{"id":2702962,"date":"2026-11-09T00:26:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T05:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/britains-war-on-free-expression\/"},"modified":"2026-11-09T00:37:05","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T05:37:05","slug":"britains-war-on-free-expression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/britains-war-on-free-expression\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain\u2019s War on Free Expression"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">10<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fbritains-war-on-free-expression%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2702962&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Recent UK developments show growing state control over speech: civil servants wrote BBC pieces, Prevent targeted lawful critics, and thousands faced arrests or police records over expression. Vague laws (Section 127, Public Order Act) and Non-crime Hate Incidents chill speech. The Online Safety Act and proposed labour measures would empower Ofcom, enforce identity checks, promote state-favored media, create a national disinformation center and a database of forbidden narratives. Critics liken this to 17th-century licensing and warn it threatens free expression. The Free Speech Union\u2019s surge in members frames Britain\u2019s path as a cautionary example.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div class=\"c-blog-post__content s-wysiwyg s-wysiwyg--blog\">\n<div style=\"margin-bottom:30px;\" id=\"elevenlabs-audionative-widget\" data-height=\"90\" data-width=\"100%\" data-frameborder=\"no\" data-scrolling=\"no\" data-publicuserid=\"cb0d9922301244fcc1aeafd0610a8e90a36a320754121ee126557a7416405662\" data-playerurl=\"https:\/\/elevenlabs.io\/player\/index.html\" >Loading the <a href=\"https:\/\/elevenlabs.io\/text-to-speech\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Elevenlabs Text to Speech<\/a> AudioNative Player&#8230;<\/div>\n<p><script src=\"https:\/\/elevenlabs.io\/player\/audioNativeHelper.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script>                            <\/p>\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap wp-block-paragraph\">The <em>Daily Telegraph<\/em> on October 18 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2026\/10\/18\/bbc-suspends-civil-service-fact-checking-scheme\/\">reported<\/a> that since 2018, dozens of British civil servants had been seconded to the BBC for periods of three to six months, during which they wrote news stories and advised on \u201chigh-impact, sensitive topics\u201d such as Channel migrant crossings in small boats from France and the Covid pandemic. Their work appeared in stories published on the BBC News website, sometimes under the auspices of BBC Verify, supposedly an exemplar of rigorous standards whose stated mission is to \u201ccounter disinformation\u201d and fact-check untruths. Their salaries were paid by the government whose record they were charged with checking. Nobody told the audience. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Within two days of the story breaking, the BBC suspended the scheme, insisting that all editorial decisions are made by its own journalists. It remains the case that for eight years, the department responsible for immigration policy had staff inside the national broadcaster\u2019s newsroom, \u201cverifying\u201d its coverage of immigration.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another recent report from the <em>Telegraph<\/em>: One fine day <a href=\"https:\/\/www.yahoo.com\/news\/us\/articles\/mother-referred-prevent-over-identifying-191057797.html\">last July<\/a>, two police officers knocked at a house in the northeast of England. The woman who answered, Holly Passmore, is 44, the mother of two children, and a graduate student of Holocaust history at the University of Haifa. She had recently returned from a press trip to Israel, and it was this that the officers wished to discuss. They did not mention her health, although the document that had sent them to her door described her as having mental health problems and being \u201cvulnerable to negative influence.\u201d They asked why she was interested in \u201cJewish issues,\u201d given that her neighborhood \u201cis not a Jewish area,\u201d and whether she had ever been to Auschwitz. They told her she might be \u201cat risk of manipulation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>                         <!-- \/22404337467,3946880\/theamericanconservative-Leaderboard-Top -->                         <\/p>\n<div id='div-gpt-ad-1742316429780-0' style='min-width: 300px; min-height: 50px; max-width: 100%; '>                         <\/div>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Passmore had been referred to Prevent, the counterterrorism program under which the British state identifies people supposedly at risk of being drawn into extremist activity. The police record, which Passmore later obtained, stated that she \u201cover-identified with the conflict between Israel and Palestine\u201d and was \u201csupportive of Israel to the point that she has traveled to Israel.\u201d The document also conceded, in a sentence that ought to have ended the matter before it began, that \u201cthere is no CT [counterterrorist] concern with an individual being supportive of Israel as it\u2019s a democracy.\u201d When she complained about this incursion into her personal freedom by the state, the police advised her not to discuss the case online.