Does Britain Have a Free Speech Problem?

This is an edited version of a speech I gave to a small group of British financiers and lawyers in Dubrovnik yesterday.

When Keir Starmer visited the White House in February 2025, J.D. Vance used the occasion to raise what he called “infringements on free speech” in Britain. Our then Prime Minister, sitting a few feet away in the Oval Office, was having none of it. “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom,” he said, “and it will last for a very, very long time.” He added that he was “very proud of our history there”.

Was Sir Keir right to dismiss those concerns? I want to answer that question not with anecdotes, of which I have a great many, but with numbers.

Arrests, charges and convictions

Let’s start with a new report from Big Brother Watch, entitled Britain’s Free Speech Problem. Its headline finding is that between January 1st 2021 and December 31st 2025, 62,199 people were arrested in the UK on suspicion of committing just three communications offences. These are section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalises sending a “grossly offensive” message over a public electronic network; section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988; and section 179 of the Online Safety Act 2023, the new “false communications” offence.

That’s a shocking figure, but it’s an underestimate. Several police forces didn’t respond to Big Brother Watch’s Freedom of Information requests, including Police Scotland. Big Brother Watch estimates the true figure is 73,023. So on a conservative estimate, the police are arresting 34 people a day for things they’ve said, the vast majority online, and the true figure is closer to 40 a day. Russia, incidentally, is thought to arrest around 400 people a year for similar offences.

Of those 62,199 people, 18,520 were charged and 12,292 were convicted. That’s more than 12,000 people with criminal records for speech offences in five years. And that number is likely to go up if the proposals to curtail the right to trial by jury, first put forward by David Lammy when he was Justice Secretary, become law. Research by the Free Speech Union found that in the year to June 2025, 14% of people tried for speech offences in a magistrates’ court were acquitted, compared with 33% in the Crown Court, where the case was heard by a jury. Twelve ordinary men and women, it turns out, are less likely than a district judge to conclude that an intemperate tweet merits a criminal conviction. Leave the decision to judges and magistrates and more people will be convicted.

Is it getting worse?

But is the number of people being arrested for speech offences actually increasing? Yes, it is, as a similar piece of research by the Times established last year. It FoI’d every police force in England and Wales and asked how many arrests they’d made relating to just two of those three offences: section 127 of the Communications Act and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. Like Big Brother Watch’s data, the Times‘s is incomplete. Only 37 forces responded; eight didn’t. But the trend is unmistakable:

• 2017: 5,502 arrests
• 2018: 6,591 arrests
• 2019: 7,734 arrests
• 2020: 9,962 arrests
• 2021: 11,403 arrests
• 2022: 13,437 arrests
• 2023: 12,183 arrests

(Arrests under s127 of the Communications Act 2003 and s1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, England and Wales only.)

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of arrests rose by 58%, and since 2017 it has more than doubled. The 2023 figure works out at 33 arrests a day.

Non-Crime Hate Incidents

You might think that if most people arrested for these offences aren’t convicted, and the proportion charged in the Times data is lower than in Big Brother Watch’s, then no great harm is done. Not so. Even when no charge follows, the complaint that triggered the arrest may be recorded as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI). (Yes, that can still happen in spite of the recommendation by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council that NCHIs should be phased out.) NCHIs can show up on an enhanced criminal records check and prevent you getting a job as a teacher or a carer.

How many of these non-crimes are there? In 2020, the Telegraph FoI’d police forces in England and Wales and discovered that around 120,000 had been recorded between 2014 and 2019. That’s more than 65 a day.

Priorities

There can be little doubt that the police are prioritising the investigation of speech offences over other crimes. Consider the proportion of offences that resulted in someone being charged in the year ending March 2026. For rape, it was 3.4%. For burglary, 5%. For vehicle crime, 2.8%.

The Telegraph found that in 48.2% of neighbourhoods in England and Wales, not a single burglary was solved in a three year period. Rick Muir of the Police Foundation told the paper that in large parts of the country, burglary had effectively been decriminalised.

