The Cage

Two tiers of people

The cage is about two tiers of people. On one side are the connected: the officials, the insiders, the people who write the rules and somehow never seem to live under them. On the other side is everyone else, the non-connected, who are expected to obey.

In some countries the cage is out in the open. Nobody needs it explained that rights are limited in China, North Korea or Russia. The bars are visible, and the people inside know exactly where they stand.

What worries me more is the cage you can't see. Over the past few decades, a "soft socialism" has crept up across the European Union. It doesn't arrive with tanks. It arrives with regulations, speech codes, unelected commissions and a steady stream of reasons why ordinary people can no longer be trusted to speak, vote or decide for themselves.

What the EU actually is

To be fair to the facts: the European Union is an economic and political union of 27 member states.^[1] It grew out of postwar economic cooperation and today has its own institutions, including the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council and the Court of Justice. Twenty of its members (twenty-one from 2026) share a single currency, the euro.^[1][2]

That's the official description. Here's my opinion of what it has become.

A collection of failed states

In my view, the EU has become a collection of failing states that have found a convenient arrangement: when something goes wrong, every national leader can point at Brussels, or at a neighbor, and say it wasn't their fault. Responsibility gets spread so thin that nobody is ever accountable.

Look at the numbers.

Debt. At the end of 2025, government debt stood at 87.8% of GDP in the euro area and 81.7% across the EU, and both ratios had gone up from the year before.^[2] These are economies that keep spending money they don't have.

Productivity. In his 2024 report for the European Commission, former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi found that the gap in GDP per person between the EU and the United States, measured at purchasing power parity, had widened from 31% in 2002 to 34%. He found that around 70% of that gap comes from lower productivity in the EU, and that real disposable income per person has grown almost twice as fast in the US as in the EU since 2000.^[3] That was the European Commission's own commissioned report, not an American critic.

Importing people instead of growth. Rather than fixing the productivity problem, Europe has been importing people. Eurostat reports that 4.3 million people from outside the EU immigrated into it in 2023.^[4] In 2024, 912,415 non-EU citizens applied for asylum in the EU for the first time. That was down 13.1% from 2023, but it is still close to a million people in a single year.^[5]

A changing population. Pew Research Center estimated that Muslims made up 4.9% of the population of Europe in 2016 (defined as the then-28 EU countries plus Norway and Switzerland), up from 3.8% in 2010. Pew projected that share would reach 7.4% by 2050 even with zero migration, 11.2% under continued regular migration, and 14% if the refugee flows of 2014–2016 continued.^[6] These are 2017 projections. I'm not making an argument about any individual's faith. My argument is that leaders are reshaping their societies without ever asking their own citizens whether they want it.

Damaged ships, chained together

Here's how I picture it. Imagine a group of damaged ships in the open ocean. Each one is taking on water. Instead of repairing their hulls, they lock onto each other with chains and call it strength. Now when one ship lists, the others feel it, and every captain blames the ship next to him. Nobody repairs anything, because the failure belongs to everyone, and so it belongs to no one. The flotilla gets bigger, and so does the leak.

That, to me, is the European project today: a collective failure that keeps growing, and that can never be blamed on any single government.

As failure grows, control grows

This is the part people miss. When a system fails, the people running it don't usually admit it. They tighten their grip instead.

These governments call themselves democracies. But in my view they increasingly manage their populations by division. They use sexuality and race as marks that sort people into groups. They exploit economic differences, pitting renters against owners and young against old. And above all, they move to control the internet and freedom of expression, because the one thing a failing government can't survive is people saying out loud that it's failing.

England: arrested for what you say

Nowhere is this clearer to me than in England, the birthplace of so many of our own liberties.

In April 2025, The Times published freedom-of-information data showing that police forces in England and Wales made 12,183 arrests in 2023 under two laws: section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. That's roughly 33 arrests a day, up from 7,734 in 2019, an increase of almost 58% since before the pandemic.^[7][8]

In my view, these are arrests for speech the government decides is criminal. Not threats. Not defamation. The usual justification is "hate," but hate is a label the government defines for itself, and in practice I believe it gets used against speech that undermines the government's authority. The official figures do lump in genuine threats and menacing messages, and I don't defend those. But the cases on this site show how far beyond threats these laws reach.

To be precise: those laws cover more than plain opinion. They include messages judged "grossly offensive," "indecent, obscene or menacing," or sent to cause "annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety."^[9] Some of those arrests surely involved real threats or harassment. But the very fact that "grossly offensive" and "annoyance" can get you arrested is my point. Not threats. Not defamation. Speech the authorities don't like.

