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Apparently Labor is going to treat Incel ideology similarly to political Islam in the UK (BBC, Guardian).
As a freedom of speech apologist, I don't think that this is a good development, but just the response to the latest moral panic and about as justified as the response to 'D&D satanism'.
What should be illegal is incitement to crimes. I am sure that this is already illegal in the UK. "Blow up Parliament for Allah", "Rape some bitches to protest against wokism", "Kill a cop to bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat" are not protected speech, if anyone posts them on their facebook they would quickly be removed and the poster charged.
Of course, even here, technically enforcing this on more obscure pages is basically impossible without cracking down on the free internet as much as the CCP does (and possibly not even then). Punish what you can find and don't lose too much sleep over some .onion board which you can't police, or infiltrate them if it looks like they are planning concrete crimes in the physical world.
To make broader pieces of ideology illegal, such as "people should live according to Sharia law" or "Capitalism is just a development stage to be overcome" or "Women should have less/more power" would curtail freedom of speech too much for my taste.
I also don't think it will succeed on the object level much. Given that the punishments for simply reading the wrong ideology is hopefully going to be light (CSAM being the only content where merely intentionally viewing it should be a crime), that prohibition will do little to dissuade people from consuming Incel ideology. The main reason why an edgy teenager would not read something widely considered bad is not because the government forbids it, which is to admit 'this is so dangerous that we can't allow people to read it', but that it is generally considered lame in his circles. If Mrs. Cooper bans Incel ideology, that will make Incel ideology less lame, not more lame, because established politicians are invariably lame. (My vocabulary is probably half a century out of date, my point stands.)
They have no other option.
They have created a society in which people have less sex than ever, have fewer children than ever and can only dream of getting the housing their parents had at the same age. They have no idea how to fix it so the result is to find ways to make the people who point out the problems seem illegitimate.
There were large riots due to the problems immigration has caused. Nobody in government has a serious and realistic plan for fixing the massive issues so instead of acknowledging them they simply have to blame a handful of Russian accounts. It can't have anything to do with crime, lack of social cohesion, rampant housing shortages or any other issue that the politicians simply can't fix.
If someone is living with their parents at the same age that their parents owned a house the problem has to be their micropenis. They are loser incels and therefore not worth engaging with. There is no political option to create affordable housing as it would completely crash the financial system to bring down housing prices to 3x an average annual salary. Therefore, what is left is repression and arguments that are insults.
Incels are a real threat to the system. The system has failed to create a society in which people can find housing, start a family. People are angry and politicians have no solutions. Lots of young men with nothing to lose and no prospects are the greatest threat to any regime.
The birth rate makes the UK pension system completely unsustainable. Filling the gap with third world labour is going to cause major issues for which nobody has any answers. So if you ask how this is going to be solved your dick is small, you are ugly, your momma is fat and you are a Russian bot so you have no legitimacy.
The effect isn't primarily through direct government suppression. Maybe one or two people with nasty rhetoric will be punished, but it's about generating a news story "look at how evil incels are," not any real likelihood that they'll act. You'll probably have a government unit dedicated to convincing young, stupid men to say they'll commit outrageous violence, just for the sake of making sure that story percolates through media on a regular basis.
Its effect will primarily be to reenforce among women that men complaining about, well, anything are icky and low status (note that "dangerous" is not one of those adjectives). A guy complaining about his inability to pay for dates is really just an entitled incel, so he deserves to be excluded from society. And he certainly doesn't deserve to have his complaints treated as a systemic issue, because we live in a perfect utopian world where anything bad that happens is men's own fault.
Men will then self-censor and retreat from a losing battlefield, at best working until they become a good cog in the system or (more likely) turning in on themselves and self-soothing with video games and porn, until eventually hanging themselves.
Incels won't be a threat to the system, because men who are plausible leaders will never be actual incels, and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any incel-adjacent positions. Instead, incels will just end up being a drag on the system, supported by the dole and their parents' retirement funds. It's also a self-correcting problem: the more men that drop out, the easier it is for the remaining men. The negative feedback loop ensures the system is stable.
While I agree with much of the rest of your analysis, this part is wrong.
It is not, however, a direct threat to the system. No incel army is going to rise up to start executing the girls who rejected them or handmaid's tail-ing them.
Think about this from an incentives and game theoretic perspective. Your modal incel is conformist and meek. They generally act however the "median basic guy" is supposed to act (until they hit their incel-dom initiation or whatever). If that group of males is dropping out of the social system, then the only males you have remaining are either the Andrew Tate types or the totally progressive bought-in types. I've seen the latter referred to as "cuttlefish." The problem is that both of these groups of males are anti-social and net-negatives to women. The Andrew Tates for pretty obvious reasons, but the progressive "men" too because they contribute to more unstable family structures.
A stable society has a large amount of men - perhaps most - who live very stable and predictable lives. Nothing glamorous, not a lot of risk taking. But they are dependable and reliable. A rational society would valorize that kind of behavior. You see some efforts towards this with the Grill Pill set, but it used to be far more front and center. Think Jimmy Stewart movies. This also presents an uncomfortable reality - a lot of the "good men" of yesteryear would probably be lumped in with the incels of today.
The danger that's emerging now is that incel-dom is moving up the chain. I had a post recently on an observation I've started to make on objectively successful, impressive, and highly competent men choosing effective celibacy (even if they don't term it that themselves nor do it for a religious reason). Now you've got a situation in which women are seeking mates in the dating pool and finding only trash goblins who hack the relationship game for their short term benefit. These guys aren't Chad Playboys with amazing jet set lives who bed starlets and then move on - they're losery semi-sociopaths who have mastered the first 72 hours of dating and are utterly substanceless thereafter.
It's been said on this forum a thousand times, but the primary victims of third wave to present feminism are women.
This might just be small sample bias on my part, but most of the stable reliable guys I know are getting laid, usually in long-term relationships. And it is usually with attractive women.
I think the underlying problem might be not so much that women find stable reliable guys unattractive, it's that largely because of economic changes, it's become harder to become a stable reliable guy than it used to be. It is hard to be stable and reliable if you are struggling just to get a decent job and pay the rent. These days you can't just go to the factory and shake the foreman's hand, now you kind of have to either become a white collar guy or really succeed in the trades. In my experience of observing incel forums, it seems to me that being an incel is highly correlated with also having economic problems. The two share some common underlying causes, like mental illness and shyness. Hence the stereotype of the incel who lives in his parents' basement. Of course, physically attractive people also find it easier to get good jobs, which does not help the truly physically unattractive subset of the incel population.
Our society obviously values stable reliable guys less than it did several decades ago, but stable reliable guys still do get pretty consistently valorized in pop culture. Most commercials target stereotypical suburban family units, just more racially and sexually diverse than the ones of decades ago. Of course they do this mainly because those people have money to spend, but still. And the movie industry still churns out plenty of movies that have conventional nice guy heroes who do what they do not because they are adrenaline junkies, but because they decide to put aside their self-interest for what they consider to be a higher cause.
I don't think you even have to "really succeed" in the trades. You can get a very solid job, and most places are even willing to train you on their dime, without being anyone amazing. Now, if you wanted to say that the trades are culturally looked down on by a lot of people regardless of the stability/income they provide, that's a different matter.
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