So if you come home to find your front door kicked in and your laptop gone, my advice is not to bother reporting it. Instead, spray paint “Transwomen aren’t women” on the door and report the burglary as a “hate crime”. You’ll have six armed police officers on your doorstep in 10 minutes.

The Online Safety Act

That brings me to the third offence in Big Brother Watch’s data, section 179 of the Online Safety Act, and to the Act more broadly.

The Online Safety Act empowered Ofcom to fine social media companies if they fail to remove illegal content – or, if the content is accessible to children, “legal but harmful” content – and the fines are so eye-wateringly large, the threat will inevitably lead to over-removal, including the removal of perfectly lawful posts that are only accessible to adults. Ofcom can fine malefactors up to £18 million or 10% of annual global turnover, whichever is greater. In Meta’s case, global turnover was $200.97 billion in 2025, so a 10% fine would come to $20.1 billion, or about £14.9 billion. And Ofcom would use Meta’s revenue as the benchmark, because Facebook isn’t a separate company. Faced with that sort of downside, what sensible compliance officer isn’t going to err on the side of caution?

The Act is worse in this respect than its European cousin, the Digital Services Act. The DSA requires platforms to take down unlawful content once it has been flagged to them by the regulator. The Online Safety Act requires social media companies to proactively remove content that is likely to be unlawful, before anyone has flagged anything.

We don’t yet know how much over-removal is taking place, because UK service providers aren’t due to disclose that data until 2027. But to give you a sense of the scale of what’s coming, consider Reddit. In 2019, Reddit’s staff removed 222,000 items for policy breaches and banned 21,900 forums. Reddit’s unpaid army of volunteer moderators – digital curtain-twitchers – removed a staggering 84.1 million items. Those are global figures, not UK ones, but they tell you what content moderation on an industrial scale looks like.

What sort of content is being removed? If you think it’s “just” hate speech, that isn’t much comfort. Who decides what is and isn’t hate speech? Are we content to let Meta, X and Google make that call? What about Ofcom? To give you an idea of what gets flagged as “hate speech”, in April 2020 change.org took down a petition by Kellie-Jay Keen urging the Oxford English Dictionary not to change its definition of “woman” from “adult human female”, following demands for it to be replaced by something more “trans inclusive”. The reason given by the platform was that defining a woman as an “adult human female” is “hate speech”.

What about ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’? Surely we can trust the platforms to get that right? On November 19th 2020, the Spectator published an article headlined “Landmark Danish Study Shows Face Masks Have No Significant Effect”. Facebook flagged it as “false information”. The authors were Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, and Dr Tom Jefferson, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and lead author of the Cochrane review “Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses”. It’s a safe bet that Carl and Tom knew more about the efficacy of face masks and the robustness of the Danish study than the humanities graduate Facebook had employed to fact-check them.

Age-gating

Where content isn’t removed or flagged, it can now be age-gated. Since July 2025, platforms have been obliged under the Online Safety Act to age-gate content that is “legal but harmful” to children. Among the things placed behind age verification in the first few weeks were Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son, Katie Lam’s speech in the House of Commons about the grooming gangs, and a Spiked video about online censorship.

In addition, the Government has already given itself the power under the Act to bring forward regulations restricting under-16s’ access to social media.

Both measures should alarm anyone who cares about democracy, because the Representation of the People Bill will extend the franchise to 16 year-olds. How are 16 year-olds supposed to make informed decisions at the ballot box if they can’t access social media until their 16th birthday, or watch speeches made in the House of Commons until they’re 18, when platforms like TikTok are now their main source of news?

In theory, these restrictions should be tempered by the duties in sections 17, 18 and 19 of the Act, which oblige platforms to protect content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content. However, those sections haven’t yet been activated. All the takedown duties are in force; all the keep-up duties are not.

What’s coming?

