In March 1946, Winston Churchill, then the United Kingdom’s leader of the opposition, famously addressed a crowd in an unfamiliar Westminster. Three of the phrases he used at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, remain memorable today: his own title of the speech, “Sinews of Peace”; the title by which most of us know it instead, “Iron Curtain”; and finally “special relationship.”
The past eighty years have, of course, seen ups and downs in the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States—two countries separated by a common language, as the quip goes that is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw. Indeed, though, one of the enduring differences between the nations has less to do with language itself than with its suppression. As is well known, the Constitution of the United States enshrines robust free-speech protections, whereas the United Kingdom is broadly sympathetic to claims of defamation, tends to privilege privacy over freedom of expression, and accepts the idea of “hate speech,” with a low bar for what counts.
Still, over the centuries, many Brits have insisted on the importance of free speech. John Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica is a classic: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” Andrew Doyle’s 2021 Free Speech and Why It Matters (which I once reviewed) offers an excellent brief account of how things stand in the present moment. And in “The Author’s Apology” to Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which was first performed, amid scandal, in 1902, nearly a decade after Shaw wrote it, the playwright hit hard:
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current concepts, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.
What do contemporary British politicians and other mandarins say about this nutshell? In late February, a couple of weeks after his controversial remarks at the Munich Security Conference, about which Jonathan Turley opined that “for the free speech community, it was truly Churchillian—no less than the famous Iron Curtain speech,” Vice President J. D. Vance spoke in the Oval Office of “a special relationship with our friends in the U.K.” In front of Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, he noted, however, that “we . . . know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British (of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them) but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens.” To this, Starmer responded, “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 . . . I’m very proud of our history there.”
Starmer should not be so proud, and neither should most Tories, who were in power from 2010 to 2024, during which period Britain’s draconian speech laws led to prosecutions and jail time that would make any American trusting in the First Amendment blanch, including, in the words of Paul du Quenoy, for “housewives and pensioners who post the wrong opinions on social media.” But perhaps even more egregious are “non-crime hate incidents,” an astounding concept with which Doyle’s book on free speech opens. In an interview with Pamela Paresky in June, Toby Young, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union (FSU), a vital organization that he cofounded a little over five years ago, explained this fine Orwellianism and its status as follows:
The current government wants to ramp up the number of non-crime hate incidents the police are recording. That’s when you’re reported for a hate crime, the police investigate, conclude that you haven’t committed a crime, and then record it as a “non-crime hate incident.” That attaches itself to your criminal record. If you apply for a job that requires an enhanced criminal records check, it can show up and stop you from getting the job.
According to the FSU, between 2014 and 2024, roughly “a quarter of a million” of these incidents were recorded by the police in England and Wales—with no reduction in records of such non-crimes even after a new “code of practice” meant to reduce their number was introduced in the spring of 2023.
Can things get worse still? Yes, they can. On July 16, the Labour-sponsored “Employment Rights Bill” passed another stage in the House of Lords, which means that it is highly likely soon to become law. The bill is over three hundred pages long, but of immediate interest is a short section on page 43: clause 20, “Harassment by third parties,” which amends section 40 of the Equality Act 2010.
The language of clause 20, to be inserted into the Equality Act, is reminiscent of instructions for basic logic puzzles in school:
(1A) An employer (A) must not permit a third party to harass a person (B) who is an employee of A.
(1B) For the purposes of subsection (1A), A permits a third party to harass B only if –
(a) the third party harasses B in the course of B’s employment by A, and
(b) A failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent the third party from doing so.
(1C) In this section “third party” means a person other than –
(a) A, or
(b) an employee of A.
Superficially sensible-sounding clinical language, but frightening—far more so than its jocular designation, the “Banter Bill,” would suggest. To quote the FSU,
In an age of hyper-sensitivity, turbo-charging the Equality Act in this way will have mind-boggling consequences.
Under this law, pub landlords might have to employ ‘banter bouncers’ to eavesdrop on customer conversations and eject them if they say something ‘problematic’, e.g. tell a dirty joke. But it isn’t just pubs. Football fans might have to censor their chants. Universities may use it to no-platform speakers like Kathleen Stock [a no-nonsense gender-critical feminist who was effectively bullied out of her professorship in philosophy at the University of Sussex in 2021]. Struggling businesses risk drowning in compliance costs—or closing altogether.
This is state-enforced speech policing, plain and simple. It will extend the fearful, stifling atmosphere already gripping workplaces to pubs, bars, restaurants, hotels, stadiums and universities—accelerating Britain’s transformation into East Germany circa 1984.
Along with a few other peers, Young—Lord Young of Acton, as of this past January—worked valiantly to “scrap [clause 20] altogether or lessen its impact,” as he put it to Paresky. He discussed clause 20 in his maiden speech in March and has brought it up many times since. After all, as he wrote in the Daily Express in May, “amending the Bill in the House of Lords . . . is our last chance to stop this attempt to ramp up the policing of speech outside the workplace.” Alas, he appears to have failed to drum up sufficient support.
What is truly astonishing, however, is how little attention ordinary Brits seem to be paying to this latest assault on their basic freedoms. Yes, occasional articles warning about banter bouncers have appeared in recent months, both in the Daily Mail and in high-end venues such as The Critic. But the operative word here is “occasional,” perhaps because some consider the idea of a banter bouncer to be, in Young’s words, “a ludicrous strawman.” Suppose, though, that Young is right, and it is not a strawman at all.
I learned of the Banter Bill at a dinner in London on July 16, at which a member of the House of Lords was present who had just come from the chamber. Also at the dinner were Roger Kimball, the American editor and publisher of The New Criterion, and Dominic Green, a regular English contributor to these pages. As I write, Kimball and Green are the only critics who have commented at any length about the outrage, the one in American Greatness, the other in The Free Press. As far as I can tell, the major British papers have remained silent. Which is why I am weighing in as well: the public—not just publicans and pub patrons—needs to know.
These days, no small number of Americans are eager to place further restrictions on speech. When these matters involve the police, there is usually a question about whether speech is in fact what is at issue. For example, was the Ohio man who was arrested and briefly put into jail in 2016 for creating a Facebook page that mocked his local police department exercising freedom of expression, or was he instead guilty of impersonating a police officer? And did every pro-Palestinian protestor who has been arrested in recent years actually violate time, place, and manner restrictions?
For the most part, though, the controversies over speech in this country have been organization-internal rather than involving the state or federal judicial apparatus. The majority of Americans understand that the First Amendment is precious. This is a good thing: just cast a glance across the Atlantic and watch what happens when a government attempts to suppress language—and not just any old language but a form that bears what one might call a special relationship to ours.
