The Death Throes of Free Speech in the United Kingdom
I
When the cleric Robert Braybrooke, newly come from the sleepy deanery of Salisbury, began his tenure as Bishop of London on Jan. 5, 1382, the embers of rebellion were still smoldering in the Kingdom of England. The Peasants’ Revolt had been suppressed a few months earlier, but only after the rebellious villains had broken into the Tower, sat joking upon the king’s bed, impudently demanded a kiss from the king’s mother, and then hacked off the head of the archbishop of Canterbury. Shaken by the slaying of Archbishop Simon Sudbury, who had previously served as Bishop of London, the newly appointed Bishop Braybrooke would have had mixed emotions as he ascended Ludgate Hill and made his way towards Old St Paul’s Cathedral, the seat of his bishopric. The scene that met him there may not have been quite as ghastly as those that accompanied the wild jacqueries of the Great Rising, yet it was enough to leave the bishop incandescent with rage.
This marvelous house of God, a masterpiece of the late Romanesque and early English Gothic style, had become a veritable den of thieves, profaned just as the Second Temple had been profaned by the merchants and the money-changers and the dove-sellers. “In our Cathedral,” the bishop would later write, “not only men, women also, not on common days alone but especially on Festivals, expose their wares, as it were, in a public market, buy and sell without reverence for the holy place.” Worse still, there were others who “by the instigation of the devil, do not scruple with stones and arrows to bring down the birds, pigeons, and jackdaws which nestle in the walls and crevices of the building: others play at ball or at other unseemly games, both within and without the church, breaking the beautiful and costly painted windows to the amazement of the spectators.” And so we read in the Annals of St Paul’s Cathedral that the bishop “threatens these offenders, if they do not desist, on monition, from these irreverent practices, to visit them with the greater excommunication.” Later, both Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I would outlaw the “making of bargains” and the “making of disturbances” inside the cathedral, to little or no avail, for the good people of London were not so easily browbeaten.
Over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, the illicit vendors who hawked their wares in the nave of Old St Paul’s Cathedral were gradually replaced by a class of persons that Bishop Braybrooke might have considered even more obnoxious: newsmongers. The nearby churchyard had become the center of London’s intellectual life, with spirited theological debates held beneath Paul’s Cross, and numerous bookstores and publishing houses springing up in the vicinity. It was at Henry Byneman’s bookshop at the Sign of Three Wells, located just off the cathedral’s northwest door, that William Shakespeare would have procured his trusty edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, the source of so many of his history plays. Politicians, theologians, philosophers, writers, and proto-bohemians all gathered there in the churchyard, debating and shopping and dodging pickpockets, and with London weather being what it was (and is), the crowds inevitably sought refuge in the drier confines of Old St Paul’s Cathedral. Thus did the so-called Paul’s Walk come into existence.
William Haughton, in his 1598 stage play Englishmen for My Money, or A Woman Will Have Her Will, described Paul’s Walk as an “open house” teeming with a “great store of company that do nothing but go up and down, and go up and down, and make a grumbling together.” Thirty years later, the cleric John Earle elaborated on that drone-like murmuration, describing it as “a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel. The noise in it is like that of bees, a strange humming or buzz mixed of walking tongues and feet: it is a kind of still roar or loud whisper … It is the great exchange of all discourse, and no business whatsoever but is here stirring and a-foot.” Courtiers and poets, businessmen and hack writers, clerics and spies would all gather in the nave at 11 in the morning, and, in the words of the 17th-century essayist Francis Osborne, “walk in the middle aisle till twelve, and after dinner from three to six, during which times some discoursed on business, others of news…. And those news-mongers, as they called them, did not only take the boldness to weigh the public but most intrinsic actions of the state, which some courtier or other did betray to this society.” The central aisle of Old St Paul’s had become, in John Earle’s words, the “land’s epitome,” indeed “the whole world’s map, which you may here discern in its perfectest motion, justling and turning.”
