On 25 March, I gave a speech on freedom of speech at the Brussels headquarters of the Alliance Defending Freedom. My speech is published below.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I have to tell you that freedom of speech no longer exists in Europe.

In almost every European country in 2015, there are individuals who are in prison or doing some kind of community service or paying off a fine simply for something that they said, simply for expressing themselves.

In Scotland, birthplace of so much of the Enlightenment, a man is currently in jail for the crime of singing an offensive song.

The man is a 24-year-old fan of the largely Protestant football team Rangers. And he was recently found guilty of singing a song called “The Billy Boys”, which is an anti-Catholic song that Rangers fans have been singing for years.

Under Scotland’s Orwellian Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, he was sentenced to four months in jail for songcrimes. We’ve had thoughtcrime and speechcrime — now we have songcrime.

In Sweden, which many view as the Mecca of liberalism, the happiest, fairest nation in Europe, a man was recently released from a six-month prison sentence for producing offensive art.

His name is Dan Parks. He’s a painter. He does paintings which he says are designed to challenge political correctness and to rattle the authorities. And they can certainly be described as offensive and racist works. For this, he was sent to jail for six months at the end of last year and his artworks were destroyed by the Swedish state.

In the past, Europe burnt allegedly corrupting books; now it incinerates or pulps offensive art.

In Spain, a rapper called Pablo Hasel was recently released from a two-year prison sentence for the crime of singing songs that contained violent lyrics.

Hasel is a communist who raps about how much he hates the People’s Party of Spain and how angry he is about the imposition of austerity in Spain. In one of his raps he went so far as to praise al-Qaeda and ETA. For this, for praising those groups, he was sent to jail.

In France, which still presents itself as the guardian of man’s rights, three people are currently paying off fines imposed on them for making homophobic comments on Twitter.

In January, these three individuals became the first in French history to be found guilty of anti-gay hate crimes, not for attacking anyone or damaging anyone’s property, but simply for expressing themselves on the internet.

In Turkey, the Dutch journalist Frederike Geerdink is currently under investigation for crimes of “terrorist propaganda”. What she actually did is post comments on Facebook and Twitter expressing support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which is banned in Turkey.

She faces up to five years in jail for this, for the crime of expressing a political view.

Some people say Turkey isn’t fit to become a full member of Europe because it’s too authoritarian. On the contrary, Turkey’s willingness to punish and fine and imprison people for speechcrimes shows that it has all the necessary credentials to be European in the 21st century.

In Germany, a 74-year-old woman is currently struggling to pay off a fine imposed on her by the courts for the crime of carrying an offensive placard.

She was on a march against immigration when she held up a sign that said “The arrogant Turks and Muslims are threatening Europe”. For this, for expressing her quite hardcore, not-very-nice political views, she was convicted of incitement to hatred and fined 1,000 Euros.

In Hungary, a historian was recently found guilty of breaching the public order when he described the far-right party Jobbik as “neo-fascist”. He was fined. Fined for expressing a political opinion, fined for criticising the far right, fined for saying something.

And on it goes. Across Europe, from Britain to Scandinavia, from the former Stalinist bloc to the Mediterranean countries, people are being arrested and convicted and fined and jailed for expressing themselves. Not for violence or theft or criminal damage, but for expression; not for action, but for speech; not for behaviour, but for thought.

And those cases are just some of the better known ones. There are hundreds more incidents from the past few years where people in Europe have been arrested under public-order or hate-speech legislation for the crime of saying shocking or offensive or simply non-mainstream things.

Christian preachers who have argued that gay sex is evil; historians who have called into question the Armenian genocide; young Muslims who have expressed support for certain Islamist groups in the Middle East —such people, and many others, are being arrested in their hundreds in 21st-century Europe.

Some are let off, some are punished. But the clear message sent by all this heavy-handed state intervention into the arena of thought and speech is that there are certain things you cannot say; certain views you cannot hold; certain opinions you must not express.

So if you want to see regimes which still, in the 21st century, punish people for singing songs or which destroy decadent art, you don’t have to look to the Islamic State.

It is happening here, all around us, on this apparently Enlightened continent. Freedom of speech no longer exists in Europe.

Some will say, “Ah, but *I* still have freedom of speech. If you don’t say offensive or hateful things, then you still enjoy freedom of speech in modern Europe.”

For example, we, in this room, are free to talk about censorship in Europe, to criticise it, to ridicule the authorities, and it is very unlikely any of us will be arrested for doing so. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that speech is either free, or it isn’t. There’s no halfway house. You cannot have free speech for one section of society but not for another — that is a profound contradiction in terms.

If the offensive and the allegedly hateful are not free to express themselves, then freedom of expression does not exist. Instead, we in effect have a licence to speak, graciously granted to us by officialdom. We have a licence to speak and it can be removed from us the minute we say something that the authorities consider offensive or hurtful or horrible.

