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Breaking History

Eli Lake and David Rose: The UK Censorship Machine Eats Itself

Breaking History

The Free Press

History

4.81.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David Rose is the director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union (FSU), a UK-based nonpartisan organization that campaigns for freedom of speech. The FSU will publish a new report examining allegations tied to Labour Together, the political network linked to Keir Starmer. David joins Eli Lake to explain how his investigation describes a murky ecosystem involving claims of journalists labeled as Russian assets, the circulation of private intelligence-style dossiers, and the growing overlap between political advocacy and “disinformation” or “digital hate” laws in the UK. Our special episode on the UK being a “censor’s paradise” is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:10.3

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Saved from 11 a.m. subject to availability.

0:18.7

Price and participation may vary.

0:20.2

All right, well, welcome back, Breaking History. Listeners. We have another one of our interviews with an old friend of mine, David Rose, a veteran journalist who I got to know when he was, you know, just writing outstanding scoops for Vanity Fair. But he has written for almost everybody. And he is now the director of policy and research for the UK's free speech union, which does incredibly important work.

0:42.9

By the way, listen to our episode from last year on the decline of free speech and how the UK was turning into a censor's paradise, where we interview the founder and president

0:55.6

of that organization. So, David, thank you so much and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me.

1:00.7

So tell me, you have a new report, which is provocatively titled Labor, that's the ruling party in the

1:06.5

UK, their misinformation mafia. What's it about? What did you find? Well, it all started with this

1:13.3

extraordinary scandal that broke in this country in early February. Now, it basically emerged that

1:21.8

the think tank, which essentially created Kirstama as leader of the Labour Party, which shoehorned him into power and engineered his selection,

1:31.2

and then also had a huge impact,

1:34.3

both on his campaign to become Prime Minister and on the policy agenda.

1:38.8

It emerged that it had commissioned a secret report

1:41.7

to investigate journalists who had written stuff that was hostile to

1:46.5

this think tank, Labour Together. Now, this was extraordinary because what this secret report

1:53.1

essentially did was accused them of being Russian spies. It suggested that there were grounds

1:59.6

for thinking that they were actually Russian intelligence

...

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