Every day that goes by brings more confirmation that Vice President JD Vance was right: Europe has a massive free speech problem. And nowhere is it seemingly worse than the U.K.
According to a report from Fox News, a 71-year-old retired special constable from Kent, England, sued the Kent Police (who he’d served for more than a decade) over his wrongful arrest in November 2023.
Julian Foulkes was detained by Kent Police after he witnessed an antisemitic mob taking over an airport in Russia and posted on X, “One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals … “
This jab at antisemites prompted the police to show up at his house and conduct a search. They rifled through his belongings, in particular his books and magazines, which included a book by conservative author Douglas Murray and Spectator Magazine.
In the search, one of the officers said that his materials contained “very Brexit-y things,” which is interesting because Brexit was passed by U.K. voters and is the law of the land.
Fox reported that “police seized his electronic devices and detained Foulkes for eight hours before issuing him a caution—a formal warning given to a person who admits to an offense to avoid prosecution.”
The police eventually apologized for the incident, which many have aptly called “Orwellian,” but the fact remains that the police thought they had a right to harass and arrest a man over a social media post. One that was calling out antisemitism to boot.
Stories like this have become so common that even the reliably liberal Economist magazine recently admitted that Vance was right, Europe and the U.K. really do have a free speech problem.
And the issue in many cases seems to be tied to the European elites’ infatuation with mass, limitless migration.
Lucy Connolly, a mother of three, has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison for “inciting racial hatred.” Her request to reduce the sentence was denied.
Hours after Axel Rudakubana, the child of parents from Rwanda, went on a stabbing spree last July and killed three children, Connolly posted on X: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f—ing hotels full of the b——s for all I care, while you’re at it, take the treacherous government politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these [Southport] families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
She took down the post a few hours later and apologized, but that didn’t prevent her arrest and eventual prison sentence.
Was it the nicest thing to say? No. But it’s absurd to jail someone for this.
The case has received the attention of the White House and is being looked into by the State Department according to The Telegraph. As many have noted, it’s outrageous that this woman gets years in jail while pedophiles and rapists get lesser sentences.
This gets to the additional problem that not only is the U.K. engaging in suppression of free speech, it also has a racial two-tier sentencing system. An antisemitic mob can march down the streets of London shouting “kill the Jews” and receive no punishment at all.
When U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was asked about the Connelly case he plead ignorance, claimed to be for free speech, and said he was against incitement.
In the United States, cases of incitement must have explicit instructions. Locking Connelly up at all would be a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment.
Stuff like this only confirms my opinion that the American Revolution was a good idea.
But it seems like there are even concerns about the U.K.’s speech laws that could affect Americans given that they police social media platforms.
During a meeting between Starmer and President Donald Trump in February, The Daily Signal’s Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell asked the president to comment on the U.K.’s free speech violations that could affect Americans.
Vance answered for Trump saying that while the U.S. does have a special relationship with the “U.K. and also the civilian European allies,” there have been serious violations of free speech going on across the Atlantic.
“Of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them, but it also affects American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens,” Vance said.
Starmer chimed in too.
“We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time,” he said. “Well, no, I mean, certainly we wouldn’t want to reach across, U.S. citizens, and we don’t, and that’s absolutely right. But in relation to free speech in the U.K., I’m very proud of our history there.”
It’s true that the U.K. has a stronger tradition of free speech than continental Europe and most of the world, but it never had anything like the First Amendment that explicitly protects speech in America. That’s looking like a mistake. Worse, the country seems to be throwing that tradition away in the name of “tolerance” and multiculturalism.
The U.K.’s trajectory on speech is appalling. It is creating a system where debate can be shut down, where being offended can be weaponized to censor fellow citizens, and where issues fester and percolate rather than being openly debated, making violence much likelier.
Let’s hope that the people across the Atlantic wake up and hold their leaders accountable for the unacceptable loss of their liberties.