Across Europe, people are not speaking freely, not even you and I. We are speaking under licence, aware that our licence can be revoked if we cross certain lines.

And those lines are blurred. Very blurred. They encapsulate not simply things that all of us can agree are hateful and of little social value, like Holocaust denial; they also encapsulate non-mainstream moral convictions and religious beliefs.

And this is where we get to the nub of the problem with the vast empire of censorship in 21st century Europe.

There are two major problems with modern Europe’s insatiable policing of thought and speech in search of anything that might be deemed offensive or hateful.

The first, and most serious, is that people are being punished for their moral, religious and political views.

Supporters of hate-speech legislation often say, “Look, we just want to outlaw the n-word or vile anti-Semitism, so what’s your problem?” But in truth, moral thought and political and religious ideology are also being swept up in this moral crusade against so-called hate speech.

So Christians have been arrested and fined for saying homosexuality is a sin. That is, they have been convicted for their beliefs, for a profoundly held moral viewpoint. They have been punished for their religious views, just as surely as people were punished for their religious views during The Inquisition.

Liberal critics of Islam have been arrested, and many have been fined, for saying that the production of halal meat is barbaric or that Islamic values are not suited to modern Europe. That is, they have been convicted for their beliefs, for their profoundly held political viewpoint. They have been punished for their political views, just as surely as people were punished for their political views under Stalinism.

We must always remember that one man’s “hate speech” is another man’s deep moral belief. What the state and mainstream observers consider to be “hateful” might be a religious or political ideal to someone else.

When we invite the state to police hatred, to police emotion, to police speech, to police thought itself, we open the door to the policing of political and moral and religious ideas.

As we have seen in Europe in recent years. In the name of fighting hatred, states have arrested, fined and imprisoned people for the crime of holding the supposedly wrong views on moral matters.

And the second problem with the empire of censorship, with the state’s crusade against hatred, is that it actually makes it more difficult for us to challenge actual hatred, real and genuine backward views.

Hate-speech legislation doesn’t only punish the hateful, or the allegedly hateful; it also disarms us, the rest of society, ordinary, non-hateful citizens. It prevents us from being able to see and know and challenge backward ideas.

Censorship is the worst tool imaginable for tackling genuine bigotry. Because it simply pushes such bigotry underground, allowing it to fester and grow out of sight.

France demonstrates this problem very well. Twenty-five years ago it outlawed Holocaust denial. And now, it has a very serious problem with Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

These things are not unrelated. In banning Holocaust denial, the French state removed this ideology from the democratic public realm where it could be challenged, where it could be fought with facts and defeated with argument.

It also unwittingly turned Holocaust denial into something exotic and exciting, into an attractive outlook for those who already felt isolated from mainstream French society.

And so some sections of French society embraced Holocaust denial as an edgy and dangerous ideology, and they were never publicly held to account or confronted or argued down because Holocaust denial was forbidden from the public realm, from public discussion. Here, we can see how censoring even genuine hate speech only makes hate speech worse.

So hate-speech legislation is not only an attack on the speaker — it is also an attack on the audience. It undermines our right, and our responsibility as citizens, to name and expose and stand up to actual bigotry; to use the tools of freedom and reason to challenge those who say genuinely racist or anti-Semitic things.

This is why free speech is so important. First, because it allows individuals to express themselves; secondly, because it allows the rest of us to listen and to think and to speak back.

Freedom of speech is the most important of all freedoms because it keeps all of us on our toes, it keeps citizens alert, it makes society a more vibrant, thoughtful place. It trusts us to hear and see and read all ideas, and then to use our reason and our rationality to consider and confront these ideas. It invites us to be engaged and responsible citizens.

Censorship, by contrast, makes us morally lazy. It turns us into children who don’t have to worry about what is right and wrong because the state has already decided that for us. It weakens our moral muscles and decommissions our moral judgment. It encourages passivity, dishonesty, obedience, slavishness — all bad things in a democratic society.

So what can be done to take down this new empire of censorship in 21st century Europe?

I think it’s a fairly straightforward task - but a very difficult one to achieve. We have got to argue for the repeal of all hate-speech legislation in Europe. All of it. Every last act, every last rule, every last word of it.

And we have got to challenge every act of censorship that occurs. And I think we need to put a special emphasis on defending free speech for people we disagree with, even for people who we loathe.

We can’t only defend free speech for ourselves and ignore the censorship of others. For that leaves the problem of censorship unchallenged and leaves us open to attack later on.

So Christians must defend those who are punished for blaspheming against Christianity. Muslims must defend those arrested for ridiculing Islam. Liberals must defend those imprisoned for expressing neo-fascist ideas. Why must we do this? In the words of Thomas Paine, one of my heroes, who was himself sentenced to death for something be wrote:

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”