What Happened to Free Speech in the UK? Arrests, the Online Safety Act, and Protest Law

On the 1st of September 2025, a comedian named Graham Linehan walked toward the baggage claim at Heathrow Airport, just back from a trip to the United States and, like anyone passing through an airport, trying to leave as quickly as possible. He did not get the chance. Linehan was stopped, not by some duty-free perfume counter or an overpriced coffee, but by five armed police officers.

His alleged crime was a tweet. It read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Police took the position that the message incited violence against people.

The arrest made enormous headlines across Britain, where many treated it as a brazen infringement on free speech. The loudest commentators began calling the UK a totalitarian state, arguing the response was wildly disproportionate and that officers should be chasing real crime rather than words on a screen. Yet the episode was not some sudden lurch in a new direction. It was the continuation of a trend that has been building for years.

The state of free expression in the United Kingdom is shaped less by any single dramatic arrest than by a slow accumulation of laws, court orders, and policing powers that, taken together, leave British speech freer in theory than it often is in practice.

Where Britain’s Free Speech Laws Come From

Britain’s free speech tradition has deep roots, arguably reaching back to the Magna Carta, though the modern story does not require going that far. Before the 20th century, free expression in the UK was understood as a “residual liberty.” That meant a person was free to speak openly unless a specific law of the day forbade it, whether on blasphemy, obscenity, or some other category. There was no written, codified right to free speech.

Instead, there was a shared understanding that liberty of expression had to be balanced against the rule of law.

That informal arrangement gained a formal European dimension in 1950, when the UK became one of the first signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights. The convention’s articles nine, ten, and eleven covered freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly. At the outset, however, those protections lived only in European law, enforceable only by petitioning the court in Strasbourg, which made them remote for most British citizens.

The 1998 Turning Point and Its Limits

Everything shifted in 1998, when Parliament passed the Human Rights Act, integrating the European Convention as it then stood into British domestic law. From that point on, the rights to free thought, expression, and assembly could be invoked in British courts directly. Subsequent decades brought further changes tied to the internet, terrorism, protests, and more, but the 1998 statute remains the foundation beneath them all.

Even so, the UK has never been a free speech absolutist country in the way the United States is. Long before 1998, and indeed when expression was still a residual liberty, blasphemy and obscenity laws could see a person locked up, or worse. The 1727 conviction of Edmund Curll for publishing erotic fiction such as Venus in the Cloister, or The Nun in Her Smock, is one early illustration of the state policing what could and could not be put into print.

The Quirks of British Censorship

Some examples of British censorship are almost comic in retrospect. The British Board of Film Classification once operated by an unofficial guideline known as the “Mull of Kintyre test.” This rule of thumb governed whether the image of a penis could appear in a piece of media. According to the lore, the board would not grant general release to a film or video if it depicted a penis erect to an angle steeper than that of the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll and Bute as it appears on maps of Scotland.

The shorthand for this measure was “the angle of the dangle.” As absurd as that sounds, it was a real consideration.

These oddities point to a larger truth: free expression in the UK has remained a residual liberty even after 1998, hedged by a patchwork of exceptions. Some of those exceptions are widely accepted. Gag orders, for instance, are judicial directives forbidding the public disclosure of information on a particular matter, typically to protect privacy, prevent harm to participants, or safeguard national security. They function a little like an automatic non-disclosure agreement, and they keep trials from being derailed by a media frenzy.

The Sensible Cutouts and the Contested Ones

Other restrictions draw broad support too. The Official Secrets Act bars the disclosure of state secrets, and most people accept that a nation’s genuine secrets should not be public knowledge. Break that law and you might face a few years in prison and an unlimited fine if you are lucky; if you are not, you could face espionage charges, which are far more serious. Laws covering libel and defamation likewise restrict absolutely free speech, and while imperfect, many Britons are content that they exist.

But British political history also contains episodes where Westminster’s interference with free expression looks far less defensible in hindsight. A law in force from 1988 to 1994 banned the broadcast voices of spokespeople from Sinn Féin, the Northern Irish party then associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In the late 1980s, the government tried to stop UK media from reporting on Peter Wright’s MI5 memoir Spycatcher, even after the book had been published abroad. Around the same time, when the BBC learned of the secret British spy satellite Zircon, the government raided BBC offices in Scotland to block a documentary about it from airing.

The Internet and the Online Safety Act

If Britain has long fallen on the side of censorship where it deemed it sensible, there is reason to believe the machinery has shifted into overdrive since the turn of the millennium, and the internet sits at the center of that shift. Parliament has a long history of policing what people do and say online. The Communications Act of 2003, for example, prohibits sending, “by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.”

