Britain’s Draconian Speech Laws

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Most of us consider Great Britain to be the birthplace of civil liberties. It is the home of what we today think of as modern democracy. The common law tradition has long protected free speech. The country has produced some of the most notable defenders of liberal thought, including John Milton, John Locke and J.S. Mill.

But things have changed – and for the worse. One might not have noticed it. After all, in 1998, Britain’s adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) required that free speech be legally defined. The United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act, passed the same year, states that all individuals have “the right to freedom of expression,” including the “freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference.”

But in order to supress “hate speech” and other subjective content deemed suspect, a new law, the Communications Act, was passed in 2003, broadly prohibiting undefined “malicious communications,” and made it a criminal offense to “persistently make use of a public electronic communications network for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety.”

This gave police broad powers. A new national regulatory agency, the Office of Communications, was created to monitor all forms of communication for illegal content. In other words, the law now prohibited vague speech offenses and this has led to some 12,000 arrests per year, with prison sentences handed out for social media posts, publicly displayed signs, personal insults, and even prayers by pensioners.

Some examples: In January, six police officers were dispatched to arrest two parents in Hertfordshire, north of London, for criticizing, in emails and a WhatsApp group, the administration of their daughter’s school. They were, after being searched and fingerprinted, held for eleven hours on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications, and causing a nuisance on school property. Police said the arrests “were necessary to fully investigate the allegations” but there was “insufficient evidence” to take any action.

A 51-year-old British army veteran was arrested two years ago for silently praying for three minutes within a 150-metre “buffer” zone around a Bournemouth abortion clinic. His conviction resulted in penalties of nearly $18,000. A 74-year-old Scottish grandmother was arrested by four police officers for silently holding a sign in proximity to a Glasgow abortion clinic reading “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.”

Regarding another contentious issue, a 41-year-old woman from Northampton was convicted of “incitement to racial hatred” because, in a post on the social media site X, she called for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants. This followed the notorious and highly publicized murder of three children killed in a knife attack in Southport, which led to widespread rioting in the country last summer. Though she later apologized, she was given a sentence of 31 months behind bars. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose Labour Party unseated the Conservatives in the July 4 election, had urged judges to impose the harshest sentences as an example to others.

Police forces across the country have also been criticized for investigating “non-crime hate incidents,” introduced in 2014 by the College of Policing, the organization responsible for training officers. A “non-crime” hate incident is defined as “an act that is motivated by prejudice or hostility towards a person’s identity but does not amount to a criminal offence.”

The issue gained greater prominence after columnist Allison Pearson of the Telegraph newspaper was visited by Essex police last November over a post on X.  Pearson said she felt “bullied and harassed” during the interaction. The case was dropped four days later when the Crown Prosecution Service ruled that there was no realistic prospect of conviction.

Many police officers now appear to believe it is their job to audit the emotions and speech of the public. Given these and thousands of similar cases, in 2019 journalist Toby Young founded the Free Speech Union (FSU), an activist organization that defends free expression across the political spectrum. It has won several prominent legal victories, particularly in the realms of education and employment.

But if anything, things gave regressed under the Labour government. Anyhow, the Conservative Party did little to help the cause of free speech during its 14-year-long tenure in power.

As a result, they have lost ground to the upstart Reform UK, led by the right-wing populist Nigel Farage, who has lamented a country “where you can’t say anything or you might get put in prison. We should be allowed to say whatever the hell we want!” Five Reform candidates won election to parliament last year, displacing incumbent Conservatives. The party came second in 98 other constituencies. The writer Dominic Green observed in the April 23 Wall Street Journal that “The mood in England today is eerie. The police menace law-abiding people for speaking their minds.”

David Betz, a professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London, points to polls showing a record 45 per cent of people “almost never” trust the government to put the nation first. “We have a long way to go to restore the liberal principles that were once seen as synonymous with the British way of life, not least because of the reckless authoritarianism of the present government,” playwright and journalist Andrew Doyle, the author of Free Speech and Why it Matters, recently contended.

