A group of pro-freedom lawyers have published a speech bill to repeal decades of laws crushing freedom and curbing expression, creating something of a First Amendment for Britons.

“The United Kingdom does not have free speech, not in any sense that an American would recognize”, an Anglo-American group of lawyers reported as they published a Freedom of Speech Bill through the classical liberal Adam Smith Institute (ASI). The group say ending “Britain’s sophisticated censorship framework” is more essential than ever because its authoritarianism is now attempting to spread its influence abroad, with London’s attempts to censor American citizens and businesses already causing concerns in Washington.

Offered for free to any British political party that would put it through Parliament and vote it into law, the grassroots bill seeks to “recognise and restore the ancient liberty of free speech, to protect expression by the public… [and] restrict the power of public authorities… to interfere with lawful expression”.

This would be achieved by the bill setting freedom of speech on a firm legal grounding — the chilling effect of what exactly is legal speech or not in Britain being so vague and too often up to the interpretation of individual police officers or judges hitherto having been so keenly felt –and abolishing decades of earlier laws severely clamping down on the freedom to speak.

The bill names 13 laws that would be abolished in full or amended in part, dating back to the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Particularly in the sights of the bill are the Public Order Act of 1986, the Communications Act of 2003, and the Online Safety Act of 2023, which criminalise speech and threaten Britons with prison and “life altering fines”. The laws are “frequently exploited by activists” in lawfare bids to take out their political opponents.

Preston Byrne, an American lawyer who has defended Americans in America from British attempts to enforce speech laws on the internet, and who led the drafting effort on the Free Speech Bill told Breitbart News that: “The UK arrests, charges, and convicts people within its own borders for non-violently expressing controversial opinions.”

But the British government isn’t satisfied with just censoring its own citizens, he said. Byrne continued: “Through the UK’s censorship agency, Ofcom, the country is also trying to export that domestic censorship regime to the rest of the world. For the sake of the British people and the rest of the planet, particularly the United States which has been repeatedly targeted by British censors in the last year, the UK’s state censorship regime must end.”

It is stated that in recent years, as many as 12,000 people a year are being arrested for communication offences in the UK and 2025 polling found an astonishing 42 per cent of Britons say they “often stop myself from expressing my true opinions on controversial issues”.

The Adam Smith Institute and Byrne have been calling for Britain to improve its freedom of speech environment for years. Breitbart News reported in 2020, before the intervening years of further clamp-downs and creeping speech restrictions had even taken told, when they published a report calling for a British First Amendment.

The ASI stated then: “The United Kingdom has placed public discourse in the hands of the easily offended, who have the power to threaten fellow citizens with fines and imprisonment for expressing unpopular opinions or having uncomfortable conversations. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. The British people no longer have freedom of speech.”

Indeed, Breitbart News has chronicled the British outrages against speech for years. In January 2021, a British police chief told citizens “now is really not the time” for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly after his force had made arrests, and later that year police arrested 11 people for being rude to players on the English national football team after they lost a match to Italy. A Chief Constable reflected of these online “malicious communications” that: “There are people out there who believe they can hide behind a social media profile and get away with posting such abhorrent comments… They need to think again.”

In 2022, a lawyer was fighting for his job after being persecuted in a “politically motivated” campaign against him for reflecting that “free speech is dying and Islamists and other Muslims are playing a central role”. The case underlined the fact that in Britain even when the police don’t get involved, almost anyone involved in a defined profession lives under harsh speech codes, lest they lose their licence to practice and with it their livelihood. In many cases, the powers allowing professional standards bodies involved in enforcing these codes are recent, Blairite creations and part of the long project to institutionalise society.

April 2022 saw a Briton sentenced to 150 hours of community service for a Tweet, and in April the British government ordered Elon Musk to keep the then newly acquired Twitter platform “responsible” by continuing to censor “legal but harmful” content as it had religiously done under the previous management. In that July, police arrested a British Army veteran for posting a meme making light of the LGBT community, and attempted to subject him to “re-education”.

September of that year saw a British police force, absurdly, order the public to stop “misgendering” a “transgender” paedophile already convicted of 30 counts of sexually abusing children. In October 2022, Breitbart reported Christians who are caught “praying”, “reciting scripture”, or “crossing themselves” near an abortion centre faced prison, and by December the arrests had begun. Coincidentally, the same year saw the Crown Prosecution Service claim that parts of the Bible are “no longer appropriate in modern society” and couldn’t be heard in public.

In 2023, British police arrested a man under counter-terrorism laws for insulting French President Emmanuel Macron, and Westminstger was revealed to have been collecting “secret files” on critics of the UK government, creating a blacklist.

In 2024, after a knife attack by a Rwandan-heritage teenager against a dance party for children in the town of Southport saw three young girls killed and, as the pathologist’s report to the court stated, one of them all but beheaded, the British government made widespread arrests for social media activity. Those arrests were above and beyond the over 1,800 people arrested for actual physical disorder during the anti-child-murder protests that gripped the country that summer.

By 2025, the British government was pushing for laws which Brexit leader Nigel Farage would ban the discussion of contentious topics of the day in Britain’s pubs and restaurants, because the waiting staff might overhear and become offended. Mr Farage had said that in Britain, “every pub is a parliament”, a place for locals to come together and talk. He said: “I love pubs, because every one is a parliament. We discuss local issues, national issues, international issues, they’re really important places”.

In May of that year, British police arrested two parents for complaining about their child’s school in a WhatsApp group. The arrests were called “Kafkaesque” after the messages in a parents’ group were deemed to be “malicious communications, harassment, and causing nuisance”.

The British government does not acknowledge that the country has any freedom of speech issues. Indeed, it is the position of the government — as expressed by present Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer several times — that Britain does have a very high level of free speech which is protected “jealously and fiercely” by the state.