Online Communication Offence Arrests

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

I declare my interest as a freelance journalist and publisher and, therefore, as somebody who makes his living from freedom of speech. I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing today’s timely and important debate. As I find myself the last Back-Bencher on the speakers’ list, perhaps I might venture to sum up the situation.

Anybody listening to the debate in this Committee today will have concluded that, in 2025, the United Kingdom is in a state of free speech emergency. As we have heard, the police are now making more than 30 arrests a day for online offensive messages—an increase of 121% from 2017. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, adumbrated so well, every police force in this country has a dedicated team monitoring social media. My noble friend Lord Frost’s point deserves further weight, to emphasise that, in the modern online world, communication has changed. It is the internet of 2025 that authorities are observing, with memes and rapid forms of communication, when the legislative framework feels as though it was built for the internet of 20 years ago.

I turn to another topic that we are yet to cover in the debate, which is the free speech of parliamentarians. I am now not the only media publisher or journalist in your Lordships’ House; in fact, our number is ever increasing. However, as a publisher, I found myself in January served with the super-injunction—now lifted—that precluded and prevented the reporting of the scandal of the Afghan response route being exposed. I was served with that super-injunction in my capacity as a journalist and reporter. I had no knowledge of the scheme or the policy while in government, but it of course prevented me reporting the facts of this enormous debacle, which is of huge public concern.

Could I have made those points in your Lordships’ House? Well, I took advice, and there are limits to parliamentary privilege in both the other place and your Lordships’ House. There are a large number of Ministers and parliamentarians who were also effectively gagged from exposing the truth of this scandal to the public, even in Parliament. In a rare note of congratulation, I note that the Government have, in my view, done completely the right thing in supporting the lifting of this super-injunction. It gives me some regret—and, I am afraid to say, shame—that my own party, the Conservative Party, instituted this super-injunction and supported it while in government. I note, though, that the current Labour Government chose to extend its application until recently.

As I said, there are limits to parliamentary privilege, but there was also a moral dichotomy in this case. Those who were served with the super-injunction were told that breaking it would constitute an immediate and real threat to life but, lo and behold, we now learn from the Government’s own recent review that the basis for that assumption may well have been faulty. That review has cast considerable doubt on the notion that those whose data was subject to the leak were in fact at imminent and real risk. The reviewer wrote:

“There is little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against”


former officials. Indeed,

“the wealth of data inherited”

by the Taliban would have already enabled that, notwithstanding the leak of the spreadsheet. That claim has also been repeated by the Talban themselves.

Why was it, then, that parliamentarians were even gagged, let alone the media prevented from reporting this outrageous scandal of high and real public interest? As a parliamentarian, I find it deeply troubling that that was the case. I urge the Government, in their response to the wash-up of these issues, to adumbrate what they will do to ensure that the privilege of parliamentarians is protected and that never again can a scandal on this scale be concealed from the public.