For some time, I have been watching Britain from across the pond and asking a question I never expected to ask about one of America’s closest allies: what is happening to free speech?
Recent news gave me another reason to ask it.
A new report from civil liberties group Big Brother Watch found that at least 62,199 people have been arrested in Britain over the past five years for communications offenses. Of those, 18,510 were charged and 12,292 convicted.
Of course, some communications offenses are serious. Threats, harassment and abuse can cause real harm, and the law has a legitimate role in dealing with them.
But that cannot explain away the bigger question raised by these figures: how did the country that gave so much of the world its understanding of liberty reach the point where tens of thousands of people are being arrested over things communicated from behind a keyboard or through a phone?
This week, I’m visiting the UK to get some answers for an upcoming podcast series: “Has Britain Lost Its Common Sense?”
Free speech is only part of the question. Britain is also undergoing a profound religious and cultural transformation. Christianity, once woven deeply into the country's institutions and identity, has declined as secularism and other faiths have grown. I want to understand whether those changes have affected how Britain now thinks about liberty, tolerance and dissent.
I will spend several days in London investigating the country’s increasingly bitter battles over speech, religion and individual liberty, and meeting some of the people who have experienced them firsthand. My guests include lawyers, politicians, campaigners, street evangelists and journalists.
Among them is Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to 31 months in prison after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred over a social media post written in the aftermath of the horrific Southport murders.
What Connolly wrote was ugly. Defending free speech does not require pretending otherwise. But a free society should still be willing to ask difficult questions about when offensive or inflammatory speech becomes a criminal matter — and whether imprisonment is a proportionate response.
I will be joined by Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, whose encounters with police over silent prayer near an abortion clinic have turned her case into an international debate about freedom of religion, expression and even thought.
Baroness Claire Fox, one of Britain’s most prominent free-speech campaigners, will talk about whether cases like these are exceptional – or symptoms of something much bigger.
I am not going to Britain to prove a point.
I am going because I want to understand where the country now draws the line between protecting people from genuine threats and opinions that are deemed offensive.
When does public safety become an excuse for censorship? When does policing genuinely harmful behavior become policing expression? And, perhaps most importantly, what happens to a society when ordinary people begin wondering whether expressing an unpopular opinion is worth the risk?
Because that is the part Americans should be watching.
The greatest threat to free speech is not necessarily that every controversial opinion ends with somebody in a jail cell. It is that people begin to believe it might.
If saying the wrong thing could mean a police investigation, an arrest, losing your job or months of legal trouble, eventually people learn to keep quiet.
That is how a chilling effect works.
Britain is particularly important because this debate is unfolding against the backdrop of a much wider cultural transformation.
Christianity, which shaped British institutions and culture for centuries, has declined dramatically. Islam has grown. Arguments over immigration, integration, religious expression and national identity have become some of the most sensitive issues in British public life.
At the same time, there are intriguing signs that Britain’s Christian story may not be over. Reports of younger people returning to church and major new Christian initiatives suggest the country’s religious future may be more complicated than a simple story of secular decline.
I want to understand all of it.
I want to know whether Americans like me have received a distorted picture of Britain – or whether something fundamental really has changed.
It would be easy for me to fly into London, collect a handful of shocking anecdotes and return home declaring that Britain has lost its mind.
That isn’t why I’m going.
I want to listen to people who believe Britain has a serious free-speech problem and people who believe its laws are necessary. I want to understand how a nation with such a profound tradition of liberty reached this moment and whether the fears being expressed about its future are justified.
Most importantly, I want to know what Britain can teach America.
Has Britain lost its common sense? I’ll let you know…
*Business leader Peter Demos is host of the 'Uncommon Sense in Current Times' podcast and author of 'Bold Not Belligerent'. Once an outspoken critic of Christianity, he now owns a successful restaurant chain where faith actively shapes his leadership, culture and decision-making. Drawing on his own transformation, he equips Christians to engage a broken culture with truth, conviction and grace. Learn more at PeterDemos.org.
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