Justin Trudeau’s arrogant, woke tyranny is a chilling vision of life under Starmer

According to one observer, Labour’s manifesto contains 27 references to new offices, regulators, quangos, councils and authorities. One of those includes the promise of “further measures to keep everyone safe online, particularly when using social media”. Which sounds wonderful. Who could be opposed to that?

The problem, of course, is what “safe” means. It is one of the immutable facts of repressive legislation that it is always claimed to be beneficial. And if you want to see what happens when a party as in thrall to progressive norms as Labour regulates online safety, look at Canada under Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

Sure enough, the Online Harms Bill, which was introduced in the Canadian parliament in February, has the stated aim of protecting children from online victimisation. In reality, however, it is a horrifyingly authoritarian bill which criminalises thoughts deemed to be hateful, and which serves as a warning as to what a similarly minded Labour government may decide to do.

Under the bill, any communication that is deemed “likely to foment detestation or vilification” on the basis of race, religion, gender or other protected categories is criminalised.

You hardly need me to point out what this will mean: campaign in opposition to trans ideology, for example, and you will almost certainly be considered to have committed a hate crime. Just last week Sir Keir Starmer described the arguments of gender critical feminists as “toxic”. Meanwhile the actor David Tennant said he wants to live in a world where Kemi Badenoch, the likely Conservative leadership contender, “doesn’t exist anymore” – because she stands up for women’s rights and dares not to subscribe to every demand of the trans lobby. If Labour follows its ideological soul mates in Canada and legislates against similar hate crimes, Mr Tennant may have his way, silencing such voices.

Canada’s Online Harms Bill also stipulates that any person who “promotes” genocide is “liable to imprisonment for life.” That’s me done for: my social media feed is full of people – including a number of lawyers – telling me that I am a genocide enabler because I support Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas, which is now (ludicrously but insistently) deemed by them as “genocide”.

The bill is also retrospective, so you can be punished for material written long before it becomes law. But here’s the real kicker: you don’t even have to have published any of these hateful views to be guilty. Thought crimes are culpable if a judge believes there are “reasonable grounds” for someone to “fear” that they might become a victim of a hate crime. The penalty can be house arrest, electronic tagging, a ban on internet access and a fine.

Canada’s Liberal government is a warning of where Labour’s worship of modern Left nostrums leads. Only recently, for example, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) voted to prioritise fighting “anti-Palestinian racism” – despite Canada currently experiencing some of the most vocal and violent anti-Semitic attacks, and Jewish pupils in Toronto reporting being beaten up and having Hitler salutes directed at them. But heh, the real issue is anti-Palestine racism – which hasn’t, of course, been defined. I give it a month before the first decision that someone calling themselves a Zionist is held to be an anti-Palestinian racist. And I give it six months before we see the same demand here, under Labour, for anti-Palestine racism to be prioritised.

Canada under Trudeau is a preview of where we could be heading. Whatever your views on assisted dying, for example, in Canada it has been taken to repellent extremes with disabled people being asked if they want to be euthanised. Sir Keir Starmer likes the image of a dessicated calculating machine, as Aneurin Bevan described Hugh Gaitskell. But as we saw when he said he would never pay for private healthcare for a relative who couldn’t be treated on the NHS, there is an ideological rod of steel running through him. The fear is where that may lead.