Jacob Rees-Mogg shared his views on two major news stories
There's a climate of fear in the press. Take the two defining stories over the past 48 hours, Southport and Huw Edwards.
The Southport suspect was named Axel Rudakubana, but the refusal to release his name fuelled erroneous speculation which led to the riots both in Southport and in London last night.
This is not the fault of the police, this is an issue that lies within the law. Under our current laws, it is the default position of the state to keep minors anonymous when arrested.
But it is time for this to change in certain circumstances. Surely anyone arrested under suspicion of murder, such a serious crime ,over the age of 16 ought to be named.
There is a growing public feeling that our institutions are not being honest with them. We now know that part of the reason we saw these riots was that people were under the impression the suspect was an Islamist.
It's an environment of secrecy and obscurity and it increases tension and disorder. Free speech is a great cleanser.
Similarly, in the case of Huw Edwards, we see the culture of fear that exists in the press, which mainly lends itself to on two judgments, Cliff Richard and Bloomberg.
Both cases ruled that a suspect must have a reasonable expectation of privacy, while the Cliff Richard case was one in which the police behaved badly, the Supreme Court ruling effectively imposed a blanket ban.
In the Bloomberg case it was a clash between Article 8 of the European Convention on the Right to Privacy and Freedom of Expression under Article 10. Free speech lost, and it is unlawful to name people who have been arrested under many circumstances.
This ban has cast a climate of fear over the press, which is effectively censored. As we discussed last night, it wasn't long after The Sun's story about Huw Edwards that liberal media elites began blaming The Sun for destroying his life.
Without The Sun story, the police may never have found out the truth about Edwards, especially as many news outlets are now reporting years of poor, but not illegal, behaviour on his part, which they dared not publicise before.
The developments over the past 48 hours illustrates the importance of free speech. The Sun's courage has exposed a pervert who is guilty of child sex abuse and the release of a defendant's name ought to calm the mood after the terrible tragedy in Southport.
Privacy laws protect the rich and powerful to the detriment of society at large, while the failure to release suspects names creates a vacuum where conspiracy theories can flourish.
We need to be more American, and of course American freedoms are based on ours, and reassert our historic belief in freedom of speech and scrap the European elitist privacy laws that have crept in under the Human Rights Act but were never specifically embraced by Parliament because politicians would never dare to vote through laws to protect themselves.
They came in through the back door.