Send a threat over social media, and this law could deem it illegal. It also reaches hateful content, the leading case involved racist voicemails, certain sexually explicit communications, persistent misuse such as repeated unwanted calls, and knowingly false hoax messages like fake bomb threats.

Much of that ground now overlaps with the Online Safety Act, which is expected to take precedence over older offences and update them for the modern internet. The Act reached the public’s devices in 2025, though it was passed by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government in 2023. On its surface, the law pursues a noble aim, protecting children online. The way it has been implemented, however, worries those who value free expression in Britain.

ID Checks, Data Risk, and Distrust

The new law requires a verifiable government ID to access certain websites that show explicit material. There is nothing inherently wrong with keeping underage users away from content that can harm their development; several US states have comparable rules. But for many people, the requirement represents an enormous risk to personal information.

We live in an unprecedented era of data harvesting, and that data falling into the wrong hands is a genuine danger. Leaks can lead not just to spam calls but to bank fraud and identity theft capable of ruining lives, and both companies and governments have repeatedly shown they cannot be trusted to handle such sensitive material.

Consider the “Tea” app, a US dating-safety service for women that ran background checks on men for “red flag” behaviour like abuse and required a government ID to verify users. Tea’s own privacy policy claimed those IDs were instantly deleted. Yet when the app was hacked in July 2025, some 72,000 images submitted by women were accessed. Women who had signed up to date more safely had their data stolen, their IDs shared online, and their addresses doxed. An app meant to protect them was undone by a single breach.

When the State Itself Cannot Keep Secrets

That was a private company, but many Britons do not trust the government to keep their identities safe from cyberattacks either. July 2025 offered a stark example. It emerged that in 2022, the data of roughly 19,000 Afghans who had been trying to reach the UK while fleeing the Taliban was leaked accidentally by an official working at UK Special Forces headquarters. The Taliban later became aware of the leak.

While the regime said it was not monitoring or arresting affected Afghans, it does not have a stellar record for honesty, and relatives of those exposed say they fear for family members still in the country.

So when the government asks a citizen to hand over identification simply to access legal adult content, hesitation is understandable. If Special Forces headquarters, supposedly among the most data-secure places in the entire country, can leak information like that, what hope is there for an ID sitting in some company’s server room that is nowhere near as secure?

VPNs, Overreach, and the Real Question

People are, of course, free to decline; access to pornography is not a sovereign right. That is fair enough. But those determined to route around the law with tools like VPNs will do exactly that. VPN usage spiked dramatically the day after the rules took effect.

More concerning still has been the official response to that uptick, with some figures suggesting they want to target VPN platforms next and framing VPN users as endangering children. That rhetorical move, throwing up one’s hands and crying “won’t somebody think of the children?”, has become a familiar reply to any serious critique, even though everyone already agrees that children online deserve better protection. Eliminating VPNs, though, would effectively kill online privacy for Britons.

The deeper issue is not really pornography but government overreach. What counts as material requiring an ID under the Online Safety Act is left entirely to the UK government’s discretion, and almost immediately after enactment the law was applied to services posing no threat to children at all. The two biggest examples were Spotify, the music-streaming service, and Wikipedia, which challenged the law and lost. That invites a pointed question: is this as much about controlling what all Britons see and experience online as it is about child safety?

Posts, Sentences, and the “Two-Tier” Charge

The government has also increasingly pursued social media users over posts that allegedly break various laws, mainly those concerning incitement to violence. Many will recall the case of fellow YouTuber Mark Meechan, known online as “Count Dankula,” who fell foul of Scottish police after teaching his girlfriend’s pug to respond to certain Reich-coded phrases with a Nazi salute. Meechan was eventually fined hundreds of pounds following a court appearance that plenty of Britons regarded as a waste of the justice system’s time.

In 2017, the Times and the Telegraph, both right-leaning papers, estimated that nine people a day were being arrested in the UK in connection with hate speech, many of the cases originating online. The most recent flashpoint involved Lucy Connolly, jailed after the Southport attacks and the asylum-hotel riots that followed. Connolly was quoted as having written: “set fire to all the hotels for all I care. If that makes me racist, so be it.”

Her arrest and conviction set off a fierce debate, with prosecutors arguing the tweet incited violence.

There has been a great deal of misinformation from all sides, but as best can be told, Connolly showed little remorse and reportedly said privately that she would use mental health as an excuse if she got into trouble. She pled guilty to inciting racial hatred, was sentenced to 31 months, and was released in August 2025. Critics argued the punishment did not fit the crime, asking how a tweet could draw a longer sentence than rioters who threw bricks.

