ARE concessions to coax MPs into voting for cruel social security cuts a sign that the Starmer government is listening and learning?

Anything but. The hysterical reaction to defiant scenes at the weekend’s Glastonbury festival and the looming ban on Palestine Action show how fast our democratic rights are being dismantled.

British centrists once prided themselves on the idea of liberal democracy, where the media isn’t censored and citizens enjoy freedom of assembly and expression. How robust do those freedoms look today?

The Prime Minister demands an explanation from the public broadcaster for failing to suppress footage of crowds chanting in solidarity with Palestine at a music festival. The organisers of a peaceful demonstration in January are up in court next week for alleged breaches of police restrictions by laying flowers in memory of Gaza’s dead children in the road. The police are reviewing footage of the Glastonbury crowds, trying to sniff out behaviour they can prosecute someone for.

The free press? The howling front pages demanding arrests and charges of bands and BBC editors alike underline a truth self-evident since at least the Corbyn years: they are not watchdogs guarding our liberties from an overbearing state but attack dogs, unleashed by the ruling class to hound its victims.

The BBC, falling over itself to make amends for failing to meet Starmer’s censorship preferences, smears the singer Bobby Vylan, accusing him of “anti-semitic sentiments” for leading chants of “Death to the IDF” (Israel Defence Forces).

But to denounce an army is not to denounce a race. And given serving IDF soldiers revealed in the Israeli press just last week that the IDF is actually ordering its troops to fire into unarmed crowds of Palestinians gathering to collect food from its tightly controlled aid centres — a sick “hunger games” scenario in which over 500 Palestinians have already been gunned down — it’s understandable that feelings against this genocidal military are running high. Anyone who thinks Vylan’s chants are more “appalling” (the PM’s term) than the government’s continuing supply of arms and intelligence to facilitate mass murder has their priorities wrong.

The gravity of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s proposed Palestine Action ban cannot be overestimated. To try to head off any potential opposition by MPs, she has lumped the direct-action group with two neonazi formations, the Maniac Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement, in a single banning order.

To label a group terrorist for splashing paint on military aircraft is an outrage, one that as others have noted would define as terrorist some of Britain’s best known historical protest movements, from the Greenham Common women to the Suffragettes.

But not only members of Palestine Action would pay the penalty. Expressions of support for their actions would also be illegal, meriting potential prison sentences. The legitimacy or otherwise of their tactics in trying to shut down weapons factories or embarrass the air force would no longer be a lawful subject of debate. The consequences for freedom of speech are chilling.

We must unite to say no.

For too long, freedom of speech has been dismissed as a right-wing fixation — even while bogus claims about safe spaces were cynically deployed to shut down Labour Party discussions of their former leader’s suspension on the absurd grounds that such discussions might offend Jewish party members.

We do not want the police to police our speech. We do not want the state to comb over our social media, determining what is and is not offensive. Free speech must be reclaimed as the left-wing, anti-Establishment cause it is.

And we cannot ease the pressure on a weak, rattled government — desperately offering sweeteners to stave off an MPs’ rebellion on disability cuts while lashing out at outspoken musicians and peaceful demonstrators.

Fight the cuts. Fight the bans. And stand up to our authoritarian Prime Minister and his bullying lackeys.