Over the past year, my pastime has been defending Americans from Ofcom, the UK’s internet censorship agency, while parrying demands from regulators in Australia, the EU and Brazil.
Most readers will know about this work because of a cartoon hamster. That hamster, sent in a letter to Ofcom on behalf of my client 4chan, illustrated a point of private international law: Ofcom’s e-mailed fines are not validly served in the United States and may safely be shredded for hamster bedding.
The hamster went viral. It made it into federal court filings. We suspect that Ofcom was not amused. But fighting Ofcom was always a sideshow. On the core legal question – whether a British regulator can collect fines against American companies – American law is firmly on our side. Ofcom will never see a cent.
The real fight, however, is bigger than any one case, or any one cartoon rodent. The real fight is to restore free speech in Britain itself. Today, with the publication of a model Freedom of Speech Bill by the Adam Smith Institute, we mean to start that fight.
The United Kingdom does not have free speech, not in any sense an American, or frankly a mid-twentieth-century Briton, would recognise. This is not a problem unique to Keir Starmer’s government, or to this Labour Government; it has been the case for decades, but a combination of the internet and the ubiquity of video cameras has meant the entire country can see the censorship in 4K the instant it occurs. Parents have been arrested for complaining about school boards. A Jewish man was threatened with arrest for being too ‘openly Jewish’ in public. Satirists have been charged for offensive jokes. Teenagers have been threatened with terrorism charges for sharing memes.
Then in 2023, Parliament handed Ofcom vast new powers under the Online Safety Act, and Ofcom spent hundreds of millions of pounds building a supposedly globe-spanning enforcement apparatus – only to have that apparatus defeated, in the court of public opinion and in practice, by a cartoon hamster. The UK’s censorship regime does not work. It does not deserve to survive. The question now that no politician has, before today, been willing to ask is: what should replace it?
Today, the Adam Smith Institute publishes a model Bill that, if enacted, would create a Free Speech Act that liberates the UK from state censorship. The Bill is a thought experiment that asks a single question: if the UK wanted to enact something equivalent to the First Amendment, what would the resulting statute look like? The answer, necessarily, is a law that performs the function that the First Amendment also performed: a legal rule that dismantles virtually the entire censorship regime, and does so in one swift strike.
At its core, the Free Speech Act establishes a broad statutory right to free expression, including expression that is offensive, grossly offensive, insulting, shocking, blasphemous or otherwise objectionable. It states a principle that should not need stating but plainly does: there is no right in law not to be offended.
The Bill draws its limits where any civilised legal system should, adopting America’s Brandenburg test for incitement: inflammatory speech is unlawful only where it is directed at a specific audience, intended to produce imminent lawless action and likely to do so.
Liability is preserved for perjury, contempt, threats, fraud, blackmail and espionage, and other unlawful acts specifically designated by Parliament, rather than at the whim of a first-instance magistrate applying a Strasbourg-style balancing test. These are reasonable limits, not the sprawling, subjective offence-based regime Britain currently suffers under.
Beyond the core right, the Bill prohibits the state from censoring expression directly or through proxies. It bans non-crime speech monitoring, including the Orwellian practice of recording lawful speech as a ‘non-crime hate incident’. It protects workers from dismissal for lawful expression outside the workplace, and prevents essential service providers – banks, payment processors and telecoms firms – from withdrawing services because someone said something they disliked.
Most controversially, the Bill repeals the Online Safety Act in its entirety and replaces it with a provision modelled on America’s Section 230: no provider or user of an interactive computer service is treated as the publisher of content provided by another. Platforms retain full discretion to moderate, UK criminal law still applies, and there is a mandatory obligation to detect and remove child sexual abuse material and report the identity of lawbreakers to law enforcement within 24 hours. The best way to keep children safe online is not censoring law-abiding adults. It is putting handcuffs on lawbreakers.
This is not a digital wild west. It is the legal framework under which the modern internet was built, and it is the right one for Britain.
The repeals schedule is a wrecking ball, intentionally so. The Public Order Act 2023, the Public Order Act 1986, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Online Safety Act 2023, the Obscene Publications Act 1959: all gone. Section 127 of the Communications Act, under which thousands have been prosecuted for online speech, is gone too. In their place are content-neutral public order offences shorn of any ideological element, and new communications offences targeting genuine threats regardless of the politics behind them.
I have already heard the objections: this goes too far. The answer to those objections is simple: the laws we propose to repeal infringe on the free speech rights of the British people, and it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise out of political expediency or a lack of courage. You either want a First Amendment for Britain, or you don’t.
The model Bill is not an invitation to negotiate with pro-censorship forces. It is an invitation to debate whether the British state should retain the power to imprison citizens for their opinions at all. Our answer to that question is ‘no’. We are confident that is a debate we will win.
Half the British population self-censors out of fear. Tens of thousands are arrested each year for the crime of speaking their minds. The establishment should have to answer for that. They cannot, because it is indefensible.
The Free Speech Act is not a radical proposal. It is perfectly aligned with Britain’s own liberal tradition, the tradition of Hume, Milton, Mill and Orwell. Free speech activists are not radicals. The radicals are those who have spent two decades quietly transforming this country into Censorship Island.
It is long past time for the British free speech movement to stop playing defence, to raise our expectations and to reclaim what the UK has lost. The Free Speech Act is the first move. It won’t be the last.
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