26 September 2025

Kneecap have overcome the new British authoritarianism

The case against the band was thrown out today. But why was Mo Chara ever charged?

Kneecap – an Irish-language hip hop act with a side hustle in Palestine activism – owes a lot to the British state. Before this summer they enjoyed the plentiful, but ultimately limited, success available to bands that so openly invoke IRA aesthetics. But when one member, Mo Chara (“my friend”), was arrested under terror charges this summer the group transcended their status as mere bourgeois-agitators, and became another shorthand for the United Kingdom’s increasingly tortured relationship with speech. Kneecap’s star only rose because of it: everyone loves a martyr.

Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Mo Chara’s government name, was charged in June for displaying a Hezbollah flag (a proscribed organisation) at a gig in Kentish Town last November. Today, the case was thrown out in Woolwich magistrates’ court, as chief magistrate Paul Goldspring said the proceedings against the defendant were “instituted unlawfully and are null”.

Good. But this theatrical, and frankly risible, attempt at law and order from the state should trouble us all: it is part of a broader ecosystem fostered by the UK’s creeping and inchoate authoritarianism, where speech is in particular jeopardy. Take the Allen couple who were arrested in January for WhatsApp messages about their daughter’s primary school; the optics of Met Police hauling pensioners off the street for protesting the proscription of Palestine Action; the arrest and imprisonment of Lucy Connolly for inflammatory anti-migrant posts on X; or the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan earlier this month for his online TERF-y activism. This list could sustain several more pages: police spend thousands of hours trawling through social media every week, and arrest 30 people a day on similar pretences.

JD Vance and Elon Musk might be diplomatically ungracious but they are not wrong about everything. In particular, both are right about Britain’s dark trajectory on civil liberties (no matter that they are burdened by their own hypocrisies as the United States deports dissenting students and punishes critics of recently assassinated conservative activist, Charlie Kirk). Speech used to rank among the sprawling and unexamined freedoms in British society. The spate of arrests and the spectre of especially zealous officers has made it rather clear that we were sleepily taking all of this for granted.

The millennial left and Gen-Z online right are not united by much, but in this they may find a cohering vision. Mo Chara will offend the sensibilities of the latter (“’Nois, cúpla ceist [now, a few questions], do ya want it in your chest?/Or your knees? Or your head?” he raps) while Lucy Connolly’s calls for mass deportation is abhorred by the former. Neither is particularly willing to defend the clause in the 2003 Communications Act that has made it a crime to be “grossly offensive” online, not least when it leads to such primitive attempts to police the public realm.

“You can’t say anything these days” used to be the instinct of the shock-jock comedian, prematurely predicting their cancellation. Well, maybe Ricky Gervais was somewhat prophetic, as strong-armed police tactics are used to suppress conversation and artistic statements across all societal strata. Upholding the sanctity of free speech – of free speech as an axiomatic value – is the only correct response to these bullying tactics. The past decade saw left liberals abandoning this principle in the name of political correctness. In America, now the so-called libertarian right is backsliding on what was once a capstone in its entire political universe in the name of public orderliness. The result? Charging rappers with terrorism offences, locking up people for tweets, and fostering a system that has forgotten the most basic organising principle of society: it’s almost always fine for people to say things.

[Further reading: Why Starmer wants digital ID cards now]