The Starmer government has used fear to shut down public discussion and Parliamentary rules to silence lawmakers, Brexit leader Nigel Farage warned.
British Member of Parliament Nigel Farage said his written questions to the government to get facts about the Southport attack have gone unanswered, and attempts to ask spoken questions in the chamber have been shut down, amounting to what he calls “a near-blanket ban on discussing the case”.
The Southport attack earlier this year saw young children killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party and was followed by days of protests and riots. Suspect Axel Rudakubana is facing trial for charges of murder, attempted murder, a terrorism offence for possession of an Al-Qaeda publication, and a bio-weapons offence, but little has been revealed about the man or his motives, and this has led to accusations of a government-engineered “information vacuum”.
The situation, as laid out by Mr Farage, is particularly concerning. In normal times, Parliamentarians actually have more freedom-of-speech rights than ordinary Britons, given they have the privilege to speak inside the chamber without fear of prosecution. While Parliament traditionally self-regulates to not endanger live cases by prejudicing court proceedings, the Brexit leader alleges present changes go far beyond what has been considered proper in the past.
As expressed, what now counts as contempt of court is much lower than in the past, Farage said, claiming: “The Contempt of Court Act appears to have been deployed as a tool of suppression”.
Launching a major attack on the present climate of “fear” surrounding even discussing the Southport attack, what it means, and what the government knew and when engendered by the crackdown on the use of social media through custodial sentences for incautious members of the public, Mr Farage wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Friday that: “I understand the importance of not prejudicing a future trial, but in the current climate, there appears to be no room to separate the ongoing legal process from the questions I posed over the summer. This is deeply troubling.”
The situation now fundamentally challenges Farage’s duty as an elected Parliamentarian representing the interests of his constituents, which he said includes “asking difficult questions in order to get to the truth about national issues”.
Describing the events of the past week, when news broke of the Southport attack suspect being charged under biological weapon and terror charges while the attack itself was not said to be thought of by officials as terrorism itself, Mr Farage wrote:
This week, I asked the Home Secretary two written questions on this subject. The first asked if the suspect had ever been referred to the anti-terrorist Prevent programme; the second asked when she became aware of the discovery of ricin in the accused’s home. The questions will not be answered.”
… [of Wednesday this week when his party college Richard Tice was granted a spoken question to the Prime Minister in Parliament] That morning, he received three panicked emails from the Commons authorities asking what the content of his question might be.
Then, an hour before PMQs began, he received a telephone call in which he was told not to ask anything about the man accused of the Southport attacks. This point was reinforced strenuously by the Speaker in the Commons just before PMQs began. Parliamentary Privilege was effectively withdrawn.
Mr Tice did get a question in, but evidently worded it carefully to elicit some response without breaking the orders handed down by the office of the Speaker, and open himself up to administrative action by Parliamentary authorities. The Prime Minister declined to respond meaningfully, instead issuing a veiled warning to those who he said “undermined” the police by speaking out.
Farage and Tice have cited the words of Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s own independent reviewer of terrorism laws, who has spoken critically of the creation of an information vacuum post-Southport attack. The top lawyer had previously said that there was a “huge, huge interest” in the suspect’s identity after the attack and that the public “quite reasonably wanted to know as much as possible about a massacre of children”.
“The brutal reality is that at some stage in the future, there will be an attack by someone who is an asylum seeker or who came on a small boat,” he said in September. “It is better to be as level and as straight as you can be because terrorism is about attacking institutions, and if institutions do not appear to be transparent, then they suffer.”
Suggesting Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer stands to face much bigger problems by “kicking the can down the road”. Mr Farage ruminated on Friday, “Do we really want to live in a society where such crucial information is kept from the public? Who decided these details should remain secret?”