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On the night of Wednesday, July 16, the Labour government's Employment Rights Bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords. If the bill goes into law in its current formand there is not much to stop it nowBritons can be prosecuted for a remark that a worker in a public space overhears and finds insulting. The law will apply to pubs, clubs, restaurants, soccer grounds, and all the other places where the country gathers and, all too frequently, ridicules one another.
They're calling it the "Banter Bill":
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Where the Banter Bill strikes new ground is by making employers liable for employees' feelings about their customers, too. It will allow employees to define "harassment" under the lowest of thresholds: taking offense.
If a server feels offended when a drinker in a pub says there's too much immigration (a sentiment shared by 63 percent of Britons in a recent Ipsos poll), or if a bartender feels offended when someone makes a rude joke about drag queens (in a country where the pantomime dame is a comic institution), their employer will be legally liable for their hurt feelings.
Business-minded critics call this a regulatory throttling of Britain's already-stagnant economy, and especially its already-struggling hospitality sector. That is clear. But it might also lead to the most authoritarian throttling of speech in the UK since World War II.
This is quite insane, isn't it? Such authoritarianism! Why leave your house if you could be prosecuted for saying something a woke, blue-haired server found hurty?
Why run a business if your woke employees drive off customers? As the piece (
read it all) makes clear, this is a Labour initiative, but the Tories, in their time running the government, were also enemies of free speech. Next, Labour plans to make criticizing Islam a criminal offense. Really. It's called "Islamophobia."
