Arrests for “hate speech,” buffer-zone violations and non-crime hate incidents in the United Kingdom have gained international attention, especially after Vice President JD Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech in February, where he said that free speech in the U.K. and across Europe is “in retreat.”
Vance’s declaration drew a mixed reaction from Europeans and Americans. In the Oval Office, shortly after Vance’s remarks, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer defended his country’s free speech protections. “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom and it will last for a very, very long time,” he told Vance and President Trump.
But others, including Douglas Carswell, a former member of British Parliament and current president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, believe Vance’s speech was largely correct — that speech censorship in Europe is a security threat.
In the U.K., the daily rate of arrests for offensive social media posts has over doubled since 2017, and the most recent data shows 30 of these arrests happening a day, according to custody data obtained by the British newspaper, The Times.
Recent headline-making examples of these arrests include an incident from February, when 74-year-old Rose Dougherty from Scotland was arrested for standing silently within a buffer zone near Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, where abortions are performed. Police found her holding a sign that said, “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.” Dougherty faces a £10,000 ($13,000) fine, per The Free Press.
Several months earlier in in late July last year, Jamila Abdi, a young Black woman from London, was charged under the 2003 Communications Act for using the n-word to refer to Alexander Isak, a Swedish footballer, in an X post. While in the U.S. a person could receive a civil penalty or an enhanced criminal penalty for using the n-word, on its own using the word is not a crime.
In November, Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson had two Essex police officers come to her home over an allegedly racist X post with the caption, “Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”
These three incidents are among 250,000 recorded “non-crime hate incidents” since 2014, according to the Free Speech Union, a London-based interest group that views the number as cause for concern.
Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told the Deseret News she believes the current state of online speech censorship in the U.K. would “shock Americans.”
“I think a lot of Americans would be sort of disturbed by the idea that you haven’t committed a crime, but the police are still going to show up at your house and scold you, and it’s going to be in some kind of record eternally,” she said.
Amid this uptick in speech policing, reactions among Britons to the policy changes in their country differ.
The policy behind Britain’s free speech crack down
America’s First Amendment is unique. It states, “Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble... .”
British laws that govern what speech is acceptable and what is grounds for incitement to violence are more complicated.
Incitement in Great Britain has a much broader definition than in the U.S. It covers indirect influence and can be applied to future crimes, even if a crime is not yet planned.
Carswell pointed to three key policies in the U.K. he believes have led to higher policing of British speech.
- The 2003 Communications Act, specifically section 127, which criminalizes online speech deemed offensive.
- The 2007 Serious Crimes Act, which abolished and replaced the common law of incitement — which Carswell voted against in parliament.
- Most recently, the Online Safety Act, which gives platforms a duty to police what people say online. It went into effect on March 17, 2025. The Telegraph reported that American social media companies could face fines of “up to £18 million or 10 percent of their annual revenue” if they refuse to take down content deemed harmful.
The U.K. has seen a several decades-long shift in policies based on the belief that rights are not inalienable but codified, Carswell explained.
To the former British MP, increasing the number and detail of codified rights is part of the issue in Great Britain. Common law develops over time through legislation and judicial rulings, rather than being based on a Constitution that explicitly lays out an individual’s rights and the limits on government powers.
“Britain has been governed for thirty years by people who think that rights come from international declarations like the European Convention on Human Rights, and that is a big, big cause of the problem,” Carswell told the Deseret News.
Policy changes like the Online Safety Act affect not only British people, but they also affect American companies.
And McLaughlin believes online speech policing will not end with this latest British legislation. “Online speech is the next big frontier or the current big frontier for increased legislation and restriction,” she said.
Parliament to review a new bill policing speech in pubs
A proposed amendment to the U.K.’s Employment Rights Bill being reviewed by Parliament requires staffs of pubs to monitor the casual conversations of customers in an attempt to protect patrons from non-crime hate incidents.
The change would require employers to “take all reasonable steps” to prevent “harassment” by “third parties,” according to The Telegraph.
Carswell called this amendment a “sinister attempt to control the nooks and crannies of British life.”
“The word ‘pub’ itself comes from ‘public house,’” Carswell said. “A pub is a public house. And, you know, it’s interesting because it’s actually a private space in that the landlord is a private businessman. And it’s recognized as being central to the English character,” he said.
Other European countries have their public spaces outside, Carswell said, but because of the rainy weather, England’s designated gathering spaces became pubs.
Pubs are “where ideas are exchanged, and gossip is exchanged. It’s where bands try out their new music. It’s where people are free to do and to say what they want to do and say,” Carswell added.
The bill was introduced last October, and its third reading will conclude by early summer. If passed, it will then move to the House of Lords for further review.
British pub-frequenters on the pub banter bill
At the Joseph Else, a pub in the heart of Nottingham, U.K., Kieran McGrenaghan, a Nottingham native, recently asked customers what they thought of the proposed bill on behalf of the Deseret News.
A couple in their early 30s told McGrenaghan they’d met at a bar when they were 19 and had been together ever since.
When asked about the proposed Employment Rights amendments, the man said, “Banter is how you have a laugh and get to have fun with a girl. If I was 19 years old today, I’d for one be too scared to make a joke for fear of being thrown out by the staff, so I feel kind of bad for the young ones today, as they don’t know what they can say or do.”
Meanwhile, Shaun Rafferty, a 58-year-old from Leeds, discussed free speech in the U.K. more generally with the Deseret News.
