GB News host Martin Daubney shut down a Labour Minister after she described Nigel Farage’s free speech address as “unpatriotic.” During the debate, MP Catherine Atkinson accused Farage of “actively seeking potential significant damage to our economy”. It comes after Farage compared Labour’s Britain to North Korea in how it handles free speech. He argued: “At what point did we become North Korea? This is a genuinely worrying, concerning and shocking situation.” Responding to him, Atkinson responded: “How is that patriotic? He is actively seeking potential significant damage to our economy?”
She added: “Our country is one where we value free speech. It was the last Labour Government that enshrined free speech in the Human Rights Act.
“But I think that for a lot of people, there’ll be more focused on neighbourhood policing and the fact that we’ve got an extra 3,000 neighbourhood police on our streets.”
However, Martin shot back during the exchange: “The trouble with that is they seem to be deployed to be policing people’s tweets and not policing the streets.
“Keir Starmer has chastised Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner, saying ‘Get on with your job,’ but the problem is there’s this confusion everywhere. Nobody knows what the law is.
“Nobody knows what the priority of the law is. We can see people going to jail for Facebook posts like Lucy Connolly, Graham Linehan being arrested for tweets not even made in this country, he’s not even a British citizen, and yet people are being sent to jail for these things.”
Then Atkinson replied: “I think that when it comes to the operational independence of the police, it’s right that they are operationally independent, and they’re the ones who are going to decide who is arrested.
“And I think people’s hearts will go out to the circumstances of Lucy Connolly in losing a child and the impact that had on her, but she pleaded guilty, and that’s entirely different than situations where people are found not guilty by a jury of their peers.”
Martin shot back: “People are losing faith in law and order, and they’re losing faith in the Labour Party’s application of law and order when they’re seeing things like Graham Linehan being arrested. It makes an absolute mockery of free speech in this nation.”