At The Conservative Woman, Bruce Newsome reports on the parlous state of free speech in the United Kingdom:
SINCE 2021, the Index on Censorship has ranked Britain as “partially open” (the third tier). Britain ranks 20th for press freedom (worse than Trinidad and Tobago).
Just released: The US State Department concludes that in 2024, Britain’s human rights “worsened” and the British government is partial in protecting rights and freedoms: “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism. The government sometimes took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, but prosecution and punishment for such abuses was inconsistent.”
There are three main categorical freedoms being routinely violated in Britain. In US Constitutional law, they are known as speech, assembly and press. British authorities need a reminder.
Let’s fully understand how this started, more than 25 years ago. In 1999, the Macpherson inquiry into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence recommended that police should record hateful incidents as a matter of intelligence, even if the incidents were not criminal. Quangos led by the College of Policing encouraged police forces to record non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). Police took it upon themselves to visit the supposed haters, to “correct your thinking“, to intimidate them with warnings of escalation, and even to strong-arm them into taking thought-correction classes with the police, at cost.
The 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act criminalises hatred of protected characteristics. It was once sold as a protection against violence, but was soon wielded to criminalise speech.
Police make more than 30 arrests a day (more than 10,000 per year) for online speech and record 66 non-crime hate incidents per day.
Despite several administrations claiming to review and restrict the definitions of hate speech and NCHIs, the definitions remain too vague to prevent police from repressing speech they don’t like. In 2024, the Free Speech Union submitted freedom of information (FoI) requests to all 43 police forces in England and Wales to see if recording went down since a new code of practice of June 2023. The number has actually increased. This year the current government sneakily signalled its appreciation of NCHIs in response to a petition to abolish them.
The latest statute aimed at free speech came into force on July 25: the Online Safety Act. The Bill was marketed as a necessary legislation to protect minors from harmful material such as pornography, self-harm forums, and bullying towards suicide. Like the Hatred Act, the Online Safety Act is being used to suppress politically inconvenient content.
British public authorities (and social media) are suppressing speech and the press selectively with political, religious and ethnic prejudice.
