How Britain became a cautionary tale on freedom of speech

A survey of recent developments in our courts and legislature

There is a palpable sense that England is under attack, from all sides and within. One reason for this — which is apparent to anyone who has visited a city in recent years — is that we have imported millions of non-Westerners from the ‘Global South’, with all of the negative effects that this has had. As Sir Keir Starmer said last November, it is a ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’.

While this is an existential issue, most are remiss to talk about this (especially in the specific context of demographic change), or indeed to form communities at all in the wake of this change. A culture of fear has gripped our nation to such an extent that it is now perceived that any assertion of English identity amid this quagmire, or frank discussion of the issue, will lead to a knock at the door from the police. Those officers will then consult a Swiss-army-knife of legislation to explain why you are now a criminal, for one reason or another. On the other hand, if you have been commentating from the safety of another country, you may no longer enter Britain, as Renaud Camus discovered in April 2025, and various others did in 2018.

The perception that England is having an auto-immune response against its own people is not misplaced. England — and by extension, Britain — once prided itself as a place uniquely adapted to liberty. Today, it leads the English-speaking world in criminalising it. Much like our migration crisis, this is not an accident: it is the result of identifiable legislation, of which the public are not widely aware, being quietly created. It is often said we do not have a written constitution; this is not so, it is just so little known to the public that it might as well not exist. Acts which began life as well-intentioned attempts to curb football hooliganism in the ’80s, or teenage suicide, have metastasised into a sweeping regime of speech suppression which punishes political dissent more harshly than violent physical disorder.

The Public Order Act (1986) (‘The POA’), written before the internet even existed, is now being used to prosecute those who speak plainly about Britain’s demographic transformation online. Layered atop this is the Online Safety Act (2023) (‘The OSA’): a bureaucratic monstrosity designed to pre- emptively erase platforms and speech that is deemed risqué before it can even be heard, or said. Much like how ‘Martyn’s Law’ has choked terrestrial events like the Shrewsbury Flower Show into non-existence, the POA and OSA are poised to choke the life out of the online world for the British.

Between these two acts, the British state has built a censorship machine of considerable breadth — all while ignoring legitimate digital harms, like doxxing, something the state appears to tolerate and even weaponises to political ends. What follows is an examination of how Britain arrived in this situation — and how, short of repealing the POA and OSA wholesale, we might claw back some of the liberty we have lost.

The POA: Criminalising diagnosis of the problem

The POA was conceived in a pre-internet Britain to help police riots, and in particular, the football hooliganism of the years leading up to its implementation. Its first three sections formalise the common law offences of riot, affray, and violent disorder. In 2016 alone, around 5 people were charged with riot, over 3000 with affray or violent disorder — but over 10,000 were prosecuted for ‘threatening behaviour’ offences under sections 4, 4A and part III of the Act, much of it online. By way of these sections, the POA threatens to criminalise any speech not wholly positive about ethnicity. This at a time when the nation reels from mass awareness of phenomena like the Pakistani rape gangs and the demographic shocks of uncontrolled immigration. Yet to even discuss ethnicity, however carefully, is verboten — a mindset baked into every press regulator, and our policing practices, as I explained here.

Following the 2024 summer riots, the Labour government seized on the POA as a Swiss-army knife against white working-class dissent. Among its victims: Lucy Connolly, jailed for 31 months over a tweet that fell well short of incitement, and which had no proven link to criminal acts. Judicial sentencing remarks rarely cited ‘hate’ itself — more often, they revealed a judiciary baffled by the mere existence of the internet.

The OSA: Britain’s Berlin Firewall, and Ofcom’s Death Star

While the POA criminalises dissent on platforms, the OSA attempts to ensure it never sees the light of day.

The suicide of Molly Russell was the emotional trigger for the OSA. A genuine tragedy, yes — but one hijacked by extreme-left lobbyists like Hope Not Hate and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate to push through sweeping restrictions. In passing the OSA, the British state has not built a shield, as was intended, but a Berlin Firewall. Not to protect citizens, but to cordon them off from the digital world entirely.

Passed into law in October 2023, the OSA grew monstrous in gestation — fattened by Ofcom’s endless ‘codes of practice’. Ostensibly designed to protect children, it rapidly revealed itself as the most far-reaching censorship mechanism yet devised in a Western democracy. In December 2024, Ofcom mandated illegal content risk assessments for any site hosting forums, blogs, or user comments.

Among the list of ‘illegal harms’ they must now mitigate, the broad and malleable term ‘hate’ was listed. By March 2025, benign forums — from hamster care groups to cycling clubs — were shuttering under the burden of compliance. Independent spaces are being crippled, driving users back into the arms of Big Tech platforms, whose in-house censorship practices Ofcom finds far easier to command.

Gab, Kiwi Farms, and similar sites are already in Ofcom’s crosshairs. The pattern is clear: destroy the free internet’s edges first, and work inward. The sole light in this darkness is X (formerly Twitter), the only major social media platform which has remained social. Watching Ofcom warm up its new statutory powers has been like witnessing the trial firing of the Death Star.

The OSA also turns the state’s hysteria surrounding misinformation into law. Under Section 179(1) of the OSA, it is now theoretically possible for an April Fools’ joke to land you court under the offence of knowingly sharing false information, which causes ‘non-trivial psychological harm’, with no reasonable excuse. I, along with the public, am still uncertain whether such information being shared before midday on April 1 constitutes a reasonable excuse. This uncertainty creates a chilling effect on the public’s ability to speak. Even claiming that Britain is a ‘free country’ logically risks incurring a criminal charge.

