Lisa Nandy announced last week that she is leaving X. That’s right, the UK culture secretary is leaving one of the biggest communications spaces there is – one that directly and indirectly shapes the culture she is meant to be engaged with.

She has justified her departure – and that of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), too – on the grounds that the platform is now rife with ‘misinformation’, and that it ‘isn’t healthy for our democracy’.

Nandy’s gripes against X are hardly unusual among our political and media class. Other senior Labour figures have also launched broadsides against X recently. London mayor Sadiq Khan has repeatedly attacked X for spreading ‘misinformation’ about the state of London, welcomed an Ofcom investigation into sexualised images on the platform and accused X owner Elon Musk of misunderstanding free speech. And just this weekend, Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell described X as ‘toxic’ and called for the introduction of so-called purdah rules on the platform during elections.

Indeed, there may come a day when the government moves to ban X outright. I don’t mean more regulation, or another Ofcom code of practice. I mean a straight-up ban. Should that happen, it would put Britain in the same category of state censorship as North Korea, China, Russia, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Venezuela and Iran.

NGOs have backed Labour in its anti-X crusade. Amnesty International has claimed that if Nandy genuinely believes X is unhealthy for our democracy, she ‘should take more decisive action – not just leave the platform’. It is effectively calling for new legislation to force X into line. Funny, that, coming from a charity whose entire purpose is supposedly to defend people’s freedoms – including freedom of speech.

Keir Starmer’s government even suggested earlier this year that it would not rule out ending its use of X if the platform did not act on concerns about its AI chatbot generating non-consensual sexualised images of users. This was a genuine issue, and one the platform did act swiftly on, but it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the UK government has it in for X – that, as Musk once put it, it wants ‘any excuse for censorship’.

Why does the political establishment hate X so much? The simple answer is because it is much freer than its rivals. It allows people to express dissenting or heterodox views in a way that other platforms don’t. There is no filter.

Pre-Musk X, then known as Twitter, was much more restrictive. Certain views, even news stories, were suppressed if they didn’t accord with the dominant consensus. Some users were kicked off the platform, or ‘shadow banned’, for their opinions on everything from gender identity to the origins of Covid.

But back then, nobody in government called the suppression of alternative views ‘unhealthy’ for our democracy. None of those currently attacking X accused Twitter, despite its censorial behaviour, of failing to foster meaningful debate. That all tells us something – namely, that the current attacks on X are not really about misinformation or democracy. They are fuelled, rather, by the Labour government’s loss of control over the debate. In short, Labour feels as if it is losing its grip on the public conversation, and X is where that grip has slipped furthest.

There is another reason for Labour’s hatred in particular. X is the platform that brought the grooming-gangs scandal back into the open in early 2025, doing great damage to Keir Starmer’s government. Musk effectively forced the political and media establishment to finally reckon with the horrors visited on thousands of young, vulnerable girls over the course of decades – while the social workers, the police and others looked away. He dragged a scandal back into the spotlight that many would have preferred to stay hidden.

Labour and the political class are not just at war with Elon Musk and X. They are also effectively waging a war on free speech. Days after her announcement, Lisa Nandy’s DCMS published a green paper proposing a ‘prominence regime’. This will legally require platforms like X to push content from ‘trusted sources’, like the BBC and other legacy media outlets, at the expense of other journalistic sources and independent media.

This is bigger than Elon, or Nandy’s huffy exit from X. We have a Labour government stating plainly that it intends to intervene directly in the content people consume. Its war on X heralds an assault on people’s freedom of speech and of thought.

Ada Akpala is a spiked intern.

Andy Burnham has promised that ‘the north’ will be his lodestar when he takes the reins of power. Yet it seems the incoming regime could be drawing inspiration not from the north of England, but from North Korea. A raft of new measures clamping down on our online activity, proposed by the outgoing Starmer administration – from restrictions on VPNs (virtual-private networks) to enforcing so-called purdah rules during elections – have reportedly gained Burnham’s backing, bringing Britain’s approach to the internet in line with some of the least liberal and democratic countries on the planet.

