Free speech in Europe, and Britain in particular, has been a concern for the second Trump administration. At the 2025 Munich Security Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance gave European leaders both barrels over the issue. Since then, U.S. government figures such as Sarah Rogers have ceaselessly drawn attention to the ever-increasing infringements on free speech in the U.K.
In recent years, Britain has seen high-profile stories such as the jailing of mother-of-two Lucy Connolly for a swiftly deleted tweet about asylum seekers in the midst of the Southport riots in 2024, the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan over tweets about transgenderism, and police officers dismissed from their jobs over gallows humor in private WhatsApp groups. Much more could be said about “non-crime hate incidents” resulting in police visits, a proposed special ban on “anti-Muslim hostility,” and the Labour government’s clear desire to reduce digital freedoms through different forms of regulation, and even the outright banning of Elon Musk’s X.
To American readers who take pride in the First Amendment, this might sound unthinkable. It can seem as if Britain is a victim of its un-American political system. Unlike the United States, Britain has no single written constitution. Rather, it combines unwritten conventions and statutes passed by its elected Parliament. Free speech warriors in both the U.S. and the U.K. increasingly suggest that, to protect their liberties, they should adopt a written constitution or Bill of Rights to safeguard things such as freedom of speech.
However, Britain’s Parliament has never worked this way, nor should it start. The driving force of British politics has always been parliamentary sovereignty; that is, an elected Parliament can create and remove whatever laws it likes if it has a majority and the political will.
Crucially, this means that no Parliament can bind its successor. If a new government is elected with a mandate to overturn the laws of the last one, it can always do so. This is not the case in written constitutional systems, such as the United States, which are subject to a constitution that is incredibly difficult or even impossible to change. It is this reality that has left President Trump, even with a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, unable to make good on his central campaign pledge to end birthright citizenship. In a true British system, he could have passed that law on day one.
Britain’s free speech crisis is downstream of bad laws created by Parliament. This began with the Race Relations Act 1965, which, in the wake of tensions arising from post-World War II immigration, outlawed the expression of certain political beliefs. This was worsened by the Public Order Act 1986, which criminalized speech that was “likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.” Later, already confused communications offenses designed for the era of snail mail and telephone operators collided disastrously with public-facing social media, just as “hate speech” offenses began to appear on the books under Tony Blair. It is these laws and others that helped to shape Britain’s own strain of cancel culture.
But the British answer to bad speech laws is not a new written constitution that takes the question out of our Parliament’s (and therefore voters’) hands. Instead, it is to repeal the bad laws and, if necessary, replace them with good ones.
This is the approach outlined in Reversing Britain’s Free Speech Recession, the latest report from the Prosperity Institute. Barrister Jon Holbrook, himself a vindicated survivor of cancel culture, has identified the laws that most need to be repealed or amended to restore a boom in the British free speech economy, with new legislation drafted and ready for implementation for a free speech government.
In the revived Britain imagined in this paper, laws criminalizing speech that merely causes “harassment, alarm or distress” will be repealed; communications speech will be criminal only if it is intentionally menacing and targeted; all so-called “hate speech” laws will be repealed. Interference with free speech in the civil sphere will no longer be a matter for contested anti-discrimination law, but a simple matter of tort law. Spurious allegations will be deterred by a new costs regime that protects those wrongly accused. A cultural shift will be needed, certainly. But we must start with the law.
English liberty gave the Western world its tradition of free speech. Yet lately, as Shakespeare wrote in Richard II, “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” But it possesses all that it needs to liberate itself once again.
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Rhys Laverty is Editorial and Research Director of the Prosperity Institute.