 

Has the Opposition to Donald Trump Become Overheated?

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

Since taking office in January, Donald Trump has been moving in whirlwind fashion to upend the established political order in the United States, via executive orders and other means. This has obviously created tremendous opposition, as one after another political sacred cow is bulldozed in a matter of days.

Has some of the criticism of President Trump crossed the line into hyperbole and scaremongering? It’s early days yet and therefore too soon to know. Still, in just the past few weeks, Yale University professors, British historians, New York Times op-ed writers, and Canadian rock stars, among others, have taken to calling the country a “police state,” a new Nazi “Reich,” a “fascist” nation, and so on. Indeed, even here in Canada, “Trump” seems to be the ballot question in the coming election.

Jason Stanley, an American scholar of fascism, has argued that both Canada and Ukraine are now “bordered by autocratic dictatorships,” by which he means the United States and Russia. He is one of three prominent Yale academics – the others are historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore – who are relocating to the University of Toronto this fall, driven by concerns over America’s political climate and academic freedom.

Snyder and Shore had reportedly been courted by the University of Toronto’s Munk School for years, but recent political shifts accelerated their decision. Shore hinted that the November 2024 elections and fears of democratic erosion played a role, calling the climate an “American descent into fascism.”

Stanley, who calls himself an “academic refugee,” is known for his bestselling book How Fascism Works. He warned that universities are failing to protect students and faculty from government overreach. He claimed he seeks to “send a warning to Americans” by relocating to Canada.

Stanley has been warning about the threat and rise of fascism in the United States since Donald Trump’s first term. He sees a connection to Hitler’s Third Reich, given fascism’s reliance on the identification of internal enemies, and its promise of restoring a mythic past. 

“Things are very bad in this country. It’s an authoritarian regime. People are not responding well,” Stanley, who will begin a new role this fall as the Bissell-Heyd chair in American Studies on the Toronto campus, remarked in an interview with Vanity Fair.

“The federal government is a fascist regime,” Stanley continued. “But fascism has to permeate the whole society. They’re trying to replace everyone with loyalists. And that’s a process. They’re pretty far along.”

However, many X commentors disagreed, with one calling it a “Vanity affair indeed.”

British historian Richard Evans, who has written extensively on Hitler’s Germany, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy, is more circumspect. In an article in the magazine Prospect, he asserts that “Donald Trump has been waging a relentless and comprehensive war on American democracy and its institutions. There seems to be general agreement that Trump poses a threat to American democracy, just as Hitler did to German democracy. Yet, he warns, there are differences too, and many academics “have been cautious about drawing parallels.”

Peter Hayes, for instance, a respected author of studies of German industry and the Nazis as well as books on the Holocaust, finds some such parallels “exaggerated,” while Christopher Browning, a leading authority on the origins of the Holocaust, contrasts Hitler’s focus on the concept of racial struggle with Trump’s narcissistic drive for praise and personal advantage.

Russian-born author and journalist Masha Gessen is less sanguine. In a New York Times commentary of April 2, she declared that “Our Police State Has Arrived.” Citing numerous cases involving “unmarked vans, secret lists,” and “public denunciations,” she warned that “(t)hose of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity.” This very vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who now calls New York home, concluded that “The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.”

Toronto-born musician Neil Young, who is now an American citizen, says he “may be barred” from entering the United States over comments he made about President Donald Trump. In an April 1 post on his website, Young worried that “When I go to play music in Europe, if I talk about Donald J. Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminum blanket.”

He continued: “That’s right folks, if you say anything bad about Trump or his administration, you may be barred from re-entering the USA. If you are Canadian. If you are a dual citizen like me, who knows? We’ll all find that out together.”

“If the fact that I think Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of our great country could stop me from coming back, what does that say for Freedom?” (In actual fact, an American citizen may be detained or arrested for whatever reason but cannot be prevented from re-entering the country.)

What are we to make of all this? Is it hysteria or prophecy? Clearly, the 2026 midterm elections will be crucial, because if the Democrats win a majority in the House of Representatives they will, at the very least, try to impeach Trump.