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This state scrutiny of legal speech is now all too common in the UK, though this sort of intrusion would be deemed unconstitutional in the United States, thanks to the development of First Amendment protections, specifically the \u201cchilling effect doctrine.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Both incidents illustrate an attitude toward freedom of expression that would surely astonish most Americans: a baseline acceptance of state interference with free expression and state scrutiny of legal speech. In Passmore\u2019s case, machinery built to disrupt jihadists was turned on a woman whose offense was to hold a lawful opinion with what a police officer determined was too much warmth. In the BBC\u2019s case, the state did not merely censor the news, but helped to write it. Both, it should be noted, were supposedly justified by a bureaucratic language of protection: the safeguarding of a \u201cvulnerable\u201d adult; the fight against \u201cdisinformation.\u201d Unfortunately, they exemplify a trend that is intensifying, with that vocabulary now being used to underpin other current and future measures, which threaten to install the most draconian regime of censorship seen in my country for almost 400 years. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I work for the Free Speech Union, a nonprofit founded in London in 2020 to defend the speech rights of its members and to campaign for free expression more broadly. When the current Labour government took office in July 2024 we had 14,000 members. We now have almost 51,000, an increase of more than 250 percent in a little over two years. Some of that growth reflects nothing more sinister than a growing awareness that my organization exists. But it also reflects a perception, now widely shared, that free speech in this country is increasingly under assault.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Since opening, we\u2019ve taken more than 7,000 cases involving individuals, including a few celebrities. Graham Linehan, the writer of some of the best-loved television comedies Britain has produced, stepped off a transatlantic flight at Heathrow in September 2025 to find five armed officers waiting to arrest him over three posts on X about transgender rights; the shock sent his blood pressure so high that he was taken to hospital in a blue-light ambulance. (The Crown Prosecution Service did not charge him, and, thanks to the FSU, he has been paid compensation for his unlawful ordeal.) A couple in Hertfordshire, one a radio producer, were arrested in front of their children and held for eleven hours over messages criticizing their daughter\u2019s school in a parents\u2019 WhatsApp chat group. No charges followed; the police apologized and, again thanks to help from the FSU, paid them \u00a320,000. Most of those we help are not famous at all: nurses, teachers, students, people reported to human resources in corporations or public sector organizations for the heresy of the month.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s widely known that Britain lacks a written constitution, but it does possess a free press older than the United States. It also has Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998. But this is nothing like as strong a free-speech shield as America\u2019s First Amendment. It is hedged with caveats and exceptions, and the way the law has evolved means the courts must \u201cbalance\u201d it against other, supposedly competing rights when it is invoked (for example, the right to privacy).<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This means that criminal offenses whose definitions would be struck down in America, such as the vague and flexible offense of \u201cstirring up\u201d racial hatred, are enshrined in UK law. And according to figures released in September by the advocacy group Big Brother Watch, based on Freedom of Information Act disclosures, more than 62,000 people have been arrested here for speech and communications offenses over the past five years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A dense thicket of statutes makes this possible. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offense to send a \u201cgrossly offensive\u201d message over a public electronic network. Drafted with threatening or abusive phone calls in mind, it is now often used to try to criminalize posts on social media. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 covers \u201cindecent\u201d or \u201cgrossly offensive\u201d messages sent with alleged intent to cause distress. Arrests and prosecutions under these laws do not require evidence of an immediate physical threat, incitement, or a falsehood. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Public Order Act 1986 is the statute that outlaws \u201cstirring up\u201d hate, an offense punishable by up to seven years in prison. It was under this Act that Lucy Connolly, a childminder and mother, was charged for a post on X on the day in July 2024 when three little girls were murdered at a dance class in Southport. Mistakenly believing that the killer was a recent illegal migrant, she suggested that the hotels housing such individuals at public expense should be set alight. She went nowhere near a hotel, was not alleged to have incited a successful, real-world attack, and deleted her post within hours\u2014but was still sentenced to 31 months in prison. