Before Vice President JD Vance and his family took their summer vacation in the Cotswolds, they spent the weekend at Chevening, a country house in Kent, as guests of Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy. At their press conference, Lammy wore the petrified expression that all foreign dignitaries don when they are bracing themselves for ad-libs from the second Trump presidency.
When Lammy’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, visited the White House in February, President Donald Trump and his vice president tag-teamed a spluttering Starmer on free speech in Britain. Vance cited “infringements on free speech” in Britain that affect “American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens.”
In late July, when Trump hosted Starmer at Turnberry, the president’s golf resort in Scotland, a reporter asked about British censorship of Truth Social, the president’s social media platform. “If you censor me, you’re making a mistake,” Trump warned Starmer in the jovial and not-at-all jovial manner that could be called Mafia Don.
At Chevening, Vance was in a merciful mood. Perhaps he wanted to go fishing. He and Lammy were also booked to do a little angling in Chevening’s lake for the benefit of the press. Perhaps Vance was more concerned with the final step in his climb toward the presidential nomination, the step in which he rises above mere politics and starts to look statesmanlike. This is not possible on the partisan-sickened domestic stage. The impression of statesmanship is, like donations from Qatar, in the gift of foreigners.
“Many of the things that I worry most about were happening in the United States from 2020 to 2024,” Vance replied when asked about free speech in Britain. “I just don’t want other countries to follow us down what I think was a very dark path under the Biden administration.”
This was the diplomatic way to put it. And it was statesmanlike of Vance to frame Britain’s problems within a crisis of free speech whose symptoms are visible across the liberal democracies. But the politically motivated challenges to free speech in America are not the same as those in Britain or Europe.
The custom of the country
The First Amendment means that American speech is usually regulated by social censure in the public square or by soft censorship, which is how the social censors of the public square keep things orderly in the media. Only the most incendiary speech is restricted by law. The rest is regulated by custom. In Britain and Europe, however, the right to free speech is affirmed and taken away in the same breath.
Apart from accusations of racism or sexism, the most chilling response in American life is “That’s not appropriate.” There is no single standard for customs in America today, so no one can agree on what is or isn’t appropriate. The optimist will hope that standards of appropriateness will be set democratically. The pessimist will confirm that this is what has happened and that there are no standards anymore. The truth is, if you have free speech and a dynamic society, standards are always going to move around. As Antony says of Cleopatra, Americans can say of free speech: “Age cannot wither her / Nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
The Biden-era suppression of speech to which Vance referred fits this American pattern. The censors felt that it was not appropriate for Americans to speculate on the origins of COVID-19. It was not appropriate for the public square to resound with excerpts from the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was not illegal to talk about these things, but it did not seem desirable, especially in an election year when the Democratic candidate was Joe Biden. Most of the cable and print media volunteered to help out, just as they had done with the fake “Russiagate” claims of the 2016 elections.
The new media, the social media companies, got the message, too. The “Twitter Files,” the correspondence released by Elon Musk after his purchase of Twitter in October 2022, show that senior staff at Twitter and Facebook, and current and former intelligence officials, tried to shape the informational environment on behalf of federal agencies and staffers on Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Accounts were “boosted” and “deboosted” according to whether they were informationally appropriate. If they were not, they were “disinformation.”
It was not necessary to silence people entirely or to jail them. It was enough to put a thumb on the scales of the free market. Gerard Baker, writing in the Wall Street Journal, thought that the Twitter Files showed both the “internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values,” and also how a “powerful class of like-minded people control and limit the flow of information to advantage their monolithically progressive agenda.” The same could have been said in 2008, when media companies decided to take the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, at his own estimate.
