Trump's British Free Speech Crusade
The Americans Escalate...
Donald Trump’s British free speech crusade continues with aplomb. The President has quietly sent a five-person team from the U.S. State Department to investigate Britain’s censorial government and the perilous state of free expression in the United Kingdom.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further yesterday announcing “a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans”.
The Telegraph explained that the visa ban could apply to individuals working for Ofcom (Britain’s state regulator responsible for policing online safety laws). And that “[t]he Online Safety Act is despised by Donald Trump’s administration because of the massive fines it can levy on US tech companies. Under the law, social media giants face fines of up to £18 million or 10 per cent of their annual revenue if they fail to remove harmful content from their platforms.”
The erosion of free speech in Britain has been happening for years, turbo-charged by Keir Starmer’s Labour government. But it has been given global attention recently owing to the likes of Elon Musk highlighting cases of people locked up for tweets.
The police are now making 30 arrests a day for so-called "offensive" online messages. This month a retired police officer was arrested for warning about the threat of antisemitism on social media, and had his Douglas Murray books and Spectator magazines rummaged through as a consequence.
Furthermore the Daily Mail report that the “White House is 'monitoring' Lucy Connolly's case after her bid to be freed from prison over a 'racist' tweet was quashed”.
Lucy Connolly is the wife of a Conservative Party councillor currently serving a 31 month prison sentence for the following post on X:
Not a very nice post, certainly one I do not endorse, but two and a half years? It might also be noted that she deleted and apologised for the social media post within a matter of hours. Like most of the country at the time, she was emotionally swept up in the horror and outrage of the Southport murders of three young girls by Axel Rudakubana.
The Trump Administration’s interest in Britain’s free speech clamp down has not been entirely consistent. Vice President JD Vance brought up his concerns at the Munich Security Conference back in February saying “free speech in Britain and across Europe was in retreat”. Later that month, Keir Starmer refuted the notion that Britain has a free speech problem at the Oval Office.
Fast forward to April and I asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at The White House whether free speech would be part of the US-UK trade deal as promised by Vance, who had reportedly insisted “no free speech, no deal. It is as simple as that”. Vance’s statement ran contrary to Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick’s later announcement that free speech had never been apart of negotiations.
Outrage in Britain regarding Connolly’s sentence and many others serving draconian punishments are exacerbated by a sense of two-tier justice. Whereas Connolly and others’ crimes were not themselves violent acts, here are some recent violent crime sentences by comparison…
Rees Newman, 33, is a child rapist who was spared jail due to the prison overcrowding crisis.
Sam Sharma, 34, got a three year sentence for drugging and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
Iqbal Chand, 31, a migrant who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, has avoided jail.
Abu Wadee, 33, who arrived illegally on a small boat, voiced support for Hamas and the murder of Jews, was given 9 months.
Antonio Boparan, 19, got eighteen months for killing a girl in a car accident when he was driving 70 mph in a 30 mph zone. Boparan was sentenced by the same judge who sentenced Lucy Connolly. In the end Boparan served only 6 months.
Even Labour councillor Ricky Jones, who announced to a large crowd ‘we need to cut throats of far-right rioters’ in August 2024, has had his trial delayed until August 2025.
And you may remember the video from May 2021 of an entourage of cars parading Palestine flags around North London howling from megaphones “F*** the Jews… f*** all of them. F*** their mothers, f*** their daughters, and show your support for Palestine”. All men involved were arrested but since have had all their charges dropped.
Matt Goodwin wrote in the Daily Mail that Lucy Connolly was given a longer sentence than some members of a Pakistani rape gang who sexually abused children.
As well as Lucy Connolly, The Telegraph reports that the issue of silent prayer is what Trump’s new free speech team has been investigating in Britain…
“A five-person team from the US state department spent days in the country and interviewed campaigners to feed back to the White House. They met with five activists who had been arrested for silently protesting outside abortion clinics across Britain… They met with officials from the Foreign Office and challenged Ofcom on the Online Safety Act, which is thought to be a point of contention in the White House.”
Most recently, Mrs Docherty, a 74-year-old woman, was arrested in February outside a Glasgow hospital for holding a non-coercive pro-life sign, violating Scotland's Safe Access Zones law. In 2022, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested for silent prayer outside an abortion clinic. She was eventually let off in 2023. But in 2024 Adam Smith-Connor endured 2 years of legal proceedings, 3 days of trial, and a criminal conviction, for three minutes of silent prayer.
I might note that not all prayer is illegal. There were no such legal proceedings for those praying on their knees towards Mecca, outside the Israel Embassy in Kensington on October 8th, 2023, whilst others were jubilantly chanting “Allah Akbar” in celebration.
So what is the difference between the UK and US on free speech protection in law?
The first glaring difference is the First Amendment. Second is the Brandenburg test which is used in courts to understand if speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND the speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
Lucy Connelly’s tweet would not have be enough to put her in jail in America.
In Britain, free speech has had a long tradition of protection through the common law system. However, we still had blasphemy laws until 2008 and sedition laws until 2009.
Just as we have a long history of great works defending free speech (most famously the works of John Milton, John Locke and John Stuart Mill), we simultaneously have a long history of censorship. Part of the reason America has the First Amendment is because they understood British censorship before their independence.
In America, the First Amendment tempered censorship and bred a culture of free speech. In Britain a mountain of censorial laws accreted, especially after World War 2. These were in part inspired by the belief that hurty words inevitably lead to the Holocaust (as explained by Lord Toby Young) and in part to deal with community tensions which grew with increased immigration.
These laws include… (deep breath):
The Public Order Act 1986
The Malicious Communications Act 1988
The Protection from Harassment Act 1997
The Crime and Disorder Act 1998
The Communications Act 2003
The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006
The Terrorism Act 2000 and Terrorism Act 2006
The Online Safety Act 2023
And there's more…
Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs), used to clamp down on silent prayer, were introduced under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014
Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs) were introduced in 2014
In August 2024, Prime Minsiter Starmer announced a National Violent Disorder Programme saying “violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime, and it’s happening on your premises.” He pushed a hard response to online activity. The Crown Prosecution Service, an independent body, pursued cases against individuals for social media posts deemed to be spreading misinformation.
And although blasphemy laws were abolished in 2008, Labour are currently considering reintroducing Islamophobia laws.
(This doesn’t even get into defamation, libel and contempt of court laws, laws I don't necessarily object to, but I mention to illustrate just how gargantuan is the mountain range restricting speech in Britain.)
The only protection in Britain is Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). But Part 2 of the Act notes that a nation’s laws against speech are not protected by the article.
And it gets worse…
As The Free Speech Union explain:
So where does that leave us…
President Trump and his administration may in part be trolling Prime Minister Starmer. But clearly they are not happy with the Online Safety Act. Rubio’s recent statements bring renewed hope to those of us in Britain concerned with our government and justice system’s censorial nature.
There is a clear escalation from the Americans. But as with JD Vance and the US-UK trade deal, such words may not amount to much in practice.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
And here is more detail in a recent YouTube monologue:
WM
When Kier Starmer was asked which he preferred , 'Westminster or Davos" he chose Davos! That should have been a huge re flag to this nation. How many news outlets reported or commented on its consequences?
Thanks Winston. I find it incomprehensible that such an old democracy which supposedly has freedom of expression at its core, is losing its way so easily. We can no longer sneer at authoritarian regimes and say ‘that could never happen here’.