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hamit Co\u015fkun, a Turkish-born refugee opposed to the Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, burned a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London as an act of political protest. He was stabbed by a passer-by who objected to his actions, but it was Co\u015fkun who was charged and then convicted of a \u201creligiously aggravated\u201d public order offense. The FSU supported him, and eventually an appellate court quashed the conviction, observing that the criminal law does not exist to protect people from being upset. This was a victory. But there have since been other attempts to recreate a British blasphemy law, 18 years after Parliament abolished it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then there is the most distinctively British invention of all: the Non-Crime Hate Incident (NCHI), a police record, held in your name on a national database, of something you said that broke no law whatsoever, but was logged because someone perceived it to be motivated by hostility toward a protected group. More than a quarter of a million such incidents have been recorded in England and Wales over the past 10 years. One was recorded against a man for whistling the theme tune of a children\u2019s cartoon, because a neighbor decided it sounded racist; another against a former home secretary for giving a speech. NCHIs may not send you to prison, but they can wreck your career, because they may surface in background checks when you apply for a job. In January, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2026\/jan\/29\/police-plans-to-stop-recording-lower-level-hate-incidents-in-england-and-wales-a-disaster-for-disabled-people-campaigners-warn\">announced<\/a> that they would be scrapped in England and Wales. But they are, she said, to be replaced by a \u201cnew legal framework,\u201d and the fate of the existing quarter-million records is unresolved. Meanwhile, the police in Scotland and Northern Ireland, who do not fall within the UK Home Secretary\u2019s jurisdiction, intend to carry on recording them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Prevent program, too, has strayed well beyond its purpose. Its training materials have listed \u201ccultural nationalism,\u201d the belief that Western culture is threatened by mass migration, as a warning sign of extremism: a mainstream opinion, held by millions, cataloged as a step on the road to terror. We at the FSU are assisting a health-service employee referred for attending a lawful rally alongside 120,000 others, and a schoolboy referred for saying he wanted a proscribed terrorist group destroyed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Speech at protests has narrowed too. In July 2025 the government proscribed Palestine Action, a direct-action group that had caused millions of pounds of damage to military aircraft, as a terrorist organization, although it appears to have little in common with more obvious terror groups such as Al Qaeda or Hamas, and it has never launched a fatal attack. The Free Speech Union does not defend vandalism. But proscription makes it a terrorism offense merely to express support for the group, and at one London demonstration <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/c8rvly00440o\">some 890 people<\/a> were arrested in a day, most for doing nothing more threatening than standing peacefully in the street holding placards. Some were elderly; others members of the clergy. To criminalize the expression of support, as distinct from the acts supported, is to punish opinion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For the online world, a larger machine is now being built. The Online Safety Act 2023 hands sweeping powers to Ofcom, the government communications regulator. Platforms must not only remove content Ofcom identifies as illegal; they must also go looking for content they themselves judge might be unlawful, on pain of high fines. The Act does contain sections that are supposed to protect free expression of democratic importance and legitimate journalism, yet they have not been brought into force. Meanwhile, the government is about to bar everyone under the age of 16 from social media. This means that everyone else will have to provide proof of their identity and age\u2014bringing state surveillance into every smartphone. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of this was in place before Andy Burnham became prime minister in July. His new government proposes to go considerably further, and here the vocabulary of protection reaches its apogee. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy\u2019s recent policy paper, <em>Watch this space<\/em>, recommends compelling platforms to <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >prioritize showing \u201cregulated public service media<\/a>,\u201d so that outlets such as the BBC are (in her words introducing the paper) \u201cseen and heard in the fierce battle against mis- and disinformation.\u201d The game is zero-sum: Promoting the BBC demotes everyone else. Nandy also stated recently that the social media ban for under-16s was only a \u201cstaging post\u201d toward \u201ca very active interventionist state, policing and regulating the online space.\u201d Her colleague Lucy Powell, Labour\u2019s deputy leader, has said she wants platforms brought under \u201csome of the same requirements\u201d of accuracy and balance as state-licensed broadcasters during election campaigns. And following amendments to the Online Safety Act earlier this year, Ofcom has told platforms to draw up protocols for restricting content during a \u201ccrisis\u201d such as the protests in several cities after the child murders in Southport.