Team Burnham confirmed earlier this week that Keir Starmer’s proposed ban on under-16s using social media will go ahead. And crucially, to enforce these age restrictions, the use of VPNs is likely to be heavily curtailed if not banned outright – for children and adults alike.

Essentially, VPNs allow users to disguise their location and their device’s IP address, making it possible to circumvent national restrictions. Their use has surged since July 2025, when the Online Safety Act began blocking age-inappropriate social-media content – and they have been in the Labour government’s sights ever since. Tech secretary Liz Kendall has promised an announcement on VPNs will come this month. A ban would bring Burnham’s Britain in line with totalitarian states like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Belarus.

And the crackdown won’t end there. Shortly after flouncing off X, culture secretary Lisa Nandy unveiled a green paper with plans to compel social-media channels and video-sharing platforms to prioritise what it calls ‘trusted’ content creators. In the name of tackling so-called mis- or disinformation, videos from the BBC and other public-service broadcasters will be given additional prominence on our news feeds, while content from independent creators will be artificially suppressed.

It’s not hard to guess what the government is up to here. After all, the BBC and mainstream media have broadcast their own fair share of actual misinformation – pushing elite orthodoxy on everything from trans to Palestine, even when it conflicts with the truth. Still, in Labour’s eyes at least, the Beeb can at least be trusted not to ask too many difficult questions about the issues that most animate the public – from rape gangs to small boats. Labour wants to replace the rough-and-tumble of the free internet – with its range of noisy, rabble-rousing dissenting voices – with a safe space where only state-approved opinions can dominate the discourse. And as if that were not Orwellian enough, Labour’s consultation on the ‘prominence’ regime does not allow respondents to say they are opposed to the state dictating what appears on our social feeds.

Perhaps the maddest proposal yet has come from Labour’s Lucy Powell, a Burnham ally who is expected to be promoted to deputy PM. Powell has suggested amending the Representation of the People Bill that’s currently working its way through the Commons to force social-media firms to follow similar rules to broadcasters during election periods. In other words, they should seek to enforce ‘impartiality and balance’ on their news feeds, even giving due weight to political parties based on their past electoral support. This would entail nothing less than the end of social media as a space for the free expression of public opinion – and during election time, no less. It would require a staggering amount of censorship and state oversight over what we post online and what posts we’re allowed to read, just as we’re making up our minds about who governs us.

As alarming and authoritarian as these proposals may be, none of them should surprise us. The Labour government’s all-out assault on free speech has turned the UK into an international embarrassment. Thirty people are arrested every day in England and Wales for posts on social media deemed ‘grossly offensive’ by police – that’s 12,000 arrests per year, more than America was arresting at the height of the first Red Scare. The Online Safety Act – passed under the Tories, but implemented and beefed up by Labour – means that vast swathes of the internet are now blocked to Britons who haven’t verified their age. This includes social-media posts about gender ideology and asylum hotels, a speech in parliament about the rape gangs, and a piss-takey article about the plummeting popularity of the Christian name ‘Keir’. Our right to blaspheme against Islam – or even criticise the most extreme manifestations of Islamist ideology – has also been constrained by Labour’s new Islamophobia rules. Not since the Crown licensing of the press was abolished in 1695 have we had a government so determined to keep a lid on dissent.

Burnham has now all but confirmed that a change of Labour leader will not mean a change of direction when it comes to our right to speak freely. We will continue careening down the slippery slope towards ever more insidious forms of authoritarianism. In the name of child protection and fighting misinformation, we could soon be living under speech restrictions that would make a tinpot dictator blush.

Be in no doubt, Big Burnham will be watching you.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.