By contrast, Ricky Jones, a Labour councillor who called for far-right activists’ throats to be cut at an anti-racism rally, went to trial and was acquitted by a jury. To some, the divergence suggests a two-tier justice system in which similar conduct yields different outcomes depending on who is in the dock. Jones took the gamble of a trial that Connolly did not, and it paid off, but free speech advocates argue the principle should be consistent: either inciting violence is illegal or it is not, and the state cannot be selective.

Terrorism Law and the Hard Cases

Beyond the internet, the state of free expression in everyday British life may be worse still, though some of the relevant laws attract little objection. The Terrorism Act, updated many times over recent decades to counter extremist threats, makes it a criminal offence to collect or possess information likely to be useful to a terrorist. In practice that mainly targets weapons-making manuals circulated by such groups.

Possessing them remains illegal without a reasonable and valid excuse, such as legitimate journalism, and even then police can confiscate and seize property while the matter is assessed. Journalists therefore have to handle such material with great care. Yet even many ardent free speech supporters accept this as a law worth keeping, because the public risk is simply too great.

The law also outlaws the glorification of terrorism, another curtailment that draws few complaints.

Surveillance, Secrecy, and the Press

Other statutes and procedures are more troubling. Take the Edward Snowden leaks. Beyond Britain’s long effort to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US, who spent more than a decade in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, London has had a sustained quarrel with WikiLeaks.

Much of the mass surveillance known to continue today was exposed by Snowden’s whistleblowing, and his disclosures concerned not only US practices but the Five Eyes, the Anglosphere surveillance network linking the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The British government was deeply implicated in programmes like Tempora, which tapped global fibre-optic cables to assess internet traffic and collect vast troves of data from millions of users. In 2013, a threat of legal action from Westminster led the left-leaning Guardian to destroy documents it held on American and British surveillance.

Even framed as national security, a government leaning on the free press did not look good.

The UK also engages in forms of censorship common elsewhere, such as bans on certain books, video games, and films. Some restrictions exist to let the justice system function. Many high-profile court cases proceed behind closed doors, which is why courtroom sketches are sometimes the only visuals available, though sentencing in big cases is often streamed live.

The aim is to avoid a public frenzy that could jeopardise a trial. Gag orders and injunctions legally bar the disclosure of certain case details, and super-injunctions are so tightly sealed that people are not even permitted to mention the injunction’s existence.

The Silly and the Serious

Some cases simply defy belief. In 2006, a 21-year-old man named Sam Brown from Belfast was arrested for approaching police while drunk and asking, “Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?” Officers treated the words as homophobic and tried to charge him under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. The charges were later dropped, but the fact that anyone was arrested and charged for the remark at all is striking.

By far the largest assault on free expression, however, has been successive governments’ targeting of protests and protesters. A lawful protest must be organized in advance with the police, in writing, with at least six days’ notice so authorities can prepare. To some, that is sensible: it lets voices be heard in an orderly way and keeps the public safe during emotionally charged moments, especially where counter-protesters might appear. To others, it is an attack on an inalienable right to assemble and demonstrate whenever and wherever a person chooses.

Protest Law on the March

The government pressed further with the Public Order Act 2023, begun under the Johnson administration, which lets magistrates issue court orders against individuals they believe capable of causing serious disruption during a protest. These are called, with little subtlety, Serious Disruption Prevention Orders. Anyone who has previously committed protest-related offences or ignored court restrictions on at least two occasions can be made subject to an SDPO, and breaching one can mean six months in prison alongside an unlimited fine.

The orders can keep a person out of particular places, bar them from disruptive activities, prohibit them from being with protest groups at given times, and even stop them using the internet to encourage protest-related offences. That sits in direct tension with the European Convention’s guarantees of assembly and speech. From a public-order standpoint the rationale is visible, but protests are meant to be disruptive by their nature; that is, in a sense, the point.

Layered on top is the 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which lets police impose conditions on protests based on noise levels, and the Crime and Policing Bill, which by now has likely passed or is in its final stages. Among other policing reforms, it too targets protest, the fourth such bill in four years, seeking to criminalize parts of peaceful demonstrations by banning face coverings. Britain’s vast network of CCTV cameras and advancing AI facial-recognition technology may be part of the motivation.

Palestine Action and the Limits of Dissent

The proscription of Palestine Action illustrates how far the framework can reach. The group was officially designated a terrorist organization in UK law after several members broke into a Royal Air Force base and spray-painted two aircraft to protest the treatment of Gaza, reportedly causing seven million pounds of damage. The consequence of that designation is severe: merely expressing support for the group can carry a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.

Immediately afterward, 29 people who sat peacefully and quietly with signs declaring their support for the group were arrested, among them an 83-year-old retired priest named Sue Parfitt. Whatever one makes of the cause, these are not the profiles one associates with terrorism.