In her masterly biography of George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham, The Scapegoat, Lucy Hughes-Hallett describes Paul’s Walk as a “thoroughfare” used by carters contemptuous of regulations barring donkeys from the cathedral, a “catwalk” for well-dressed young gallants, a “marketplace” full of antiquarian books and cheap pamphlets, as well as a “a place to stretch your legs,” a “social venue,” and a “playground” where children frolicked from dawn to dusk. Above all, it was a place where information circulated freely. Gossips served up succulent morsels of slander, lawyers deliberated over questions momentous and obscure brought before the Bar, ships’ captains brought news from the distant shores of a growing empire. As Hughes-Hallett notes, there was something deeply subversive about Paul’s Walk, something threatening to King James I’s regime:
King James didn’t like it. He sensed it was dangerous. In 1610 Francis Bacon had listed political songs and “false news” among the signs of imminent “trouble.” The King agreed, He didn’t like the wares for sale at Paul’s. He disapproved of “the common printing and dispersing of traitorous and seditious books and of profane and scurrilous pamphlets and libels.” He didn’t like the writing and he didn’t like the talk. He wrote a rhyme against the rhymesters: Hold your prattling, spare your pen / Be honest and obedient men.
The prattling continued all the same, at least until Old St Paul’s Cathedral was gutted during the Great Fire of London and replaced by Sir Christopher Wren’s Baroque confection, the nave of which never caught on with the writers and dandies and colporteurs of the roiling English capital.
II
Paul’s Walk is long gone, but it will always represent a crucial link in the great chain of English liberty and freedom of speech stretching from the Magna Carta through the Protestation of 1621 to the Declaration of Rights of 1689 and beyond. Paul’s Walk was the embodiment of Desiderius Erasmus’ assertion that “in a free state, tongues too should be free.” Paul’s Walk was the realization of John Milton’s stirring exhortation in Areopagitica: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” It was along Paul’s Walk that freedom of speech, that greatest product of natural law and common law rights, attained its apotheosis, much to the chagrin of the powers-that-be.
America’s Founding Fathers partook of the cultural and legal traditions that produced Paul’s Walk. Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their fellow revolutionaries treated freedom of speech as the “principal pillar of a free government,” a principle “justly vexatious” to tyrants, without which we “may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” They fought to preserve their ancient liberties and rights as Englishmen; as the historian Jacques Barzun correctly pointed out, what the American revolutionaries “wanted was not a new type of government, but the old type they enjoyed. They were used to many freedoms, which they claimed as the immemorial rights of Englishmen. Once they defeated the English armies and expelled the Loyalists, they went back to their former ways, which they modestly enlarged, and codified in the Bill of Rights.” Thus we may speak of these United States as a fundamentally Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, not of course in an ethnic but in a historical, cultural, political, and legal sense.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, in a famous 2006 interview, spoke nostalgically of how “I went to England, and I felt at home. There is no doubt that American culture, American common culture, which nobody has to belong to, originates with English culture, and that includes Shakespeare, it includes nursery rhymes that we all know, and that we use as examples. That’s our common culture, and I think our framers recognized that.” Most Americans are, at heart, Anglophiles, and not just because of the appeal of the posh Received Pronunciation, flaming Christmas puddings, Jermyn Street tailors, Wodehouse comedies, BBC costume dramas, steeplechasing, and so on, but something far more fundamental. England is the wellspring of liberty which nourished our comparatively young nation. Yet when we look upon England in its current abject state, we begin to wonder whether we would still feel “at home” there, as once we largely did.
There is no denying that the new Labour government under Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has made rather a bad start. Its policies have proven ridiculous at best, contemptible at worst. A tremendous amount of political capital is being expended on implementing the moral monstrosity of “medical assistance in dying,” even though physicians have warned that assisted dying cannot possibly be safely introduced while the National Health Service is fundamentally broken. Sovereignty of the Chagos Islands is being relinquished to a country allied with China, over the objections of Britain’s closest ally. The prime minister has signed a document calling for talks on “reparatory justice” for former colonies, without knowing what that will mean. A value-added tax has been introduced on public school fees, despite the transparent absurdity of taxing education, and the fact that families sending their children to public (i.e. private) schools are already being taxed to support the state-run schools they do not utilize. Millions of pensioners have been deprived of Winter Fuel Payment assistance. Crippling death duties are to be assessed against farmers, while left-wing journalists support the measure by claiming that “Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain,” language directly echoing that of Stalinist de-kulakization campaigns. It is with the ongoing suppression of free speech in Britain, however, that the Starmer regime has reached its nadir.
