Free Speech Wobbles in the U.K.

“We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time,” promised British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in an Oval Office conversation with President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Feb. 27. Starmer was responding to Vance’s concern that in the U.K. “there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British … but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens.”

This exchange came the day before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous Oval Office interaction with Trump and Vance. In contrast to Zelensky, Starmer struck a conciliatory note, disclaiming any intention “to reach across U.S. citizens” with speech-related prosecutorial action.

Despite being couched in more general, principled terms, Vance’s concern about “American technology companies” and “American citizens” appeared directed toward the treatment of one specific American citizen and technology-company owner: Trump administration disrupter Elon Musk. During racially-charged demonstrations last August following the murder of three white British girls and injury of several others by the teenaged son of Rwandan immigrants, Sir Mark Rowley, London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner, threatened to “come after” people in other countries for speech rising to criminality under British law. Rowley specifically mentioned “the likes of Elon Musk,” a U.S. citizen, who had posted comments on X that Rowley alleged were “whipping up hatred” and therefore possibly illegal in the U.K. Britain’s Online Safey Act of 2023 also mandates that online companies, including foreign companies, must remove objectionable content posted by users or face large fines.

Britain has no equivalent to the First Amendment, but the common law tradition of England and Wales has long respected free speech as a so-called “negative right,” a right that the government respects by not taking action for or against. In 1998, the U.K.’s adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), to which it remains subject despite Brexit, required legally defined free speech, which arrived in the U.K.’s Human Rights Act, passed the same year. The ECHR provides that all individuals have “the right to freedom of expression,” including the “freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference.”

In recent years, however, Britain has mimicked the EU’s more proactive approach to “hate speech” and other subjective content to police what people say and, increasingly, post online. In 2003, a new law, the Communications Act, broadly prohibited undefined “malicious communications” and made it a criminal offense to “persistently make use of a public electronic communications network for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”—all highly subjective categories. The act also authorized a new national regulatory agency, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), to monitor all forms of communication for illegal content. In other words, the law prohibited vague speech offenses and then empowered a government agency to police them.

Over time, Britain’s speech authorities have become more powerful while the offenses have become more vague. According to Rowley, prohibited communications include “incitement, stirring up racial hatred, [and] numerous terrorist offenses regarding the publishing of material.” In practice, this has led to thousands of arrests and prison sentences for social media posts, publicly displayed signs, shared memes, personal insults, and even prayers by pensioners.

In his Munich speech, Vance mentioned the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old British army veteran who was arrested two years ago for silently praying for his aborted son for three minutes within a 150-meter “buffer” zone around a Bournemouth abortion clinic. Smith-Connor’s conviction, now on appeal, imposed costs and penalties of nearly $13,000 and cost his local council authority over $100,000 in legal expenses.

This was not an isolated case of zealotry. Five days after Vance’s speech, 74-year-old Scottish grandmother Rose Docherty was arrested on video by four police officers for silently holding a sign in proximity to a Glasgow abortion clinic reading “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.” The Scottish MP who authored the relevant law expressed gratitude to the police “for acting so quickly … This kind of intimidation [silently holding a sign] has no place in a modern or progressive Scotland.”

Pro-life Britons are not alone in being targeted by Britain’s speech police. According to the London Times, 3,395 people were detained and questioned for online speech alone in 2016, a rate of nine per day. Nearly half of those questioned were prosecuted. Typical was the case of Lee Joseph Dunn, who last July posted three memes suggesting that Asian men possessing knives might move into British communities, possibly after immigrating illegally. Dunn deleted the memes and apologized; he was therefore sentenced to only two months in jail instead of three. The same judge, however, gave Billy Thompson the full three months for a heated Facebook post that included emojis of an ethnic minority and a gun.

Jamila Abdi, a 21-year-old Black woman, was criminally charged last summer after using the “N-word” to refer to a Black soccer player in a Twitter discussion. Her prosecution continued for eight months before Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, which Starmer once led, dropped the charges—not on free speech grounds, but amid concerns that prosecuting a Black person for using the “N-word” was itself racist.

Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old white woman married to a Conservative Party councilor, was less fortunate. She was charged, detained, and last October convicted of “incitement to racial hatred” because she called on X—in a post she quickly deleted and for which she later apologized—for mass deportations of illegal immigrants and destruction of their places of lodging. While mass deportations are now government policy in the United States, expressing her support for such measures in the U.K. got her a sentence of 31 months behind bars, apologies be damned.

Some Britons are starting to notice the vanishing of their traditional liberties. In 2019, the journalist Toby Young, whose father Michael Young invented the term “meritocracy,” founded the Free Speech Union (FSU), a nonprofit, member-based activist organization that defends free expression across the political spectrum in Britain and other countries. FSU has scored a number of prominent legal victories, particularly in the realms of education and employment, where woke and DEI policies became entrenched despite Conservative governments’ holding power from 2010 to 2024. Liz Truss, who served as Britain’s prime minister for seven weeks in 2022, tells me she is “ashamed of the state of free speech in Britain.” She states that she is now in the process of creating a new media network “to take on the censors and reclaim our right to free speech.”

In 2023, belated legislation attempted to establish free speech rights in Britain’s universities, though critics thought it too weak to solve the problem. In any case, the new Labour government paused the implementation of the new law just five days before it was scheduled to take effect last August. A weaker variant, which denies those deprived of free speech the right to sue institutions, may still advance.

Whether such localized half-measures are likely to do much good seems doubtful. Young, who now sits in Britain’s House of Lords alongside FSU’s Chairman Nigel Biggar, a prominent scholar of the British Empire, is unsure of the future. “My fear is that Starmer is going to pull the plug,” he wrote me.

Some hope that electoral politics may yield a solution. “We now have more members than some of the country’s best-known trade unions,” Lord Young says of the FSU, “but my hope is that a properly conservative government is elected in 2029 [the year in which a new general election must be held] and makes the restoration of free speech one of the central planks of its legislative program.”

It is as yet unclear if that government will be led by the Tories, who now hold the smallest number of parliamentary seats in their party’s 200-year history and have lost considerable ground to Reform UK, in part because of their failures on free speech during their 14-year-long tenure in power. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, a populist ally of Trump, openly boasts of his intent to lead his new party, which grew out of the Brexit movement, to national victory in 2029. Last month, he opened his well-attended speech at CPAC lamenting the current state of “my country, where you can’t say anything or you might get put in prison” before concluding, “We should be allowed to say whatever the hell we want!”