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Underpinning these proposals is a 136-page \u201cevidence review\u201d of mis- and disinformation commissioned by the Government Office for Science from a team at Sheffield University and published in May. It concluded that online falsehood is \u201ca systemic national risk,\u201d recommended statutory \u201cquality signals\u201d in content ranking, a state-linked \u201cdatabase of false and misleading narratives,\u201d and official \u201cprebunking\u201d in schools, warning that debate about what misinformation actually is \u201cshould not become a distraction from action.\u201d Its authors did not attempt to measure how much falsehood exists online, or whether it had much impact; by their own account they relied on AI-generated summaries of 228 papers. Its \u201cexpert reviewers\u201d included the chief executive of the Global Disinformation Index, a lobby group that pressures advertisers to defund publishers it dislikes. Among its victims is the website UnHerd, which dares to publish gender-critical writers, and\u00a0 which drew this group\u2019s ire during the Covid pandemic for granting space to what it claimed was a \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d\u2014the notion that the virus may have emerged from a poorly guarded lab in Wuhan, China. (Needless to say, that conspiracy theory is now widely accepted as the likeliest explanation for the pandemic by scientists and intelligence agencies such as the CIA.) <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What the review omitted was the large body of research published in the world\u2019s leading journals that contradicts it. For example, a 2024 paper in <em>Nature<\/em> found exposure to false or extreme content online to be low, and concentrated among a motivated fringe who were not fed it by malevolent social media algorithms but took steps to seek it out. According to this and other studies, \u201cfake news\u201d accounts for roughly 0.15 percent of the average media diet. A 2023 experiment in <em>Science<\/em> that gave tens of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users a chronological feed instead of an algorithmic one for three months found this made no difference to their political attitudes. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On September 22, at the United Nations General Assembly, Burnham announced his intention to create a new National Centre for Information Defence. Its stated target would be hostile-state information warfare, especially from Russia, which he said is driving Britons to the far right. His new organ, he promised, would be a bulwark for \u201ccommunity cohesion\u201d against a \u201cdistorted and untrue narrative about Britain.\u201d <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A few weeks later, he blamed Russian misinformation for the result of the Brexit referendum\u2014a claim made widely back in 2016, which has been comprehensively demolished, not least by an exhaustive <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oii.ox.ac.uk\/did-russia-meddle-in-brexit-a-social-media-study-casts-doubt\/\">study<\/a> by the Oxford Internet Institute. Nobody in his government has yet said where hostile-state activity ends and domestic dissent begins, or what the government\u2019s plan to \u201cdisrupt\u201d it means when the narrative in question is being generated by British citizens. Put all this together\u2014ranking rules that privilege approved outlets; a state database of forbidden narratives; emergency protocols for restricting content; and an intelligence-led center to disrupt \u201cuntrue\u201d stories\u2014and you have the most far-reaching apparatus for the control of peacetime speech that this country has seen since the English press ceased to be licensed in 1695. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Americans, when they think of British tyranny, think of George III: stamps, tea, soldiers quartered in private houses. But that quarrel was about representation and taxation; nobody in Boston or Philadelphia had to get a license in order to print. For that, you have to go back a further century and a half. In July 1637 the Star Chamber of Charles I decreed that nothing might be published without a license from approved authorities, with enforcement delegated to a private body, the Stationers\u2019 Company, much as Ofcom now delegates the policing of the internet to the platforms. The categories of the forbidden, \u201cseditious,\u201d \u201cscandalous,\u201d \u201coffensive,\u201d meant whatever the licensers, following orders from the king, wished them to mean. <\/p>\n<section class=\"c-subscribe-email\" >\n<div class=\"l-container\">\n<div class=\"c-subscribe-email__wrap\">\n<div class=\"c-subscribe-email__head\">\n<h4 class=\"c-subscribe-email__heading\">Subscribe Today<\/h4>\n<h5 class=\"c-subscribe-email__subheading\">Get daily emails in your inbox<\/h5>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"c-subscribe-email__form-wrap\">      <!