Whereas the Stuart monarchs merely grumbled about Paul’s Walk, the British government is taking a more proactive approach to its modern-day equivalent, social media. There is, admittedly, a precedent for this. In 2017, under a (nominally) Conservative government, something like nine people were being arrested per day, five of which would eventually be charged, for online speech offenses. Complain on social media about, say, the prevalence of Palestinian flags on Bethnal Green, and prepare yourself for a late-night knock on the door and an arrest on suspicion of a “racially aggravated Section 5 public order offence.” And even if you aren’t arrested, your speech may be cataloged as a “non-crime hate incident,” as was the case when Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser likened non-binary gender identities to self-identifying “as a cat.” It has been estimated that some 120,000 non-crime hate incidents were recorded between 2014 and 2019, alongside 6,150 actual arrests from 2015 and 2016. These are numbers that we would normally associate with Putinist Russia, and yet they are happening in the land of “freeborn Englishmen.”
An uptick in arrests and convictions for “online hate speech” has occurred in the aftermath of this summer’s anti-immigration Southport riot, with judges warning that “so called keyboard warriors” must “learn to take responsibility for their inflammatory and disgusting language,” and with police constabularies warning that “there is nowhere to hide.” The official X account of the United Kingdom has urged its populace to “Think before you post,” while the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley has vowed that “we will throw the full force of the law at people and whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online we will come after you.” Terms like “Orwellian,” “Big Brother,” and “thoughtcrime” naturally come to mind. George Orwell argued in a 1948 essay, “[T]hreats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen,” and we are rapidly approaching that point, as the United Kingdom descends into the sort of grey, dystopian anarcho-tyranny in which a 53-year-old Cheshire housewife is imprisoned for angry Facebook posts at the same time that a child rapist is given a supervision order and prematurely set free on the grounds of “prison overcrowding.”
Argentina’s libertarian president, the estimable Javier Milei, stated at a meeting of the Council of the Americas that “while other countries propose censorship, we propose freedom of expression … Just look at what is happening in England. Since the socialists came to power, they are putting people in jail for posting on social networks.” He also pointed out that the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act imposes penalties for social media posts that inflict “psychological or physical harm,” while specifically exempting members of the press. “The journalists here would also like it, because they don’t like that they have lost the monopoly of the microphone and being able to use that tool to extort and slander without any cost.” Yet it is worth noting that British journalists, too, have been targeted in recent months. Allison Pearson, a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, briefly mistook a photograph of supporters of the Pakistani political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf for Hamas partisans, only to delete her X post. She was nevertheless visited by an elite unit of the Essex Police’s “gold group” — normally tasked with serious matters like terrorism and financial cybercrime — who were investigating her social media activity not as a non-crime hate incident but as a potential offense under the Public Order Act. Another writer, the prominent feminist Julia Bindel, likewise had officers banging on her door following a complaint submitted by “a transgender man in the Netherlands.”
These and similar incidents have led former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to complain that “This is appalling. How can Starmer’s Britain lecture other countries about free speech when an innocent journalist gets a knock on the door – for a tweet? Our police have their hands full of burglaries and violent crime. They are being forced to behave like a woke Securitate — and it has to stop.” It bears mentioning that this all could and should have been stopped during the Johnson government, but now it seems it is too late. What Allison Pearson has called “deeply sinister, frightening nonsense and wholly disproportionate police over-reach” is now endemic in the old birthplace of liberty.
