worth reflecting on.
