Britain’s complacency when it comes to free speech in this country can be measured by the testiness with which people react to criticisms about it. When JD Vance sounded off about Europe — not least Britain — putting the principles of free speech at risk in a talk he gave in Munich in February, there weren’t many who actually read his text, but there were lots who responded irritably to Americans weighing in on an issue that seems pretty OK.
Former queen of Woman’s Hour, Jenni Murray, reacted badly to JD’s views on anti-abortion activists being banned from even silent protest near clinics. On Any Questions, an American, Sarah Elliot, who had the temerity to raise the Lucy Connolly question — she’s the Tory councillor’s wife sentenced to 30 months in jail for a rash tweet about the Southport murders (subsequently withdrawn and apologised for) — got short shrift when she suggested it all seemed a bit excessive. Yanks, huh?
But you know, the Americans have a point, and they’ve got the high ground, since free speech in the US is guaranteed under the First Amendment. In fact Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, declared the other day that people abroad who seek to curb Americans’ liberty to speak their mind may find they don’t get US visas. “It is unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on US citizens or US residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on US soil,” he wrote on X. “Free speech is essential to the American way of life — a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.”
Rubio may have had in mind Europe’s Digital Services Act — a 2022 law intended to curb disinformation and hate speech online — rather than Britain, but his observations have implications for the UK too. The EU law requires tech firms — including US companies such as Meta and X — to remove illegal content and provide transparency about their content moderation. Except the trouble is, one person’s free speech is another person’s hate speech — and the bar in Britain is set low on these matters (hate crimes are based on the perspective of the alleged victim).
None of us are safe
The same goes for misinformation. Five years ago Covid took a toll on free speech here — as you’d have found if you expressed the now perfectly respectable view that the virus may have escaped from a Chinese laboratory rather than from, say, pangolins, or queried the potential side effects of the Covid vaccines. We weren’t terribly keen on free expression then — one friend, a vaccine sceptic, is still angry about the way his non-nutter group was treated. Rubio is making clear that when it comes to weaselly terms like disinformation, he’s taking the fight to those who try to curb dissident views. And good for him. Meanwhile, his aide, Samuel Samson, has called on UK and EU governments to take “tangible actions” to “guarantee protection for political and religious speech, secure borders and fair elections”.
You think it’s all wildly overheated … that we don’t have a problem? Where have you been? I lost any illusions in 1988 when Salman Rushdie went in fear of his life after the publication of The Satanic Verses and when not a single British paper published any of the Danish cartoons (remember them?) — even the perfectly benign and respectful ones — featuring Mohammed, lest their personnel be murdered by Islamists.
There was a whiff of that spirit last week after police arrested Hamit Coskun, a Turkish citizen who burned a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish embassy. I was repelled at the burning of the Muslim scripture, but I think the police should have directed their attention, not at the protester, but at those who attacked him.
Arrested for silent protest
In fact anyone who thinks we don’t have a free speech problem hasn’t been paying attention. Police arrest about 30 people a day for potentially offensive online posts — the result of thousands of hours spent trawling social media rather than, you know, getting out to catch actual criminals. If the respectable Telegraph columnist, Allison Pearson, could be visited at home by two coppers for a tweet about Palestinian protests, none of us is safe. In his post, Rubio’s aide Samson mentioned the cases of two anti-abortion activists, Livia Tossici-Bolt and Adam Smith-Connor, who were arrested in Britain for “silently praying outside abortion clinics” as evidence of “concerning trends”. That, I’d say, is an understatement. The arrests — and £20,000 fine in the case of Tossici-Bolt — were the consequence of a law banning anything that might resemble dissent, even silently, even in thought, within 150 metres of an abortion clinic. It’s self-evidently at the expense of free speech on a profoundly serious matter of conscience.
Tossici-Bolt’s offence was standing within the exclusion zone with a placard saying “Here to talk if you want”. Dangerous, huh? As for another protester, Isabelle Vaughan-Spruce, she was accosted by a community police officer who demanded to know if she was praying. None of these people was behaving aggressively but they got arrested.
Vance said in Munich that “free speech, I fear, is in retreat”. The Trump administration may go out of its way to court controversy — and I think it is wrong in its condemnation of European sanctions on extremist Israeli ministers — but on this one, I say, the Americans are right. Thank you, JD.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
