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The British economy continues to struggle under PM Keir Starmer, the military is depleted and a pension crisis is on the horizon, but there is one area where the UK is exceeding expectations.

Starmer’s UK has achieved levels of political prisoners not only resembling but occasionally even outdoing those of Communist dictatorships like Cuba, Venezuela and even China.

Freedom House estimated that Cuba has 2,768 political prisoners, Venezuela has 1,953 political prisoners, and thousands more in China. Starmer’s regime and an enthusiastic police force have easily outdone these backward Communist regimes by arresting over 1,000 people a month for social media posts. The full number of political prisoners in the UK remains unknown, but the high number of arrests suggests that Britain may be able to compete with Cuba.

The 12,000 arrests by 37 forces a year are a record high. Speech arrests more than doubled from 5,502 in 2017 to over 12,000 since 2022. increasing by 1,000 or more every year. The internet did not fundamentally change since 2017. The UK authorities however have.

The London Times recently reported that “British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts”. London’s Met Police, who have been at the center of some of the worst speech abuses, maintain a secretive operation monitoring social media leading to almost immediate arrests.  The Met Police arrested a staggering 5,332 people in 9 years for speech and 1,700 speech arrests in 2023 alone making London into its own speech gulag.

Other forces have tried to duplicate it with their own social media monitoring teams.

After a Muslim terrorist murdered 3 British girls, a 55-year-old woman was dragged out of her home, arrested and held for 36 hours for “posting inaccurate information” that he was Muslim.

Allison Pearson, a journalist, had the police show up at her door after she tweeted a criticism of  them for posing with members of an Islamist  movement. Such incidents have become routine.

And some have led the victims of Starmer’s speech police becoming political prisoners.

One of the most infamous cases is Lucy Connolly, the mother of two children, who had lost her little boy after his hospitalization, and expressed her anger after the brutal Muslim terrorist murders of three little girls at a dance studio. Lucy was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison even while Islamists have been allowed to spout their support for terrorism and genocide.

While organizations like Freedom House and Amnesty International assemble lists of political prisoners in dictatorships, no such lists are being compiled for the UK since it’s ‘free’ (and since the British government has been one of the largest funders of Amnesty) however there were 7,734 ‘detentions’ in 2019 suggesting the possibility of a higher number of political prisoners in the UK than in many dictatorships.

Political prisoners in the UK are not limited to those arrested for online social media posts.

Recently a man who burned a Koran outside the Turkish consulate to protest the Islamist dictatorship was locked up, not in Istanbul but in London, for “harassment” against “the religious institution of Islam”. To add insult to injury, the Islamist who stabbed him was let out on bail while he was kept in prison. In the UK, speech is a major crime, stabbing the speaker is a minor one.

At political rallies, a Jewish protester who waved a sign mocking Hezbollah’s leader had his home raided by two police vans looking for “offensive materials” and was accused of stirring up “racial hatred” by offending “pro-Hezbollah” terrorist supporters. He was charged with “racially or religiously aggravated harassment” and put through an eight month court case before the case was finally dropped. Even an anti-Israel activist was arrested for carrying a sign reading “Stop Israel genocide! Stop Hamas executions!”. He wasn’t charged for the anti-Israel slogan, but for the anti-Hamas one, on the grounds that criticising Hamas was engaging in a “racially and religiously aggravated breach of the peace under the Public Order Act.”

Offending Hamas or Hezbollah is a crime in the UK, supporting terrorists however isn’t.

Such arrests make it even more difficult to begin assembling a full list of political prisoners, but the expansiveness of speech suppression operations in the UK is on par with dictatorships.

While it’s easy to blame the Starmer regime for the transformation of the United Kingdom into a speech gulag, much as in East Germany, where much of the public was revealed to have been informing on each other, the increase in speech investigations and arrests has been driven in part by a growing population of enthusiastic political informants. Cancel culture in America can get people fired or shunned, but in the United Kingdom it can actually send them to prison.

Over 14,000 “non-crime hate incidents” were reported to UK police forces including someone offended by a classic children’s illustration considered racially insensitive today and a family member “reported for being transphobic after saying that the ‘victim’ was “living out a sexual fantasy”. In a recent case a portrait of Enoch Powell, a British politician who warned about the dangers of unrestricted mass migration, in a store window was reported as a hate incident.

British leftists used to moan about Thatcher and warn of a tyranny that would take away free speech, but it’s their regime of radicalization and Islamization that is killing free speech. Englishmen had more free speech under even the most tyrannical kings, where men could at least whisper criticisms to each other in the corner of a pub, than they do under PM Starmer.

Crime rose 10% in 2024 and robberies rose 64% in a decade, but the only crime that the Starmer regime and police will prosecute is the crime of speech. The UK is falling behind in everything, but when it comes to political prisoners, it’s catching up to Communist tyrannies.