-- Begin Mailchimp Signup Form -->      <\/p>\n<div id=\"mc_embed_signup\">\n<form id=\"mc-embedded-subscribe-form\" class=\"validate\" action=\"https:\/\/theamericanconservative.us4.list-manage.com\/subscribe\/post?u=442e644c01f8e54e26e4ff3f8&#038;id=f7b67cac40\" method=\"post\" name=\"mc-embedded-subscribe-form\" novalidate target=\"_blank\">\n<div id=\"mc_embed_signup_scroll\">\n<div class=\"c-subscribe-email__fields\">              <label for=\"mce-EMAIL\" class=\"u-screenreader-text\">Email Address:<\/label>              <input id=\"mce-EMAIL\" class=\"c-subscribe-email__field\" name=\"EMAIL\" type=\"email\" value=\"\" placeholder=\"Your Email\" \/>              <input id=\"mc-embedded-subscribe\" class=\"c-subscribe-email__submit o-button o-button--red-500 o-button--solid\" name=\"subscribe\" type=\"submit\" value=\"Subscribe\" \/>            <\/div>\n<div id=\"mce-responses\" class=\"clear\">\n<div id=\"mce-error-response\" class=\"response\" style=\"display: none;\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"mce-success-response\" class=\"response\" style=\"display: none;\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>              <!-- real people should not fill this in and expect good things - do not remove this or risk form bot signups-->            <\/p>\n<div class=\"u-screenreader-text\" aria-hidden=\"true\">              <input tabindex=\"-1\" name=\"b_442e644c01f8e54e26e4ff3f8_f7b67cac40\" type=\"text\" value=\"\" \/>            <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/form>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>      <!--End mc_embed_signup-->          <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/section>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The proposals of 2026 are not an exact echo, but like the regime set up in 1637 they would police content by controlling the medium through which it is disseminated: exalted legal status for approved publishers; emergency powers to take down \u201charmful\u201d narratives; official programs to instruct the people on which voices to trust; and a national center to disrupt unwelcome narratives. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s worth recalling that Charles I\u2019s decree did not work. Sedition spread, we had a civil war, and he was beheaded twelve years later. Meanwhile, in 1644 John Milton inaugurated England\u2019s free speech tradition with the publication of his brilliant <em>Areopagitica<\/em>. His answer to the censors and licensers still stands: \u201cLet her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?\u201d The founders of the United States wrote into the Bill of Rights the principles that Milton had championed. The country that produced him is rejecting them, in the name of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/brian-stelter-talks-disinformation-at-world-economic-forum\/\" title=\"Brian Stelter Talks \u2018Disinformation\u2019 At World Economic Forum\">preserving public safety<\/a> and what it calls \u201csocial cohesion.\u201d <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">American readers should watch what Britain does next\u2014not as a spectacle but as a warning. For the tools being built on these islands are portable, and the justifications being provided for them will sound, in every language, eminently reasonable.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The piece surveys what it calls growing state influence over speech in Britain. It cites a Telegraph report that, since 2018, dozens of British civil servants were loaned to the BBC for short stints (three to six months) to help write stories and advise on \u201chigh\u2011impact, sensitive topics,\u201d including Channel crossings by small boats and the Covid crisis. The employees were paid by the government, whose records they were supposed to scrutinize, and the audience was not informed. After the story broke, the BBC paused the scheme, insisting that editorial decisions remain with its own journalists. The article notes that for eight years an immigration\u2011policy department had staff inside the BBC newsroom \u201cverifying\u201d coverage.<\/p>\n<p>A second Telegraph piece describes an incident involving Holly Passmore, a 44\u2011year\u2011old Holocaust-history student, who was visited by two police officers under the Prevent program. They questioned her about her interest in Jewish issues and potential vulnerability to manipulation, and they noted she had traveled to Israel. Passmore was flagged as being at risk of \u201cextremist influence,\u201d despite the document acknowledging there is no counterterrorism concern with being supportive of Israel, a democracy. The police advised her not to discuss the case online. The article uses this to illustrate a broader, troubling pattern: state surveillance of lawful speech and a climate in which authorities scrutinize opinions, a phenomenon the author contrasts with First Amendment protections in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>The author identifies the Free Speech Union (FSU), a London nonprofit founded in 2020 to defend speech rights, which has grown from about 14,000 members to roughly 51,000 under the Labour government elected in 2024. While some growth stems from greater awareness of the group, the author suggests a widespread belief that free expression in Britain is under threat. The FSU highlights numerous cases-ranging from high-profile figures like Graham Linehan to ordinary people such as nurses, teachers, and students-often involving alleged threats to reputations or career consequences for comments or posts. The article emphasizes that the UK lacks a written constitution and has weaker protections for free expression than the U.S. First Amendment; instead, it relies on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998, which contains many caveats and balancing tests with other rights such as privacy. It cites statistics from Big Brother Watch suggesting tens of thousands of arrests related to speech and communications offenses