A Cautious Conclusion

So where does this leave the country? It can look as though successive British governments have squeezed free speech and protest to the point of near-meaninglessness. That sounds cynical, but Britain does appear to be entering uncertain territory. Cracking down on expression in all its forms sets a dangerous precedent for future leaders already on a slippery slope.

Authoritarian tendencies are rising worldwide, including among European liberal democracies, whether Poland’s constitutional court threatening to let its government ignore EU law or German climate activists charged with forming a criminal organization under new protest rules. In the UK, the clearest signs show up in laws around expression and in mass surveillance.

In theory, it would take only one authoritarian-leaning leader to drive further crackdowns nationwide and leave a country looking suspiciously like an autocracy almost overnight. Such fears were once unthinkable across much of Western Europe, yet they must be taken seriously today if they are to be resisted. Countries with strong institutions like the UK are better placed than most, and this is not to suggest Britain is sliding inevitably toward dictatorship.

But modern authoritarianism does not only fight democracy on an open battlefield; it subverts it from within, and the more a country flirts with authoritarian ideas, the easier the next step becomes. Trust is fraying too: a Parliament brief published in May 2025 noted record-low confidence in institutions, and a January YouGov poll found just 28 percent of people expressing confidence in the House of Commons.

The deeper reality is that dialogue, education, and debate are the only genuine ways to change minds. Criminalizing speech does not make it disappear; it drives it underground into echo chambers where it can grow more twisted and extreme.

Signs of Pushback, and a Reality Check

There is some natural resistance to Britain’s clampdown. VPNs are one example; encrypted messaging apps like Signal have been growing in use for years. Some of the backlash comes from politicians. Nigel Farage, a prominent and outspoken figure, recently traveled to the United States to meet President Donald Trump and was questioned by Congress, where he asked of his own country’s trajectory: “At what point did we become North Korea?”

That is hyperbole, and Farage is less the cause of these attitudes than a symptom of them. The country’s broader culture war underlines the point; at one stage the public was locked in a fierce argument over whether it is acceptable to put up flags and paint a St. George’s cross on roundabouts.

For all the alarm, the picture is not as dire as social media suggests. Holding up an England flag, professing love of country, and eating a bacon sandwich will not get anyone arrested. And attitudes may be shifting. As of October 2025, the Metropolitan Police dropped their inquiry into the Linehan case and announced they would no longer investigate “non-crime hate incidents” of the sort that led to his arrest.

Still, the Linehan case shows the propensity to go too far. There is a serious debate to be had about what free speech should mean to the people of the country and how it can best be protected, but beyond soundbites and agendas, the government has not chosen to focus on it. A digital bill of rights would be a step forward, yet it is not currently on the agenda.

Things could be considerably better as the UK takes further steps toward surveillance and control over people’s lives. No country is a free speech absolutist to its core, not even the United States, but on one point the American public is broadly right. Nobody wants people to be hurt or offended by what others say, and most of those seeking to restrict speech are well-intentioned people who genuinely do not want to see others harmed.

That instinct is noble. But the state cannot become the arbiter of what people may and may not say, because a future government with a radically different view could one day apply that same machinery to the very things you say, and a precedent that endangers people for their thoughts will already be set.

Freedom is not something a country simply decides to have. It is built across generations through the sacrifice of those who came before. And in the same way, it can be eroded little by little, bill by bill, until nothing remains but a hollow shell where free speech used to be.

Sources

• The Guardian — Censorship
• The Guardian — NSA/Snowden files: drives destroyed in London
• European Court of Human Rights — HUDOC case record
• Duncan Campbell — Secret Society and Zircon
• The Guardian — 30 years since the Irish political voice ban
• Condé Nast Traveler — Mull of Kintyre
• Wikipedia — Censorship in the United Kingdom
• legislation.gov.uk — Terrorism Act 2006
• legislation.gov.uk — Terrorism Act 2000, Section 58
• The Times — Police arresting nine people a day over web trolls
• The Telegraph — “Insulting words” crime and the police horse case
• The Times — More than 20 arrested at Palestine Action protest
• Amnesty International UK — Crime and Policing Bill
• Liberty — Right to protest
• The Guardian — Anti-protest curbs in the Queen’s Speech
• gov.uk — New laws to clamp down on disruptive protesters
• The Guardian — Wikipedia can challenge Online Safety Act rules
• BBC News
• BBC News
• BBC News
• BBC News
• BBC News
• BBC News — Europe
• BBC News
• UK Parliament petition 722903
• Freedom House — Global expansion of authoritarian rule
• UK Parliament POST brief — POST-PB-0066
• BBC News
• BBC News