Speaking to Fox News after his meeting with Vice President JD Vance, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer dismissed concerns that his government was cracking down on free expression.
“We actually had some exchanges today about things like freedom of speech. We got on very well, by the way,” he said.
“We had a really good discussion over lunch, and I made clear we’ve had freedom of speech in the United Kingdom for a very, very long time, and we guard it preciously.”
Challenged on whether the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023 amounted to censorship, Starmer was unequivocal: “No, we don’t believe in censoring speech, but of course, we do need to deal with terrorism. We need to deal with paedophiles and issues like that.”
It was an assertion that stood in defiance of concerns raised earlier that day by Vance, who directly challenged the UK’s record on free expression during an awkward moment in the White House.
The clash came after Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, where he accused several European governments of restricting free expression – a right that enjoys constitutional protection in the United States thanks to the First Amendment. Facing reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, the vice president reaffirmed his stance.
“I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the U.K. and also with some of our European allies,” Vance remarked when pressed by a journalist.
“But we also 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 American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens. So that is something we’ll talk about today at lunch.”
Starmer, seated a few feet away, immediately interjected: “Well, 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.”
“Certainly, we wouldn’t want to reach across to US citizens, and we don’t, and that’s absolutely right,” he added. “But in relation to free speech in the UK, I’m very proud of that – our history there.”
Sir Keir’s portrayal of Britain as a bastion of free expression sits uneasily with developments under his own government. Since winning a landslide victory in July 2024, securing two-thirds of seats in the House of Commons with the backing of just one in five eligible voters, his Labour government has presided over a series of measures that have significantly expanded state oversight of speech, both online and offline.
At the heart of these concerns is the Online Safety Act, which hands extraordinary powers to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. More draconian than the EU’s Digital Services Act, the OSA requires social media platforms, including those owned by US companies, not just to remove content flagged by the regulator as unlawful, but to proactively police online content and remove anything they themselves judge to be unlawful. Given the legal ambiguity around ‘harmful’ speech, this will inevitably lead to over-removal, particularly of content coded as ‘far-right’, e.g. anything that challenges progressive orthodoxies on subjects like immigration, climate change and public health.
From March 17th, social media platforms will be legally required to protect users from ‘online harm,’ which includes, but is not limited to, removing illegal content. Should companies like X and Meta fail to remove content from their platforms that Ofcom retrospectively deems ‘harmful,’ the regulator can fine them up to 10% of their annual global turnovers. There is also growing suspicion that the government intends to amend the section 175 “special circumstances” directive created by the Online Safety Act to expand Ofcom’s (and by extension the government’s) censorial powers.
For instance, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a Left-wing pro-censorship group with the self-professed ambition to “kill Musk’s Twitter” and which was co-founded by Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir’s Chief-of-Staff, has lobbied for the Secretary of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to give Ofcom expanded “emergency response” powers to combat “misinformation” deemed a threat to “national security” or “the health or safety of the public”.
The idea that these powers would be granted only in an “emergency” is hardly reassuring – Left-wing lobby groups habitually declare perpetual crises to justify suspending essential democratic rights. The CCDH, for instance, has previously lobbied for the removal of so-called “climate denial” from social media – an expansive category it defines as “arguments used to undermine climate action”.
Vance’s concerns about US firms being subjected to British laws may have been sharpened by a recent move by Starmer’s government to force Apple to create a global ‘backdoor’ to its encrypted user data. Under a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) issued through the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, the government sought to compel Apple to weaken encryption across its entire ecosystem – not just in Britain, but worldwide. Rather than comply, Apple withdrew its highest level of data encryption from the UK entirely, in what privacy advocates have called a significant retreat from user security.
Recent amendments to the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) expanded the UK’s ability to demand data from foreign tech firms, broadening the definition of a “telecommunications operator” to include companies serving UK users, even if they have no physical presence in Britain. While the US-UK Data Access Agreement theoretically bars the UK from targeting US citizens’ data, privacy groups warn that the IPA is now being used to circumvent this restriction by compelling service providers to maintain access to encrypted information.
Meanwhile, dozens of people have been jailed in the UK for making supposedly ‘racist’ or ‘inflammatory’ comments on social media following the Southport attack last July, in which a 17 year-old male called Axel Rudakubana killed three schoolgirls and injured 10 others. One man received an eight-week jail sentence for sharing three ‘offensive’ memes on Facebook.
Former Royal Marine and Free Speech Union (FSU) member Jamie Michael was arrested and charged with “stirring up racial hatred” for a speech crime under the Public Order Act after posting a 12-minute Facebook video in the aftermath of the murders encouraging people to share their concerns with elected officials about the risk of allowing undocumented migrants into the country. Buffy Williams, Jamie’s Labour representative in the Welsh Parliament, reported him to the police for a ‘hate crime’ and he was arrested and charged with “stirring up racial hatred”, an offence under the Public Order Act 1986 which carries a maximum sentence of seven years.
The FSU funded Michael’s legal defence, and at his trial in February, it took the jury just 17 minutes to return a unanimous verdict of ‘Not Guilty’.
In recent weeks, a number of individuals have been charged with “causing harassment, alarm or distress” – an offence under section 5 of the Public Order Act – for burning copies of the Quran in public, even though laws against blasphemy have been repealed in Great Britain. The Government has recently announced it will convene an ‘advisory council’ to draw up a legal definition of ‘Islamophobia’ which may then be embedded in official guidance to the police and prosecutors, with more people arrested for causing Muslims “distress” by breaching their blasphemy codes.
In 2018, an All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims came up with a very broad definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that included drawing attention to the over-representation of Muslim men in Britain’s grooming gangs, a definition that was subsequently endorsed by the Labour Party. The obvious risk is that this capacious definition will shortly be embedded in law, with hundreds of people being prosecuted for ‘Islamophobia’.
Starmer insists that Britain “guards free speech preciously”. There’s certainly a lot of ‘guarding’ going on – of those jailed for speech crimes, of protesters arrested for Quran burning, of tech firms forced to censor content and undermine end-to-end encryption – but none of free speech. Under his government, laws have been tightened, censorship powers expanded, and speech-related prosecutions pursued. The contrast between his lofty appeals to Britain’s democratic tradition and the reality of his government’s authoritarian instincts is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore.