III
“We’re watching the end of an ancient and once rather wonderful civilisation,” Peter Hitchens lamented more than a decade ago. “You’re watching the end of it. It’s how these things go – neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with the country sinking giggling into the sea.” State-assisted (and eventually state-mandated, no doubt) suicide, de-kulakization, a crackdown on freedom of expression — it all does seem like the death throes of a civilization. There are obvious reasons for why this is happening. As Unherd’s Nial Gooch has astutely posited:
Several trends are coming to a head. The first is a very long-term one, whereby the entire moral basis of the British state has changed…The state now regards itself as the overseer and regulator of social interaction — a schoolmistress making sure that all the children play nicely together and sanctioning those who are reluctant to do so. The Covid-19 pandemic gave the state a renewed crusading ardour, a reinvigorated justification for its mastery over the rest of us.
The second is that:
in the age of vast demographic change, the British state has to take upon itself the role of intercommunal peacemaker and arbiter, like the imperial administrators of yesteryear. Keeping order between and within very different communities becomes the paramount concern, even if it means treating some groups with indulgence. Think of the Harehills riots in July, to which the local authorities effectively surrendered, or the way in which the Met has more or less ignored appearances of the black power paramilitary organisation Forever Family.
Again, this amounts to a classic case of anarcho-tyranny, defined by the political theorist Samuel Francis as “the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and law abiding, and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.”
The prospect of the United Kingdom “sinking giggling into the sea” has certain ramifications on the other side of the Atlantic. We have already seen the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner threatening to “come after” those who commit alleged hate speech offenses abroad. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, originally incorporated in London as Brixton Endeavours Limited, has targeted social media platforms and numerous conservative news sites, with leaked documents indicating that the non-profit’s “annual priorities” include initiatives to “Kill Musk’s Twitter,” “Trigger EU and UK regulatory action,” and make “Progress towards change in USA,” prompting Elon Musk to label it as a “criminal organization.” New laws being introduced in the U.K. will allow regulators to levy fines on U.S. tech companies assessed on the basis of “global revenue,” meaning that penalties imposed against X, for example, could conceivably be calculated based on Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, and the Boring Co. sales.
All of this is completely unacceptable, and has prompted Vice President-elect JD Vance to link the heretofore distinct issues of free speech and military support: “NATO wants us to continue being a good participant in this military alliance – why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” According to Vance, “We have to say that American power comes with certain strings attached, and one of those is: respect free speech.” If the United States represents the sole guarantor of British and European peace and security, particularly with a revanchist Russia threatening NATO’s eastern flank, and if the United Kingdom is content to let its military waste away — a recent House of Lords committee report found that the “UK’s Armed Forces lack the mass, resilience and internal coherence necessary to maintain a deterrent effect and respond effectively to prolonged and high-intensity warfare” — then Washington has a considerable amount of leverage, which can be employed to preserve our most fundamental civilizational values. Transatlantic security remains a matter of profound importance, but the notion that our closest allies can shelter under our defense umbrella while undermining basic human and civil rights, and even targeting some of our most successful industries, can no longer be tolerated.
Once upon a time, Paul’s Walk was the “land’s epitome,” the “great exchange of all discourse” where ideas were formed, criticized, and disseminated. Now, the public square has shifted to the internet and social media, where again the constant “still roar or loud whisper” of the world’s opinions can be heard. Free speech remains as necessary as it was in the days of Milton, who rightly maintained that “the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience” was “above all liberties.” If Britain has forgotten this, America has not (even if there are plenty of politicians like Kamala Harris who think that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.”) The preservation of our fundamental civilizational values, foremost among which is the freedom of expression, and the ability to engage in public debate without fear of de-platforming, de-banking, and other forms of official interference, should be part of our foreign policy going forward, and judging by Vance’s recent comments it seems it will be. This will not only safeguard basic norms and values, but perhaps it will even help bring our partners across the ocean back to their senses. And then, might we dare envision, as Milton did in Areopagitica, a British renaissance: “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam.” Yet that can only happen where unfettered speech is viewed not with dread, and not with contempt, but as the essential condition of a free people.
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