Not every force even answered the requests, so the real number is likely higher.^[9]

How does that compare with Russia, a country everyone agrees has no free speech? Russia's Net Freedom Project recorded 882 criminal prosecutions in 2023 for online publications, posts and reposts, 150 of which led to prison terms.^[9] Fact-checkers have rightly pointed out that the two numbers aren't directly comparable. The UK figure counts arrests under broad communications laws, while the Russian figure counts criminal prosecutions, and Russia's overall restrictions on speech are far harsher.^[9][10] I accept that. But when a free country records arrest numbers for speech-related offenses in the tens of thousands over a few years, and the comparison anyone reaches for is Russia, something has gone badly wrong.

Then there's the cost. All of this takes police time that could be spent fighting burglary, assault and violent crime. The think tank Policy Exchange estimated that the roughly 13,200 "non-crime hate incidents" logged each year (cases recorded by police even though no crime was committed) consumed over 60,000 police hours a year.^[11] [Needs source: I could not find a reliable published figure for the total police time or cost spent specifically on the s127 and Malicious Communications arrests.]

The jury, the last check

If speech is the first freedom to go, the jury is the last line of defense, and it has been a pillar of English justice for centuries.

In July 2025, a review of the criminal courts led by Sir Brian Leveson recommended creating a new tier of court in which many cases would be tried without a jury.^[12] In December 2025, Justice Secretary David Lammy told Parliament the government would remove defendants' right to elect a jury trial and create a new "bench division" of the Crown Court. It would hear either-way cases with likely sentences of three years or less before a judge alone.^[13]

After a fierce backlash from lawyers, ministers announced in October 2026 that they were dropping the broad judge-alone plan, keeping judge-only trials just for some lengthy, technical fraud and financial cases.^[14] But according to reporting at the time, the plan to strip defendants of the right to choose a jury trial and to raise magistrates' sentencing powers was still on the table.^[14][15]

In my view, the fact that a government seriously proposed this tells you everything. A right that has survived for centuries was nearly traded away for administrative convenience, and it was pulled back only because people pushed back hard.

The cage closes

Put the pieces together. The government decides what you're allowed to say. The government arrests you for saying the wrong thing. And increasingly, the government wants to be the one that convicts you, without twelve ordinary citizens standing in the way.

That is not oversight. That is the absence of it. That is a cage of control.

And it's coming here. Once the cage closes, it's closed forever. Follow along.

Sources

1. European Union, "EU countries" and "Aims and values" — https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/eu-countries_en
2. Eurostat, "Euro area government deficit at 2.9% and EU at 3.1% of GDP" (22 Apr 2026) — https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w/2-22042026-ap
3. Mario Draghi, The future of European competitiveness (European Commission, Sept 2024) — https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3-412d-be4c-f152a8232961_en
4. Eurostat, "EU received 4.3 million immigrants in 2023" — https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20250328-2
5. Eurostat, "Decline in asylum applicants and temporary protections" (20 Jun 2025) — https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20250620-2
6. Pew Research Center, "Europe's Growing Muslim Population" (29 Nov 2017) — https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/
7. The Times, "Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages" (Apr 2025) — https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for-offensive-online-messages-zbv886tqf
8. House of Lords Library, "Select communications offences and concerns over free speech" — https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-offences-and-concerns-over-free-speech/ ; Reclaim The Net summary of the Times data — https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-arrests-for-offensive-online-posts-nearly-double-in-seven-years
9. The Standard, "Fact check: International data on 'online comments' arrests not comparable" — https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/russian-wales-england-germany-the-times-b1266428.html
10. PA Media, "Russia has far more restrictions on social media use than the UK" — https://pa.media/blogs/fact-check/russia-has-far-more-restrictions-on-social-media-use-than-the-uk/
11. Policy Exchange, "Non-Crime Hate Incidents" (25 Nov 2024) — https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/non-crime-hate-incidents/
12. BBC News, "Justice secretary wants most jury trials scrapped" — https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7vdvrnnvzo
13. Hansard, Written statement "Criminal Court Reform", David Lammy (Dec 2025) — https://hansard.parliament.uk/debates/GetDebateAsText/25120245000015
14. The Guardian, "Ministers drop plans to cut jury trials in England and Wales after outcry" (4 Oct 2026) — https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/oct/04/ministers-drop-radical-plans-cut-jury-trials-outcry-lawyers-centuries-old-right-courts
15. BBC News, "Courts backlog will fall despite scrapping plans to curb jury trials, Alex Norris insists" — https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crq5nd9dgz68o

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