'The UK is a police state and we may need the US to save us,' says Matthew Goodwin

Even Boris Johnson has warned that the UK is now fast becoming a police state. And today, I wanted to explain why I think this is no exaggeration.

There's no denying that Southport was a watershed moment in the history of our country. Not only did we see the likes of Lucy Connolly being handed prison sentences for things that they wrote on social media, in the privacy of their own home.

They were given prison sentences longer even than some members of the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, but we even saw The National newspaper columnist Allison Pearson being paid a visit by the police, and having a non-crime hate incident recorded against her.

Not to mention those two parents who were arrested by six police officers after complaining about their local school in a WhatsApp group. Indeed, this revelation has opened up an entire scandal.

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One analysis has shown that the 43 police forces in England and Wales have, between them, recorded more than 133,000 of these non-crime hate incidents since they were introduced in 2014.

Just a reminder those are things where, if you perceive somebody to be offensive, you can have one of these non-crime hate incidents recorded against them, despite not having to provide any evidence.

But the threat to free speech doesn't end with those Orwellian measures.

The Labour government, as I've warned before, is currently working on a crude and tight definition of Islamophobia that could also pose a serious threat to free speech.

Indeed, an earlier iteration of that definition specifically mentioned talking about the rape gangs as an example of Islamophobia.

Just to give you some kind of idea about how this Labour government feels about free speech, remember, one of the first things it did upon entering power was to try and stop the previous government's free speech law for our universities.

Now, the real question, of course, is in what kind of country does this make any sense at all? And what kind of country is a mother and wife like Lucy Connolly put in prison for nearly three years?

The answer is a country that has completely lost its way, that has forgotten that it is its foundations of free speech, free expression, and individual liberty.

At least, those are the things that I associate with these islands.

Now, there may come a point where we have to rely, even on America, to keep the pressure on.