LONDON — “At what point did we become North Korea?” Nigel Farage asked of the U.K. Wednesday as he took to the grand surrounds of Washington’s House Judiciary Committee chamber — more than 3,500 miles from Westminster.
“I come from the land of Magna Carta, I come from a land that gave us the mother of parliaments so it doesn’t give me any great joy to be sitting in America and describing the really awful authoritarian situation that we have now sunk into,” the Reform UK leader lamented to the committee of U.S. lawmakers probing “European threats to American free speech and innovation.”
Farage — who is surging ahead in opinion polls in the U.K., and making great domestic play of being a champion of free speech — landed in Washington for his big committee moment with apparently perfect timing.
Back home, a furore over the arrest of Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, detained by police at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of inciting violence with a series of social media posts about transgender people, is brewing.
What happened to Linehan could “happen to any American,” Farage told the U.S. lawmakers.
The Reform UK leader also raised the case of Lucy Connolly, a mother jailed after pleading guilty to stirring up racial hatred with a social media post in the wake of a deadly knife attack on young girls in Southport, England last year. The case has similarly animated the right in the U.K.
Farage’s appearance will do little to calm a narrative — already being pushed by key allies of U.S. President Donald Trump — that free speech is under threat in Europe, and particularly in the U.K.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance stunned European leaders in February when he accused the continent’s governments, and what he called EU “commissars,” of being more interested in stifling free speech than in providing security for their citizens. Vance beefed with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the issue in the Oval Office, earning a rebuke from Starmer in full view of President Trump.
Just last month, the U.S. State Department issued an unflattering assessment of the U.K.’s free speech record.
But some domestic opponents believe Farage is overplaying his hand — and amping up a complex issue in a bid to earn political capital.
Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Starmer accused the Reform UK leader of lobbying Americans to “impose sanctions on this country to harm working people,” adding that it “cannot get more unpatriotic than that.”
Ahead of the hearing The Sun newspaper reported Farage would call for the U.S. to punish countries that restrict free speech with diplomatic and trade penalties, though Farage denied suggesting sanctions “at all, in any way.”
Conservative Shadow Housing Secretary James Cleverly also refused to row in behind the Reform leader ahead of his evidence session. “I’ve been to parts of the world where freedom of speech really is curtailed,” Cleverly told GB News, the right-wing network whose pin Farage wore in his evidence session, and which is expanding into the United States. “We’ve got to be careful that we don’t add to what I think is fundamentally a political attack from Nigel Farage toward his own country.”
Farage also draw criticism from committee member Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, who argued there was “no free speech crisis in Britain,” highlighting Farage’s own show on GB News. Raskin described the Reform UK leader as a “far-right, pro-Putin politician who leads the U.K. Reform party — a party that has four members out of 650 members in the parliament.”
But Claire Fox, a libertarian author and member of Britain’s House of Lords, thinks there is a case for British authorities to answer, after a series of high-profile incidents that have blurred the lines between offense and actual risk of harm.
There has, she argued, been a “huge shift” in recent years as the definition of harm has become “a very elastic concept.”
“People will say that they’re harmed by speech that’s effectively offensive, but which you wouldn’t ever have seen as being on a par with somebody coming up and biffing your head in,” Fox said. Public order legislation — under which Linehan was arrested — is being used “promiscuously in relation to speech,” she argued.
Ken Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions, is skeptical. “I don’t think we face a crisis of free speech,” the former top prosecutor for England and Wales argued.
“The Court of Appeal has been absolutely clear that people must be allowed to express themselves offensively. They must be allowed to ridicule, they must be allowed to say things which are upsetting to other people. All of this is protected. What you can’t do is incite violence. That’s illegal.”
“I think it’s an issue that’s been weaponized by Farage, and it’s been weaponized by American tech titans like [Elon] Musk and [Mark] Zuckerberg, and the rest of them. Farage is doing it for political reasons, and they’re doing it for commercial reasons,” he added.
Indeed, Farage argued that Britain’s new Online Safety Act — a controversial and long-in-the works law that imposes a duty of care on platforms to protect users from harmful content — would “damage trade between our countries.”
Martyring Connolly
Senior lawyers have little time for Farage making Connolly, the jailed mother, a cause célèbre over her 31-month prison sentence for posts on social media platform X, which she admitted had incited racial hate.
Farage told the U.S. committee Connolly was “living proof of what can go wrong.” The post was “intemperate” and “wrong,” he said, but it was removed three-and-a-half hours later, he added.
Connolly’s sentence was too high, Macdonald acknowledged. But he pointed out: “She pleaded guilty to a very serious offense. The Court of Appeal found that she had admitted inciting racial hatred with the intention that serious violence should result from her tweet. The idea that prosecuting a person in this situation is a curtailment on free speech is just completely ludicrous.”
Brits’ views are decidedly mixed on these hot-button issues.
Polling from the think tank More in Common last month found a third of those asked thought Connolly’s sentence was too harsh, although that leapt to 70 percent of Reform UK supporters. Yet just one in five of the group polled thought politicians should associate themselves with Connolly. Support for doing so was strongest among supporters of Farage’s Reform UK.
There is also strong public support for the Online Safety Act, despite skepticism about how effective age verification measures meant to keep eyes off content deemed harmful will be. A majority of Reform UK voters also support online age verification, according to separate polling from Ipsos, although they are the least likely voting group to say they would comply with age checks.
On his left flank
While the right-leaning Farage is leading the charge on the Connolly case, the left in Britain is waging its own battle over free speech, and the right to protest.
Earlier this year, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper moved to proscribe Palestine Action, a pro-Gaza campaign group involved in direct action at a U.K. military site in July, as a terrorist group. That makes membership of, or support, for the group a criminal offense, and it’s a restriction being challenged by high-profile figures on the left, including former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Civil liberties groups have also leapt on the protest curbs. In August, more than 500 people were arrested at a demonstration in London in support of the banned group, many for displaying placards in support. Akiko Hart, director of the campaign group Liberty, said the proscription of Palestine Action is a “disproportionate application of counter-terror laws, and is a worrying escalation of how the government treats protest groups and uses terrorism powers.”
She said it was creating “a chilling effect in which many people are now also unable to express their opinions on the proscription of a direct action group because of the risk of arrest.”
The Home Office has long insisted the proscription does not affect the freedom to protest on Palestinian rights, and only applies to the “specific and narrow organization.” The decision to proscribe had been based on “strong security advice” following serious attacks, the Home Office said.
For the police — tasked with enforcing the controversial law — the proscription of Palestine Action had “clearly been a pressure” over the summer, Gavin Stephens, a senior chief constable who chairs the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said. But they had the “capability to deal with the law where it needs to be enforced.”
Stephens is also forthright on the pressures of policing the online world. “If people are committing crimes online and are stirring up hatred, and inciting others to commit crimes, we have to deal with it,” he argued at a briefing with journalists on Tuesday.
Police unease about potentially ill-defined laws is, however, apparent. In the wake of the Linehan arrest, Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley said Wednesday that officers had been left “between a rock and a hard place” in cases where intent and harm of a post is ambiguous — because successive governments had made confusing hate crime laws.
“I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position,” he said.
On Wednesday, one of Starmer’s most senior allies, Wes Streeting hinted the government could be open to clarifying the law. Cops, the health secretary said, should be “policing streets, not just policing tweets,” he said.
For Farage — who thrives on setting the political agenda even without the parliamentary heft he craves — that will feel like a win.
Tom Bristow contributed to this report.
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