The genius — if one may call it that — of the OSA lies in its engineered vagueness. Rather than tightly targeting child abuse or terrorism, it grants Ofcom and compliant platforms a catch-all mandate: mitigate any ‘risk of harm’, criminal or not, defined post hoc. Section 3 imposes a ‘duty of care’ on any service offering user-to-user interaction. Section 5 extends this to virtually the entire internet. Section 12 expands ‘content of concern’ to include perfectly legal material deemed harmful by future risk assessments.

This is not law enforcement. It is discretionary speech suppression, weaponised by a Blair-era regulator (Ofcom).

Under Section 110, Ofcom can demand access to platforms’ internal moderation systems, source code, or private records — backed by the threat of ruinous fines under Section 112, and personal criminal liability under Section 176.

Platforms will not simply remove speech proven harmful. They will remove anything that might become a liability, pre-emptively. Welcome to the compliance economy: where the Englishman’s right to speak is strangled not only by a police knock at the door, but preventing access to public discourse entirely.

Digital Illiteracy

In 2024, I chronicled the ‘Keyboard Warrior Prosecutions’ following the summer riots for The Critic; in particular, cases where crude online speech is punished as if it were violent conduct. Lee Dunn, Wayne O’Rourke, Daniel Kingsley — men prosecuted as though they were revolutionaries for posts on social media, overseen by a judiciary which does not understand the culture of the internet. Laws written in the ’80s (such as the POA) are now applied to platforms unthinkable to those who enacted them.

Rather than malice, I am content to assume much of this is the result of a total lack of digital literacy in our judiciary. 70 percent of court judges and 69 percent of tribunal judges are aged over fifty, and over one-third of both are older than sixty. The same illiteracy is true in the blunt end of the police and the legislative end of government. Most of those involved in drafting and implementing legislation dealing with online speech first meaningfully experienced digital culture upon being forced indoors for two years amid Britain’s COVID-19 lockdown.

For a decade, we have witnessed those who do not understand either the law or the internet pushing for legislation on its uses. Lucy Powell MP, now the Leader of the House of Commons, put forward a motion for consideration of a bill in 2018 banning private Facebook groups, claiming that right-wing groups were not being prosecuted as much as she would like. Similarly, in 2021, Lord Gilbert, Conservative chair of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, stated that more online speech ought be criminalised, telling the committee that: ‘…if the government believes that a type of content is sufficiently harmful it should be criminalised’ (emphasis added). The same low-information hysteria surrounding the internet explains why the government has treated the fictional Netflix television series Adolescence as though it were a green paper.

The boxing solution

The obvious conclusion is to mass-repeal these pieces of legislation, but if this is not possible, another approach is that online speech ought be given the same exceptions from criminality as boxers who voluntarily enter a ring.

Boxing, under the laws of England and Wales, should almost certainly not be allowed to go ahead, between those consenting to be in the ring, without regular prosecutions. However, the rules and regulations of boxing place it at a relatively safe distance from the criminal law. If sites like X and Facebook were willing to referee the ‘boxing ring’ of their platforms with consistency, the courts ought be satisfied that prosecutions should not take place over speech seen by those consenting to be in that ‘ring’.

The Doxxing omission

While the OSA and POA limit the speech of named individuals, it pointedly ignores doxxing — the malicious exposure of pseudonymous users. I believe that this omission is deliberate. Doxxing, in the right hands, is now a state-approved political weapon.

As I wrote in 2024, if there is to be any criminal category for online speech, it should be doxxing: the deliberate publication of private information with the intent to cause real-world harm. It violates the separation of the digital and terrestrial realms in a real sense, unlike the various speech offences Britain currently pursues, which — crucially — do not.

Doxxing is not about offence or disagreement. It is a targeted act of intimidation that exposes individuals to real-life harm to body and reputation. Unlike the ever-expanding categories of speech offences surrounding offence, misinformation, and racial hatred, doxxing presents a clear victim, a clear perpetrator, and a clear chain of causation. It should be a standalone criminal offence, carrying an unlimited fine — serious enough to deter, but proportionate to the harm done.

Any such criminal finding will also be admissible in civil court, allowing victims a swift route to damages in defamation or harassment claims. And yet today, doxxing is treated as a political weapon rather than a crime: when the extreme-left Hope Not Hate unmasked Raw Egg Nationalist, The Guardian named the pseudonymous writer Lomez, or Taylor Lorenz outed Libs of TikTok, they were celebrated in media circles, not sanctioned – and wrongly so. The OSA is, predictably, completely silent on this subject.

Conclusion

Britain’s speech laws have made us an international laughingstock. If there is to be a criminal offence for online speech, it should be doxxing alone: a direct assault on personal safety. Instead, we are saddled with laws like the POA. These are used to suppress political discussion, particularly around immigration and its myriad negative consequences. Talking honestly about immigration and national identity now risks prosecution, and it is not because it is untrue.

The obvious answer is repeal. But short of that, online speech should be treated like boxing: a consenting contest, where rough play within clear rules stays outside criminal law. Platforms like X and Facebook, if they are willing to referee fairly, should provide that protected ‘ring’. Only breaches of consent — such as doxxing — should attract the government’s attention.

Until Britain makes that distinction, it will remain a cautionary tale: a nation censoring its own survival while ignoring the real injuries of its political culture.

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Image credits: Jim Linwood, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

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This article was written by Michael Reiners, a writer and barrister. You can follow him on X here. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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