“I think free speech is under attack in most places across the world, but in the U.K., it’s still reasonably well preserved,” Rafferty said. “Having said that, the previous government’s legislation to make protest more difficult and criminalize certain types of protest is a clear attack on free speech.”
Rafferty believes “free speech absolutism” and the criminalization of protest are the largest threats to free speech as a whole.
“The argument that free speech means saying whatever you want to whoever you want whenever you want is one of the things making our online conversations so toxic and divisive,” Rafferty said.
Rafferty provided an example of what he believes should be protected and what should be classified as incitement. “If someone says, ‘I don’t agree with having drag queens in school,’ I’m personally totally opposed to this view, but I would defend someone’s right to say it. But ‘Drag queens are grooming our children to be gay’ is incitement to hate and harm,” Rafferty said.
Meanwhile in the U.S., the same tension between free speech and “hate speech” exists.
For example, Catherine Choi, a staff writer for Case Western Reserve University’s Observer, believes the U.S. should lower the threshold for what counts as defamation, slander and libel. She also believes the U.S. should follow the U.K. in increasing the width of incitement laws. “Cyberbullying should be treated the same way as physical violence,” she wrote last Fall.
All policy comes as a result of culture
The U.K.’s Equality Act of 2010 legally defined nine protected characteristics, including age, race, sex, disability, religion or belief, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity and sexual orientation.
“If you have one of the nine characteristics, you are now treated by law as more favorable,” Carswell said.
The former MP believes acts favoring certain characteristics are evidence of the country’s infatuation with cultural relativism, a term that was first coined by American anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University in the mid 1920s.
“It started off by saying that all cultures are of equal worth,” Carswell explained. “It’s now actually on the far-left changed subtly. People now don’t say that non-British culture is the same worth as British culture. People on the left in England now teach that England is uniquely bad, uniquely evil.”
Viewing England and the West as cultures with fundamentally less worth than others introduces an intrinsic conflict to policy-making. Individuals then coming from different cultures have different codified rights, are protected differently by legislation and are policed on different tiers.
In fact, after the Southport stabbings last summer, Prime Minister Starmer gained the nickname, Two-tier Keir (used frequently by Elon Musk on X), over ethnicity-based sentencing accusations.
McLaughlin expressed a warning that advocating for the speech censorship of others may turn into self-censorship. “Our rights are really a shared thing,” she said. “If somebody who I disagree with loses their right to speak, it effects me too.”
She continued, “They might not see it today, but someday they might see it.”
Whistleblowers suffer from limits on free speech
Jon Wedger, a retired Scotland Yard detective and child sexual abuse whistleblower, spoke to the Deseret News about how he believes limits on free speech lead to a “bully culture” for people shedding light on difficult topics.
In 2004, Wedger was working as a vice detective in London when a child in a care home reported she was being sexually abused by an adult. Wedger believed her and couldn’t ignore the accusations, which also came from several of her friends who lived in care homes.
At the peak, Wedger caught 90 pedophiles in one week.
However, as Wedger continued to investigate, higher-ups in the police department told him to stop his investigation and stop speaking about it.
“The police threatened me with my home, my job and my children if I ever spoke about it. That is it in a nutshell: you can’t ever speak about this. You will lose everything if you speak about it.”
Wedger told the Deseret News he was arrested for both theft of a sheet of A-4 paper and conspiring to supply class-A drugs. The police also examined 15 years of his emails to find data protection violations. “But of course, I’d done nothing wrong,” he said.
The police “beat you down on every level” Wedger said. They cut his access to his bank account and sent Child Protective Services to his home after spending three days in the hospital with another child.
Whistleblowing is a “very, very dangerous thing to do, so I’m reluctant to encourage people to speak out if they’re in my situation. Because if you’ve not got that strength to see it through, you’re in trouble,” Wedger said.
But Wedger’s work has expanded beyond London. He told the Deseret News that the New York Police Department got in touch with him about a month ago.
“They’ve just set up a human trafficking unit, and they got in touch with me, asking to give them some sort of education on this, and I told them exactly what to do — don’t investigate this from your chair, because statistically it doesn’t exist,” Wedger said.
In the U.S., some states have implemented anti-SLAPP suit laws (anti-Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) that try to prevent courts from silencing whistleblowers, including California and Utah.
Despite these legal safeguards, whistleblowers in the U.S. also face significant challenges when confronting government or corporate giants.
Prioritizing free speech will come through grassroots
Rob Jenkins, an associate professor of English at Georgia State University/Perimeter College and a higher education fellow at Campus Reform, attributes the U.S.’s protection of speech to the U.S. Constitution and the First and Second Amendments.
“They gave us in their precious, in their God given inspiration, they gave us the tools we need to resist tyranny,” Jenkins said.
However, “whether we actually resist it or not is up to us,” he said.
Jenkins said personal liberties “require sacrifice ... If people don’t want to be free, they’re not going to be,” he said.
McLaughlin echoed this sentiment. “It’s going to be very hard for us to maintain our protections for free speech if there isn’t a widespread public support for them.”
What is the policy path to restoring free speech?
In terms of policy, Carswell believes repealing the 2003 Communications Act and the 2007 Serious Crimes Act are key steps in returning free speech to the U.K.
“What the U.K. needs is a return to common law,” Carswell said.
If the U.S. continues to hold onto the first amendment and actively protect speech, “we can be a shining beacon” for the U.K. and for Europe, Jenkins said.
Carswell agreed. “There’s a strong chance that America will reinvigorate free speech in the Old World,” he said.