Donald Trump’s approach to governing can be summed up as “for thee and not for me”. He looks askance at the idea of American troops securing a peace in Ukraine, for instance. But naturally the tanks must roll into Washington, DC and the marines into Los Angeles. Militarism starts at home, in other words. Or note that Joe Biden is vilified as a corrupt politician in Washington while Trump’s family hoover up deals in foreign capitals.
You can see the same pattern with free speech. Trump has little time for opinions that don’t flatter his own. Immigrants who dare speak out about Gaza have their visas revoked and media outlets who don’t publish obedient coverage are punished. And yet, the administration has fought a selective campaign for free speech abroad.
At the Munich conference in February, JD Vance declared that: “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” The battle against woke cancel culture, in the eyes of the international right, has now morphed into a fight against authoritarian progressive states who are suppressing a public backlash against the establishment. Senior Maga figures often point to two groups: pro-life activists who pray silently outside abortion clinics as well as activists who oppose mass migration and asylum seekers.
This is where Lucy Connolly comes in. Connolly was imprisoned in HMP Peterborough for a tweet she sent on the day of last year’s Southport attacks. She called for hotels housing migrants to be burnt down. She quickly deleted the tweet and expressed contrition.
The case has since become a right-wing cause célèbre on both sides of the Atlantic. Her release this week is being closely watched in Washington. “There’s great interest in Lucy’s case among the admin. It illustrates the harms JD Vance warned about in Munich,” one Washington insider close to the administration told me. Nigel Farage has said about the case that his “American friends cannot believe what is happening in the UK”.
The case only fuels the perception in Washington that Labour is an ailing authoritarian party suppressing legitimate dissent over mass migration by locking up those who speak out. In that framing, Connolly is the archetypal political prisoner in Keir Starmer’s two-tier police state.
Charlie Kirk, the influential Maga podcaster, thinks the UK is becoming a “totalitarian country” and remarked that “what [Connolly] said would not be any prison time in America”. He’s right. The First Amendment in the American constitution offers much stronger protection than any law in Britain. The protection for free speech under the European Convention on Human Rights, which serves as an imitation of a British Bill of Rights, is so caveated as to become meaningless. The right to free speech can be overrode by what is “necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, [or] for the protection of health or morals”.
Hence you have a situation in the UK where, under the Communications Act 2003, anyone can be imprisoned if they persistently send messages which cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. Many group chats on WhatsApp would meet such a low bar. The Times reports that around 12,000 people a year – or about 30 a day – are arrested under the Communications Act 2003 or the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Last year, one man from Manchester faced two years in prison for dressing up as the terrorist Salman Abedi for a Halloween Party. (His conviction was later overturned because a judge ruled the costume was merely “rude” and not “grossly offensive”, which only goes to show how subjective such rulings are, and how much power these laws hand to the judiciary.)
Or look at the Terrorism Act, under which Palestine Action was categorised as a terrorist group. That led to the arrest of people wearing t-shirts bearing the group’s name and one man holding a sign with a joke from the satirical newspaper Private Eye. (Note the Trump administration cares little for the free speech of pro-Palestinians and is using the language of anti-Semitism to suppress progressive institutions in America.) Starmer’s boast that Britain is a bastion of free speech is therefore best understood as a deceit designed to keep the Americans on side through perilous trade negotiations and retain their military protection.
The Americans have taken notice. The Telegraph reports that diplomats from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor travelled to London in March to “affirm the importance of freedom of expression in the UK and across Europe”. Washington is worried Britain’s suppression of speech will affect its own citizens. When he met Trump in Scotland last month, Keir Starmer claimed this would never happen. But during last year’s riots, Mark Rowley, London’s police commissioner, said he would “come after” those in other countries who broke Britain’s speech laws, specifically “the likes of Elon Musk”, who is an American citizen.
Don’t expect Washington to let this pass because Trump is excited to visit Windsor Castle; too many officials see Britain as the ancestral home of the very idea of free speech and scorn its erosion. The fact Labour recently backed down over its plans to force big tech companies to decrypt users’ data speaks to Starmer’s weakness in the face of American opposition. He is willing to take instructions from Trump, even on how to implement British law, and the Americans are happy to interfere. The ease with which Labour rolled over will only encourage the administration to keep the pressure on No 10 over the issue of free speech.
[See also: Has Nicola Sturgeon cursed the SNP for good?]
Content from our partners
Related