Unfortunately, it’s likely to get worse. A couple of months ago, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport published a Green Paper called Watch This Space. It proposes giving Ofcom the power to compel social media platforms, including YouTube, to give greater prominence in their algorithms to content produced by the BBC, ITV, STV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and S4C, along with other “trusted” news sources. Ofcom itself agrees – it recommended it be given this power in its current review of public service broadcasters.

But whether a source counts as “trusted” won’t be determined by how much people actually trust it. According to Ofcom’s own latest data – which, ironically, it initially forgot to publish – viewers of GB News trust it more than viewers of the BBC, ITV, Sky News and Channel 4. If people trusted the BBC, they wouldn’t need an algorithm to force-feed it to them, like a child being told to eat his greens.

So how would Ofcom decide which news sources deserve this privileged status? My fear is that it would become a prize awarded to “recognised news publishers”, a term that appears in the Online Safety Act relating to which content social media companies will have a duty not to remove once sections 18 and 19 are activated. At present, the criteria for that status are fairly broad. But Ofcom could easily tighten them, perhaps by adding a requirement that the news publisher in question bend the knee to a state-approved regulator. That would, in effect, bring back state licensing of the press, something we haven’t had in Britain since 1695.

There would be other consequences. The Trump administration might well retaliate by encouraging American platforms to give more prominence to US-produced content, which could mean the output of our public service broadcasters being buried in their biggest overseas market. British content creators on platforms like YouTube could see their audiences suppressed, undermining their business models. And it would be extremely damaging to alternative news publishers that rely on reaching large audiences through social media to build their subscription revenue. (I should declare an interest here, since Skeptics Ltd, a company that I am the largest shareholder and which publishes the Daily Sceptic, is one of them.)

Then there’s the idea floated by Lucy Powell, Labour’s Deputy Leader. She has suggested the Representation of the People Bill be amended so that social media platforms are subject to some of the same restrictions as licensed broadcasters during election periods. So political debate, the thing elections are supposed to be about, would be curtailed on the platforms where most people now conduct it, precisely when it matters most.

The counter-disinformation state

The British state also has non-legislative ways of monitoring and suppressing content it disapproves of. Andy Burnham used his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly this week to announce the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence. Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, welcomed it: “A British counter-disinformation centre is long overdue, and very welcome.”

That’s an odd thing to say. What she should have said is that yet another British counter-disinformation centre is long overdue, because by my count we already have at least nine. There’s the National Security Online Information Team, the Government Communication Service, the Media Monitoring Unit, the Research, Information and Communications Unit, the Defending Democracy Taskforce, the Joint Election Security and Preparedness Unit and the FCDO’s Information Threats and Influence Directorate. Then there’s the work the National Cyber Security Centre and GCHQ do investigating hostile cyber activity and information threats, the Social Cohesion Taskforce and, not to be forgotten, the Army’s 77th Brigade.

These Orwellian agencies are always sold as a response to threats from hostile foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran. But they aren’t confined to monitoring foreign threats: more than half of them monitor and in some cases flag domestic content. The new centre was sold in the same way. Burnham justified it by citing Russian mis- and disinformation, but in the next breath he tied it to “community cohesion” and preventing a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain”. In other words, it’s there to stop British people saying things about Britain that the Government would rather they didn’t.

Prevent

These agencies are part of the UK’s growing counter-extremism ecosystem, and its most famous face is Prevent, supposedly the linchpin of the state’s counter-extremism strategy.

In the year to March 2025, 8,778 referrals were made to Prevent, a 27% increase on the previous year. Of those referred, 21% were classified as “extreme right-wing” and only 10% as “Islamist”. That’s in spite of the fact that about three quarters of MI5’s counter-terrorism caseload is Islamist, and only a quarter extreme right-wing.

Why the discrepancy? Part of the answer may lie in something the Free Speech Union discovered last year: a Prevent “refresher awareness course” on a Home Office website, designed to help public sector employees identify people they should refer to the programme. It identified “cultural nationalism” as a warning sign that someone was at risk of being radicalised by extreme right-wing ideology, and described expressing concern about mass immigration as an attitude associated with cultural nationalism. By that standard, a good chunk of the electorate – including the current Home Secretary – should be on a watch list.