Prince Harry is having a bad week, and it is impossible not to be delighted. First, he learnt that taxpayers would not be footing the security bill for his family’s trip to the UK. Then he was refused a last-minute request for a room at Buckingham Palace. And now, best of all, in a rare victory for press freedom, the Duke of Sussex has lost his long-running legal case against the Daily Mail. I make that 3-0 to us commoners.

The High Court’s dismissal of all the claims that Harry and his posh pals brought against Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, is worth celebrating. The judge in the case ruled that neither the prince nor Elton John, Liz Hurley, nor any of the other censorious celebs who accused journalists of phone hacking and blagging private medical records, could prove their claims. In fact, Mr Justice Nicklin told the claimants, just because information published about them was private did not mean that it ‘must have been unlawfully sourced’. Harry’s loss is a win for the journalists who were dragged into court and had their lives turned upside down by false allegations. And it is a victory for everyone who wants a free press rather than a media devoted to sycophantic propaganda.

In truth, the outcome of this case should never have been in doubt. The ginger whinger’s evidence never stood up to scrutiny. Sadie Frost may have given the performance of her life, summoning up tears in the witness box, but it turns out that legal cases are still won on the basis of facts rather than emotions. Yet time and again, Harry showed he’s not capable of recognising ‘the truth’ when it smacks him in the face.

Those he was close to would never leak stories about him, the prince told the court, even though he had previously accused friends of doing exactly that – and text messages showed he knew that this was happening. Harry also claimed he had cut off all contact with a woman when he found out she was a journalist, despite Facebook messages revealing this was absolutely not the case. He would not share information about his love life with strangers, he insisted, only for this to be disproved by his own tell-all, 400-page autobiography.

A sympathetic explanation might be that, despite receiving the best education money can buy, Harry is simply not that bright. But there’s more to these ‘untruths’ and contradictions than mere lapses of memory. Harry’s courtroom testimony, and the fact that the legal case burnt through an estimated £50million on lawyers’ fees, suggest the Duke of Montecito is not merely dumb but has an overinflated sense of his own importance. It’s not that Harry doesn’t know what’s true and what’s not – it is just the truth is far less important than getting his own way. He is self-entitled enough to expect journalists and judges, the legal system and the press to bend to his will.

He may be a spoilt brat, but let’s not forget that Harry was encouraged to engage in this expensive, time-wasting litigation by a coterie of lawyers, luvvies and a former Lib Dem MP associated with Hacked Off, a campaign group founded by Hugh Grant, to curtail press freedom. In delivering today’s ruling, the judge went so far as to brand Hacked Off adviser Dr Evan Harris as ‘dishonest’ for a plan he cooked up to hide the fact that one of the cases put before the court was beyond the statute of limitations. ‘At root, that proposal involved a deception’, the judge declared. Damning indeed.

If things had gone Harry’s way, he would now be celebrating a victory for money, influence and titles. What’s more, he hoped to be doing this from within Buckingham Palace.

Thankfully, his father had already kiboshed that part of the plan. The king, or at the very least a senior royal adviser, seems to have grown sick and tired of Harry’s constant to-ing and fro-ing over which members of his family will be coming to the UK and where they will stay. For the best part of a fortnight, we’ve been treated to a minute-by-minute account of Harry and Meghan’s ever-changing travel plans, revealed – without any hint of irony – by the privacy-loving couple themselves.

The duke and duchess originally proffered a meet-up with Archie and Lilibet, the king’s grandchildren, only to withdraw the offer when it became clear they were not going to get the bells-and-whistles security detail they wanted. Having first accepted, then rejected the offer of rooms at Buckingham Palace, Harry again changed his mind when it dawned on him that the royal surroundings would make a suitable backdrop for what he assumed would be a victory speech. Good on Charles for acting like any sensible parent and turning down the last-minute request and putting a stop to the whole circus.

As Harry heads off to Birmingham for the Invictus Games and in search of the one remaining reporter prepared to offer a positive spin on his endeavours, the rest of us should raise a glass to press freedom and demand the right to read what politicians, royals and celebrities would rather we did not know.