For the first time ever I am becoming seriously worried about free speech in this country.

I don’t just mean the crucial freedom for people to say things that they honestly believe to be true. I mean the freedom to say things that are in fact true, but which the Labour government has decided are no longer acceptable.

Let me give an example. We have a problem with criminal gangs who have, for years, been bringing migrants across the English Channel in small boats. This practice is dangerous, and several hundred people – including children – have drowned.

The sight of these boats has enraged the British public. They cannot understand why it isn’t possible to end this trade in human life.

They cannot understand why the UK Border Force seems to have abandoned any attempt to protect UK borders, and instead spends its time actively ushering these dinghies and coracles to our shores.

No one knows who these passengers are, or where they have come from, or what their intentions may be once they arrive in the UK, and yet they are coming in the tens of thousands. The whole farce seems to make a mockery of the UK state, and our ability to control our borders.

People overwhelmingly want to see the people-smuggling gangs smashed, and they want some practical way of deterring the young men – it is mainly young men – from making the voyage. That is why it was so important that we finally had a plan – the Rwanda Economic and Migration Partnership, which, with more time, would unquestionably have worked.

As I said at Dover in April 2022, it was always going to be difficult to implement. I predicted that it would be fiercely opposed by the kind of Left-wing lawyers – Keir Starmer being a prime example – who are so prominent in the world of immigration law.

The opposition was, indeed, concerted, but we would eventually have overcome it (just as we got Brexit done, against very similar opposition).

Even before the Rwanda Plan had a chance to come into force, the mere prospect was having a deterrent effect on the gangs, with potential migrants choosing Ireland, for instance, rather than the UK.

Plenty of other countries started to follow the UK model – opting to frustrate the people-smugglers by sending their victims for processing in third countries.

It was the right plan, and today it remains the right plan. Look at the Channel in the last few weeks – almost 6,000 arrivals since the election, and some days with near record numbers. But Starmer has scrapped Rwanda, and put nothing in its place.

Far from deterring the gangs, Labour have announced an amnesty for 100,000 who were going to be deported – so that they will now be claiming asylum in the UK, and, inevitably, living here.

Instead of tackling the problem, they appear to be changing the language we use to discuss it so that we should no longer refer to the cross-Channel traffic as ‘illegal’ migration, but only as ‘irregular’ migration.

Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper are coming to resemble the two gay Dutch policemen in the Harry and Paul sketch, who congratulate themselves on cutting crime in Amsterdam – by legalising burglary.

In fact, it would be comical if it were not so serious.

These gangs are cruel. They don’t give a fig for human life. They need to be told the truth – that what they are doing is against the law, and the same goes for the people who make use of their services.

We must not mince our words.

It is illegal to come to this country without authorisation, just as it is illegal to overstay your visa or to engage in a fictitious marriage.

It is illegal for these people to get on boats in France, and try to flout the UK immigration procedures. To say otherwise is an insult to those many people who do the right thing, who fill out forms, who queue at British embassies around the world, and who make use of this country’s abundant safe and legal routes for getting here.

No one could possibly say that this country was not generous, under the Tory government, to those who were fleeing persecution around the world. Look at the scale of the welcome the British people provided in the last few years to those fleeing Hong Kong, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

It is grotesque now to tell those legal immigrants – who did the right thing – that they are being lumped together with the law-breakers. It is a moral and political disaster, because of course it will only encourage indiscriminate prejudice against all immigrants, legal or o therwise.

It is also an abuse of the language. You might as well say that shoplifters are no longer guilty of theft but ‘irregular’ shopping and that those drunk at the wheel are guilty of ‘irregular’ driving.

The Labour government is deliberately obscuring the difference between right and wrong, for political ends – because they have abandoned the attempt to control illegal immigration.

It has been quite amazing, in the last few days, to see the speed with which the main broadcasters – and many papers – have adopted this bizarre Labspeak diktat. It is as though this country were turning into North Korea.

The BBC, Sky, Channel 4, they all now refer to the cross-Channel trade as “irregular” rather than “illegal” – even though the law remains the same. Where will all this end?

Once a word becomes disapproved of, especially in a sensitive context such as immigration, it gets harder and harder to use. One can imagine there will come a point, very soon, when it will be actively frowned upon to call any such activities ‘illegal’, even though they patently are. The very phrase ‘illegal immigration’ seems poised to enter the lexicon of inflammatory language – of the kind that can now get you locked up.

Of course it was right to punish the rioters, following the appalling stabbings in Southport. Anybody who rioted, anyone who engaged in violence, anybody who damaged property – they have all deserved the full force of the law.

Some people, on the other hand, have received custodial sentences for posting comments on social media that they believed – at the time – to be true. Some of these seem to have been people with no previous criminal history whatever. Is this really sensible?

We in this country pride ourselves on our free speech. We wag our fingers – rightly – at regimes where they suppress that freedom. We believe that we are among the great global champions of the right to speak your mind, the right that is the foundation of creativity and progress.

Well, we are now losing that reputation, under Starmer, around the world. Rival governments are seeing that ordinary British people are being jailed for a mistaken tweet, while serious and violent criminals are being let out early.

The irony is not lost, believe me, in places like Putin’s Russia.

We seem to be entering a new and topsy-turvy world, where people can be jailed for blurting something on X – formerly Twitter – that they actually believe to be true, while the Labour government wants us to collectively start saying things about illegal immigration that we all know are false.

Welcome to Starmer’s Britain, twinned with Orwell’s 1984.