This is the opening statement I will be delivering for the opposition on the motion “A Bill of Rights Would Not Protect Free Speech” in a debate hosted by the UK Free Speech Union on Wednesday, 12 February 2025.

Video here.

We’re here tonight to discuss the world’s two great charters of liberty: the American Bill of Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights.

One of these has succeeded wildly in protecting free speech, both at home and abroad. The other one is the European Convention.

The reason one of these works and the other doesn’t is pretty simple: nobody lost their job after the European Convention became the law of the UK in 1998. This is because the Convention was not designed to act as a bulwark against state power.

Rather, it was designed to serve the interests of the government.

The Convention Rights were created during the Cold War to allow the nations of the West to pay legal lip service to human rights while also creating major carveouts – in the case of free speech, Article 10(2) – which permitted derogations, or deviations, from these rights where the so-called “interests of a democratic society” were threatened. This feature was designed to allow European countries to waive fundamental rights and freedoms to crack down on communist subversion and other forms of authoritarianism.

What the drafters did not foresee was that the communists – specifically the post-communist intersectional theorists and “wokes” – would one day seize control of most of our institutions, including the universities and the civil service, and weaponize the European Convention against the very societies it was created to protect.

For this reason, the European Convention – far from protecting the rights of the British people – has been turned against them, time and again, by the police and by courts at every level.

We see this in the variable treatment of the pre-Human Rights Act and Post-Human Rights Act public order cases. Take for example 1999’s Redmond-Bate compared to 2011’s DPP v. Hammond, both of which involved street preachers espousing traditional notions of Christian morality. Redmond-Bate resulted in an acquittal; Hammond, in a conviction.

Most similar cases today result in convictions. There are of course occasional outliers where the courts, under public pressure, go the other way – such as they did in Miller v. College of Policing in 2021. Overwhelmingly, however, the UK’s politicians, jurists, and police regard free speech as a limited right, and they treat it as such.

Contrast this with the U.S. Bill of Rights, which was not merely a statement of rights but part of a complete constitutional overhaul designed to overthrow and replace the British system of Parliamentary supremacy with systems of procedural safeguards and, in the case of the Second Amendment, kinetic safeguards.

The Bill of Rights not only fired the English Parliament and an English King; it fired all Parliaments and fired all kings, and granted the people rights to forestall the emergence of tyrants and the means to violently overthrow them.

The U.S. Bill of Rights is an antigovernment document, articles of surrender crafted by a group of heavily armed fundamentalist libertarians after winning a bloody war. The European Convention is a progovernment document, drafted by a group of government bureaucrats in the Council of Europe to protect their governments from subversion.

The First Amendment was designed in direct opposition to the UK’s laws at the time, principally those which outlawed blasphemy, High Treason, seditious libel and scandalum magnatum – all of which, for the most part, have been formally abolished where mere speech is concerned.

All of these laws have been replaced by new rules that achieve the same objectives via different means.

The UK’s modern censorship laws, by contrast, go by names like the Public Order Act, the Communications Act, the Online Safety Act, or the Terrorism Act. This is, I suspect, the only room in the world tonight where I can reference these laws and no explanation of their content will be required.

What does require explaining, in case it isn’t clear, is the function they serve. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Remember this: the purpose of a system is what it does, and what the UK’s speech laws do is enforce woke political orthodoxy at gunpoint.

These orthodoxies are an invasive species, not native to these lands, deriving from the progressive political project in the United States and its earlier progenitors from the Frankfurt School. Try expressing an idea contrary to that orthodoxy in a public manner in England:

• criticize immigration policy,
• reject the idea that men can turn into women,
• interview someone who holds officially disfavored views, as Darren Grimes found out when he interviewed historian David Starkey in 2020,
• or, especially, attempt do any of aforementioned things using coarse language –

…and the least bad thing that will happen to you will be the entry of your name onto a government database, an ineradicable black mark made against your reputation with no due process, for the simple act of daring to say something controversial, or even something, very often, true.

More probably, and as happens thousands of times each and every year, you will find half a dozen constables at your door, hissing at you: “you are under arrest.”

Common law, which is fundamentally flexible and not prescriptive, offers no defense. From the Attorney-General, to the judges, to the beat cop in the street, everyone who operates the UK’s legal system now assumes, believes, or pretends to believe, that it is right that someone who posts an offensive Tweet or uses offensive language in public should be jailed.

Yet there is hope. Across the pond, in America, something of a revolution against liberal bureaucracy is underway. Government jobs which are essentially progressive sinecures are slated to be cut back by 80% or more, with the President simply deleting entire departments which were substantially devoted to the political ideologies which inform UK censorship laws today.

The United States is also exporting our new revolution abroad.

America’s new leaders are in the process of dismantling the institutions that promoted global censorship. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, or GEC, unit that focused almost exclusively on censorship was defunded and disbanded. USAID was simply deleted. If reporting is right, ending federal funding of progressive ideology at universities is next.

This is already having an impact in terms of corporate civil disobedience:

• Shortly after the election, Facebook blew the whistle on the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts and indicated it would be joining Elon Musk’s X in adopting a pro-Free Speech posture going forward.
• Last Friday, Apple let it be known via a leak that it would not be complying with a UK request to backdoor its encrypted cloud services, and would turn off its services here rather than obey.
• On Sunday, free speech video website Rumble restored access to Brazil, in defiance of local censorship laws, safe in the knowledge that America would, once again, protect that choice.
• On Monday, we learned that Labour is considering repealing portions of the Online Safety Act that are incompatible with free speech to avoid the threat of American tariffs.
• Yesterday, American Vice-President JD Vance, speaking in the Grand Palais in Paris, scolded the assembled European heads of government for enacting the censorial EU AI Act and Digital Services Act, as well as other European laws that hamper innovation and free speech. He warned the assembled bureaucrats that such laws were not compatible with good trading relations with the United States.
• These laws will surely vanish in due course.

What is happening in America should give us both hope and a roadmap. The old American permanent bureaucracy was global censorship’s main patron. The American President is committed to that bureaucracy’s total destruction. Some of the largest exporters of pro-censorship progressivism, particularly USAID, have been routed. The rest of the apparatus is in full retreat, with the government determined to close it down and salt the earth.

Four years from now, none of it will be left. The UK’s official censors have not yet got the memo. They are working to please a patron and protector who, in short order, will no longer exist.

In a networked society, censorship is necessarily self-defeating. Just like a pressure vessel filled with boiling water, the longer that true public opinion is officially suppressed, the more explosive the preference cascade once containment fails. And fail it will, if it isn’t doing so already.

As to the roadmap, we should emulate the model once and currently being used by the United States, and not the milquetoast approach adopted by the European Convention. This means backing an outsider political party that, once it obtains power, is prepared to

• rewrite the British constitution,
• enshrine free speech in that constitution,
• delete every department, including the Law Commission and internet regulatory divisions of the Home Office, that was involved in the suppression of free speech, and
• retire and replace every single civil servant at any level who played any role in enforcing any law that infringed on the basic liberties of the British people.

The American First Amendment thunders, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.”

The UK’s first amendment will one day roar that “the right of any person, and of the people, to freedom of speech shall not be violated by the state.”

Before that can happen, however, we need to follow the examples of reformers in Argentina, El Salvador, and the United States – we must have a party adopt our position, that party must win, that party must have a complete program for constitutional and civil service reform on day 1 – which likely includes the abolition of Parliamentary sovereignty – and that party must be prepared to execute on the implementation of that program not in years or months, but in weeks or days.

That is the only chance the UK has to save itself. I hope you take it.