Unelected bureaucrat Lord Lebedev claimed that Britain’s enemies are ‘laughing at us’ during a rare appearance in the House of Lords.
The Russian media mogul, who owns the London Evening Standard and is a shareholder in The Independent, warned against the “erosion of free speech” in the UK in his second-ever contribution to the upper chamber.
He went on to claim that he has seen “industrial quantities of falsehoods” about himself in the press without pointing to any specifics in a somewhat contradiction to the essence of his speech.
“When you muzzle people, cancel them, sack them, merely because they champion their honestly held opinions, then you are playing with fire”, Lord Lebedev said.
“By allowing people to be censored right, left and centre, we are making a huge mistake.
“By suppressing free speech, we are not contradicting the nutters and conspiracists, we are giving credence and foundation to their otherwise bonkers assertions.
“Worst of all, we are allowing the most deadly enemies of freedom to claim an equivalence between cancel culture in Britain and the suppression of free speech around the world…
“We are giving our enemies precisely the stick they need to beat us with. They’re not laughing with us anymore, they are laughing at us.”
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