No laws were broken in the making of this movie. But it was a fiction, perpetrated on the American public by a small and obscure group of people. The perpetrators did not want their opinions and interventions to come to public attention, but the public’s attention was the name of the game. Their distortion of facts was amplified by the reality field of the media. The old media companies figured that, with social media destroying their business model, they couldn’t afford to be high-minded. And anyway, they reasoned, the censorship was just a course correction, to stop rednecks, racists, and conspiracy theorists from putting a crook, Russian asset, and micturition fetishist back in the White House.
Britain’s situation is different. Britain has all kinds of customs around speech, but it has many more limits in law. The law is getting tighter. Each turn of the screw occurs in full view: policy statements, parliamentary debates and votes, formal cautions and arrests, prosecutions and court judgements, and outright censorship on social media. If the customs of American speech were restored to their constitutional glory by tomorrow morning, it would make no difference to British law. Given recent precedent, it might even cause a further tightening of the ratchet.
English accents
In his February speech to the Munich Security Conference, Vance referred to the case of Adam Smith-Connor. A military veteran and physiotherapist, Smith-Connor was prosecuted in October 2024 for silently praying near an abortion clinic. Smith-Connor was praying for his deceased son, who had been aborted 22 years earlier. Though he was outside the mandated 50-meter “buffer zone” established by the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act of 2014, he was arrested and prosecuted. He was conditionally discharged and made to pay the costs of his prosecution. He now has a criminal record. So does 65-year-old Livia Tossici-Bolt, a retired medical scientist who prayed silently near a second abortion clinic on two occasions in 2023, bearing a sign that read “Here to talk, if you want.”
The Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act was the work of a Conservative Party-led coalition. The minor party in this illiberal and undemocratic legislation was, naturally, the Liberal Democrats. The same Conservative-led coalition passed the Equality Act in 2010. That act prohibits discrimination, harassment, and victimization on grounds of race, religion, and sex, as well as gender, age, disability, and gender reassignment.
The Equality Act built on the Human Rights Act of 1998. This was passed by a Labour Party government and imported the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. Article 10 of the Human Rights Act is a law on the European model. It grants “the right to freedom of expression” and “hold opinions and to receive and impart information,” only to immediately condition those rights “in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”
Perhaps a society that exists in perfect peace could circulate its opinions, should there still be anything worth talking about, without breaking the Human Rights Act. In 1998, a future of Kantian harmony and End of History equilibrium seemed within grasp. It turned out that this was a mirage and that we would live in what Chinese people call “interesting times.” Social media have fed our interest in the times. The personal has never been so political, because everything is now so personal, and nothing is so personal, and few things so gratifying, as feeling like a victim.
The defining trends of our times are the expansion of state and commercial powers into our private lives and the expansion of our self-absorption. The relationship between the two may seem paradoxical, but it is symbiotic. The frontiers of privacy and personhood have been erased by communications technology and laws that try to keep up with its spread. When everything becomes transparent, we become fused to the public realm. It sounds like the vicious fantasies of communists, fascists, and Islamists, but it is, as Aldous Huxley recognized, an accidental effect of the liberal utopia that was the antidote to the 20th century’s ideologies of tyranny.
The post-1990s shift in liberal governance is a shift in liberal management of technology. Like earlier shifts in communications, such as the creation of cuneiform or the Gutenberg press, it has reconfigured the relationship between the individual and the state. The British system is unusually vulnerable to this kind of reconfiguration, so it has been formally reconfigured to an unusual extent.
The state we’re in
The British constitutional order was not created in a civilizational Year Zero, like the constitutional orders of the U.S. or France. Its laws emerged over time from custom and tradition. The right of free speech in Parliament was affirmed in law by the Bill of Rights in 1689. But the custom of free speech in Parliament was operational by the late 1300s. The patchwork nature of Britain’s nonconstitutional constitutional order depends heavily upon the stability of custom and the paternalist conscience of the ruling class. Neither now exists in Britain.
The Human Rights Act of 1998 was the cornerstone of a new constitutional order. Its creators were not all wicked, but they were casual and often self-deluding. They wanted to refound the state on rational grounds. These happened to resemble the assumptions of the European Union, into which the ruling class wanted to incorporate the remains of British sovereignty. But in 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron made the mistake of asking the British people whether they wanted this. They didn’t.
