Freedom of speech does not exist in the UK. Anyone who claims otherwise is either deluded or lying to you.

I wish this was an exaggeration. The reality is that over thirty people are arrested every single day in Britain — more than 12,000 people a year — for simply saying things the government doesn’t like.

Although restrictions on free speech have grown considerably worse in recent years (arrests have increased 121% since 2017), this problem has been slowly building for decades. In 1988, the UK Parliament passed the Malicious Communications Act, criminalising anyone who sends a letter or electronic communication that causes “distress or anxiety.” 15 years later, the Communications Act 2003 extended this to anyone who publicly writes something that causes “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another.”

By this logic, nearly every single person on the planet should be locked up in prison, including Keir Starmer. He has publicly expressed countless things that have caused me and millions of others distress, annoyance, inconvenience and anxiety. When are the police going to arrest him?

As if imprisoning his own people for saying mean words wasn’t bad enough, Starmer also gaslights them by routinely claiming that they do have free speech. When speaking to reporters about this, he always gives the same unimaginative and unconvincing response, as if regurgitating a memorised pre-approved script.

“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.”

“We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time here, so we’re very proud of that and we’ll protect it.”

“We’ve had free speech in this country for a very, very long time and we protect it fiercely.”

I’m sure the thousands of people you’ve had arrested for speech violations would beg to differ. Just so you know Keir, repeating a lie over and over again doesn’t make it true.

When the UK government isn’t busy censoring words altogether, it’s distorting the meaning of them to manipulate the public into supporting the criminalisation of innocent people.

Take the word “terrorism.” Since the organisation Palestine Action was proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000 in July, at least 2,094 people have been arrested for showing their support. Are we seriously expected to believe that those who speak out against mass murder and forced displacement are terrorists?

Or take the word “hate.” Women who oppose sharing their locker rooms, prisons, sports teams, rape crisis centres, and breast feeding support groups with males can be arrested under Scotland’s Hate Crime Law for discriminating against trans-identified men. Are women who advocate for their sex-based rights hateful?

Of course, the answer is no. Despite what the government will have us believe, Israel is the terrorist, and the men barging into women’s spaces are the hateful ones.

Because the police can’t arrest everyone, they select their victims at random. At any given moment, any one of us could be next. It is therefore the fear of arrest, rather than the arrests themselves, that causes the majority of self-censorship in this country.

In January, Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested in front of their three-year-old daughter at their Hertfordshire home by six police officers. Their crime? Complaining in a WhatsApp group chat about their nine-year-old disabled daughter’s school. Their house was searched and the pair was subsequently detained in a cell for eight hours. After a five week investigation, police concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to charge them, and the case was dropped.

Allen told Sky News: “When you watch the doorbell footage, you think, what are these six police officers doing? What is this operation? Is it a terror cell, is it a drug den they’re about to raid? No, it was two parents in a dispute with the school.”

“We cannot fathom what happened, it doesn’t make any sense. We made a few inquiries, we had a bit of banter on a WhatsApp group, and then we were arrested,” Levine added.

In September, Pete North was arrested in his home at night and detained in solitary confinement for hours because he had posted a meme that said: “F— Palestine. F— Hamas. F— Islam. Want to protest? F— off to Muslim country and protest.”

After being questioned by police, North was released and told he would have to wait until the end of December to learn if charges would be pressed. “The initial trauma of being detained is horrifying in itself, but I now have to live with this hanging over my head three months. That’s the psychological weight they press on you,” he wrote in a Substack post.

Do I agree with the sentiment that North expressed in that meme? No, but that’s irrelevant. True freedom of speech protects the right of all speech – especially when it is disagreeable, especially when it is offensive, and especially when it makes people uncomfortable.

Perhaps the most famous case is Lucy Connolly, an Englishwoman who was arrested and sentenced to 31 months in prison for “inciting racial hatred” because she posted – and quickly deleted – this tweet following the horrific Southport attack last year:

Connolly’s tweet was an emotional response to the rumour that Axel Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan immigrants who brutally murdered three young girls last summer, was an asylum seeker. Connolly deleted the post shortly afterwards — but it was too late. During her time in prison, Connolly was denied food, manhandled by police officers and forced to reside in the prison wing that housed violent, dangerous prisoners. All because of a single tweet.

Meanwhile, despite having thrown a kettle of boiling water at a prison guard in May, Rudakubana enjoys privileges in prison, including a Freeview TV with roughly 25 channels and a DVD player.

Let that sink in: a mother who responded emotionally to the mass murder of little girls is treated worse in prison than the mass murderer himself. This is not normal.

The UK government doesn’t just need to allow their people to speak; it also needs to listen to them. Brits have a right to be angry. Mass migration has caused seismic demographic and cultural changes to the UK (as well as to all of Europe and the Western world) in an extremely short period of time. It seems that every day there is a new story about a migrant stabbing, raping or assaulting people. Meanwhile, women and children are under constant attack by a pernicious ideology; the government is funding both a proxy war in Ukraine and a genocide in Palestine; and nearly one in four Brits are living in poverty.

There’s arguably never been more reason to protest, complain and write offensive social media posts – and yet the government can’t even grant its people that. It takes a special kind of evil to punish your own citizens for speaking out against the harm you yourself have caused them.

Instead of doing something to actually improve the country, this is what the shameful UK government has to say to its people:

As an American, I find this criminalisation of speech utterly shocking. I grew up in a country that protects all speech, no matter how “offensive” it may be. I’m not claiming that the US is some kind of utopia (we have our fair share of problems and the First Amendment is violated far too often), but at least we have a First Amendment.

I was venting about all of this to an American friend recently. After I had finished, she leaned back in her chair and smiled. “I guess it’s true what they say. The longer you spend abroad, the more patriotic you become.”

I think that about sums it up.

By me a coffee or a glass of wine

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