00:00Thank you, Chairman Jordan, for inviting me here today.
00:03And it turns out, with news in the last 48 hours, to have been really rather timely.
00:08I'm delighted to reacquaint with the charming Mr Raskin.
00:14That was a delightful testimony you gave me earlier on with your speech.
00:19But hey, that's fine. You can say what you like. I don't care.
00:22Because that's what free speech is.
00:24And in a sense, this has all been going wrong now for a couple of decades.
00:27We've kind of forgotten the Voltairian principles that we'll fight and defend to the death your right to say something that we fundamentally disagree with.
00:37That is the absolute foundation, if you think about it, of free speech, of democracy, of living in freedom.
00:43It's kind of why we fought two world wars at massive, massive cost, to defend that very principle for ourselves and for many, many others around the country.
00:52And I first became worried about all this with cancel culture.
00:56You know, the idea that we can't have this speaker go to a university because some people might be offended by what he or she have to say.
01:05It is important to note that there is not a parent in the United Kingdom, and I would guess it's the same for America, too, that is not concerned about content their children, as minors, can find on the Internet.
01:22Not a single parent that is not concerned about this.
01:25But at the moment, we're not finding the right solutions.
01:28I do myself begin to think that hardware might be one of the solutions, that laptops, that headsets could be programmed so that many, many apps and many, many services simply aren't available from these devices.
01:45But what we've done is to go down the legislative route, and it's extraordinary that, you know, I come from a land of Magna Carta, or I come from a land that gave us the mother of parliaments.
01:56And it doesn't give me any great joy to be sitting in America and describing the really awful authoritarian situation that we have now sunk into.
02:07J.D. Vance did us all a service at the Munich Security Conference back in February this year.
02:13He really got this debate up and running, and it's a vital one.
02:17We've run on since then.
02:19The Online Safety Act was put in place by the last Conservative government.
02:23I don't doubt for a minute their good intentions, but sometimes the road to hell is paved with those good intentions.
02:30And we are now where we are.
02:32We have a couple of very famous cases.
02:34We, of course, have Lucy Connolly, who put out an intemperate tweet after the savage murder of those three beautiful young girls, she herself, a mother who had lost a child.
02:45It was intemperate.
02:46It was wrong.
02:47But she removed it three and a half hours later, sentenced to 31 months in prison.
02:53She's now out, having served 40 percent of the time.
02:57I wanted to bring her with me today as living proof of what can go wrong.
03:02Sadly, the restrictions that have been put on her banned her from making the trip, which is a very, very great shame.
03:09And we, of course, have the extraordinary events that we understood yesterday of Graham Lyon, the comedy writer, comedic writer.
03:18And he put out some tweets months ago when he was in Arizona.
03:25And months later, he arrives at Heathrow Airport to be met by five armed police.
03:31Armed police, not a big deal in the USA, a very big deal in the United Kingdom.
03:36Five of them.
03:36And he was arrested and taken away for questioning.
03:41He's not even a British citizen.
03:43He's an Irish citizen.
03:45This could happen to any American man or woman that goes to Heathrow that has said things online that the British government and British police don't like.
03:54It is a potentially big threat to tech bosses, to many, many others.
04:00This legislation we've got will damage trade between our countries, threaten free speech across the West because of the knock-on rollout effects of this legislation from us or from the European Union.
04:14So I've come today as well to be a klaxon to say to you, don't allow, piece by piece, this to happen here in America.
04:24And you would be doing us and yourselves and all freedom-loving people a favour if your politicians and your businesses said to the British government, you've simply got this wrong.
04:37At what point did we become North Korea?
04:40Well, I think the Irish comedy writer found that out two days ago at Heathrow Airport.
04:46This is a genuinely worrying, concerning and shocking situation.
04:51And I thank you for the opportunity to come here today.
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