Before that, a report produced for Prevent by the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) set out what it regarded as key texts for white nationalists. They included the complete works of Shakespeare, as well as books by Orwell, Huxley, Tolkien, Conrad and Burke. Other warning signs included DVDs of the Dam Busters, Zulu, the Great Escape and the Bridge on the River Kwai, and box sets of Yes Minister, the Thick of It, the original House of Cards and Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys.

The censorship-industrial complex

Beyond these state agencies there’s a whole censorship ecosystem of NGOs, lobby groups and think tanks – the British arm of the global censorship-industrial complex. It includes the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose internal documents reportedly set out an aim to “kill Musk’s Twitter”; the Council for Countering Online Disinformation; Stop Funding Fake News; Hope Not Hate; Labour Together; and the Global Disinformation Index.

Why?

Why are the British authorities so concerned about what ordinary people say on social media?

As David Betz and Michael Rainsborough have pointed out, it’s as though the state is acting like a colonial power occupying a foreign country, and has built a surveillance and suppression apparatus to manage the unruly indigenous population. Got to keep a close eye on the natives and nip any potential uprisings in the bud.

Hannah Arendt wrote about this in the Origins of Totalitarianism – techniques of control developed to govern colonies are later used by former colonial powers to govern their own domestic populations.

It also reflects our governing class’s collapsing faith in multiculturalism. They used to believe “diversity is our strength”. Not any more. Now they view many British cities as tinderboxes that could explode at any moment, so the lid must be kept on tight.

More broadly, it reflects a loss of faith in liberalism itself. The reason the governing class pretends that anyone who dissents from progressive orthodoxy has been manipulated by bad actors trafficking in mis- and disinformation is that it’s easier than acknowledging that these disputes are, at bottom, conflicts of values. Having lost their faith, they don’t want the burden of defending the policies that flow from it in the public square. Far easier to pretend that everyone would agree with them if only they were properly informed, and that anyone who doesn’t must have been reading something they shouldn’t.

Censorship doesn’t work

I won’t spend too much time on the usual justifications for free speech as I’m sure you’re more than familiar with them. It’s how we make informed decisions about who to vote for. It’s how we make progress in science and technology and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. It’s how we test and evaluate different ideas about how to organise society and what a good life looks like. It’s a bulwark against totalitarianism. And it’s the most valuable human right of all, because without it we cannot defend any of the others.

Instead, I’ll leave you with an argument that even the defenders of the status quo might find persuasive: censorship isn’t working. In spite of the British state’s efforts to suppress dissent, Reform UK is leading in the polls. So is the AfD in Germany and the National Rally in France, in spite of similar efforts across the EU to suppress narratives that threaten the hegemony of the EU’s political elite. In the three biggest economies in Europe, the parties the EU is most determined to censor are the most popular.

Our masters would do well to heed Louis Brandeis, the great Supreme Court Justice, who wrote in Whitney v California in 1927: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” That became known as the counter-speech doctrine, and until about 15 years ago it was the prevailing wisdom of political elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

We can but hope they rediscover it soon. Otherwise, Sir Keir’s prediction that free speech will last in Britain for a “very, very long time” may turn out to be one of his more optimistic predictions.

Stop Press: Watch the FSU’s Connie Shaw react on GB News to Andy Burnham announcing a “National Centre for Information Defence” to tackle “disinformation”. “This Government has a very dim view of the British public, it is very patronising,” she tells Jacob Rees-Mogg’s State of the Nation.

‘This government has a very dim view of the British public, it is very patronising.’

External Affairs Officer at the Free Speech Union Connie Shaw reacts to Andy Burnham announcing a ‘National Centre for Information Defence’ to tackle ‘disinformation’. pic.twitter.com/dz3HUZ5yD2

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 23, 2026