Since the Brexit vote, the reconfigured state has been at odds with the unreconstructed traditions of the majority of its subjects. Like Trump’s 2016 victory a few months later, the Brexit vote of June 2016 was the shock that symbolized the creeping breakdown of relations between governments and peoples in the Western democracies. The crisis of free speech is at the core of this crisis. Liberal democracy emerged from free speech, understood as the imperatives of the religious conscience. Free speech is contracting as the liberal state ossifies into soft tyranny. This is a civilizational problem, so Britain’s crisis resembles America’s, only with a pronounced English accent.
The slide began in 2003, when the British people were deceived by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his adviser, Alastair Campbell, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his effort to buy “yellowcake” uranium in Niger. It accelerated after 2008, when the subprime mortgage crisis flattened the British economy, with the least wealthy mortgage holders the worst hit. It went off a cliff after 2016, when a majority of British people voted to leave the European Union and a succession of Conservative governments did their best to thwart their vote. It cratered in 2020, when the government misled the people about the origins of COVID-19.
All the time, mass immigration and the fraying of the social fabric alienated the silent majority. Every British government since 2010 has included a promise to reduce immigration in its manifesto. None of them has delivered on it. Mass immigration drove up the cost of housing and blocked up the waiting lists for social housing. It drove up the welfare bill and jammed up the roads, schools, and hospitals. It filled the already crowded jails. It made women and girls unsafe on the streets. It may have spiced up the national cuisine, but it also brought in female genital mutilation, machete gangs, and the mass rape of English children by “grooming gangs,” most of them Pakistani Muslims. Even Starmer had to admit that it turned Britain into a “nation of strangers.”
There is now quite a lot to talk about. The Human Rights Act allows for suppressing speech that threatens “the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.” In an early August poll by Merlin Strategy, 70% believed that Britain’s criminal justice system is “more concerned about the rights of criminals” than of law-abiding citizens. Only 38% believed that judges “always apply the law impartially,” while 62% believe that judges “sometimes make decisions based on their personal political opinions.”
When people no longer believe in the impartiality of the judiciary, they no longer respect its authority. When the police doorstep people for their opinions and warn them that they have committed a non-crime hate incident that will appear on their employment background checks, people will view officers not as the salaried servants of the lawful majority, but as the long arm of the thought police. When the government refuses to deport illegal immigrants because the Human Rights Act prevents it, the people see that they are ruled by lawyers, for lawyers.
Britain’s historic social contract and its legal legacies are shredded. The law is supposed to rest on consent, but it is increasingly enforced by coercion and against the free-speaking traditions of the people. Merlin Strategy also found that 70% of Britons said that they feared political violence. One in five said they would participate in political violence “if things got worse.” Among the young, the figure rose to 1 in 3. Britain has more laws than it ever did. But no one feels safe.
The pas de deux of bipartisan speech suppression took another step forward at midnight on July 25, when the latest phase of the Online Safety Act came into effect. The Conservatives passed the act in 2023 to prevent children from watching pornography and visiting sites that encourage suicide. Critics, including Kemi Badenoch, who now leads the remains of the Conservatives, warned that some clauses of the law would limit freedom of speech — for instance, the “false communications” clause for prosecuting anyone who sends a message that might “cause nontrivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience.”
The act went into law with that clause unaltered. At midnight on July 25, social media users reported that they could not see footage of British police arresting anti-immigration protesters or clips of Katie Lam, a Conservative member of Parliament, talking about grooming gangs.
“The British state won’t protect children from mass gang rape,” Lam posted. “But it will ‘protect’ adults from hearing about it.”
Lam’s words reminded me of George Orwell’s line from 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
I thought about posting it on social media, but it seemed better not to say anything.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.