in recent years, and outlines laws such as the Communications Act 2003 (offenses for \u201cgrossly offensive\u201d messages), the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and the Public Order Act 1986 (which includes \u201cstirring up\u201d hate). The piece points to cases like Lucy Connolly\u2019s conviction for a post about a violent incident and Hamit Co\u015fkun\u2019s initial conviction for a Quran burn, later overturned on appeal. It also notes the Non\u2011Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs), which are police records of supposedly hate\u2011motivated remarks that do not themselves constitute crimes but can affect employment and background checks. The government has signaled these might be replaced with a new framework, while activity in Scotland and Northern Ireland may continue to record them.<\/p>\n<p>The Prevent program is described as having broadened beyond its original aim, with training materials labeling broad political beliefs-such as cultural nationalism-as signs of extremism, effectively branding mainstream views as dangerous. The FSU reports assisting individuals targeted for attending lawful protests or making ordinary statements that triggered referrals. The piece also criticizes the Online Safety Act 2023 for granting Ofcom sweeping powers to compel platforms to remove content deemed illegal and to search proactively for content that might be unlawful, with heavy penalties for noncompliance. Although some protections for democratic discourse and journalism exist in the Act, those provisions have not yet been activated. The government\u2019s plan to bar under\u201116s from social media would, in effect, require age verification and expand state surveillance across smartphones.<\/p>\n<p>Looking ahead, the article notes that Prime Minister Andy Burnham\u2019s government aims to push the agenda further. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy\u2019s policy paper, Watch this space, proposes prioritizing \u201cregulated public service media\u201d to ensure that platforms promote trusted outlets in the battle against mis- and disinformation, even if that means privileging certain voices over others. Deputy Labour leader Lucy Powell has suggested bringing platforms under the same accuracy and balance expectations as state\u2011licensed broadcasters during elections. Following amendments to the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has instructed platforms to devise crisis-response protocols for protests and other upheavals. The piece also discusses a government\u2011commissioned 136\u2011page \u201cevidence review\u201d from Sheffield University that labeled online falsehoods a systemic national risk and urged statutory quality signals, a state database of misleading narratives, and pre\u2011emptive education in schools-while critics argue the review relied on AI\u2011summaries and did not engage with the full spectrum of existing research.<\/p>\n<p>In a move announced at the United Nations, Burnham proposed creating a National Centre for Information Defence to counter hostile\u2011state information warfare, notably from Russia, and to defend \u201ccommunity cohesion\u201d against distorted narratives. The article argues that, by combining outlet ranking, a state database of disallowed narratives, rapid content-restriction protocols, and an intelligence\u2011driven body to disrupt \u201cuntrue\u201d narratives, Britain would be assembling a comprehensive censorship regime not seen since 1695, when the Star Chamber licensed printing. It contrasts this with Milton\u2019s Areopagitica, which defended free expression, and with the American tradition of robust constitutional protections. The author suggests that if Britain proceeds with these policies, it could presage a new era of censorship that other countries might imitate under the banner of public safety and social cohesion.<\/p>\n<p>The piece closes as a warning: Americans should watch Britain\u2019s next moves not merely as a curiosity, but as a test case for how far state control over speech may go, given that the tools and justifications developed there could become portable and palatable in other jurisdictions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4485,"featured_media":2702963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/tac.imgix.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/GettyImages-2297479592.jpg?auto=compress&#038;crop=faces%2Centropy&#038;fit=crop&#038;fm=jpg&#038;h=630&#038;ixlib=php-3.3.1&#038;q=80&#038;w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[13035,6371,81359,32311],"class_list":["post-2702962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-britain","tag-censorship","tag-free-expression-2","tag-free-speech"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/tac.imgix.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/GettyImages-2297479592.jpg?auto=compress&#038;crop=faces%2Centropy&#038;fit=crop&#038;fm=jpg&#038;h=630&#038;ixlib=php-3.3.1&#038;q=80&#038;w=1200","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4485"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2702962"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2702966,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702962\/revisions\/2702966"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2702963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2702962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2702962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2702962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}