Will Donald Trump save us benighted Brits from our speech-policing overlords? That’s the hope of Britain’s excitable right. They’re giddy at the news that the Trump administration is reportedly tying its trade deal with Britain to the issue of freedom of speech. ‘No free trade without free speech’, says one US source. In short, if the British state doesn’t stop muzzling the unwoke, our nation will suffer. Mighty America will rap our knuckles.
The Telegraph reports that Keir Starmer’s attempts to strike a trade deal with the US are ‘at risk’ thanks to our ruling class’s love of censorship. One case in particular seems to have enraged the White House: that of Livia Tossici-Bolt. She’s an anti-abortion campaigner being prosecuted for holding a sign near an abortion clinic in Bournemouth that said, ‘Here to talk if you want’. That’s a huge no-no under our ‘buffer zone’ regime, introduced last year, which forbids activism of any kind within 150 metres of an abortion clinic. She denies breaching the peace; the verdict will be handed down this week.
In a highly unusual move, the US State Department said it is ‘concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom’. It said it is ‘monitoring’ the case of Ms Tossici-Bolt. Many on Britain’s right are cock-a-hoop. They’re salivating over Trump’s ‘free-speech ultimatum’. They dream that Washington’s ‘very high-ups’ will force us to become a freer nation. They need to get a grip. This idea of free-speech imperialism, where Brits’ liberty to utter might be restored by benevolent outsiders, is a spectacular contradiction in terms. Only those who know nothing of liberty could imagine liberty being created by the fiat of a foreign state.
Some say the White House ‘is right’ about free speech in Britain. Well, yes, in a sense. It is right that there is a very serious free-speech crisis here. But its highly partisan focus on certain cases over others ironically ends up minimising the depth of our rulers’ addiction to censorship. In flagging up the case of Ms Tossici-Bolt, no doubt because they share her moral concerns, Trumpists risk distracting attention from the wholesale normalisation of speech-policing in Britain. Hundreds of Brits have been punished for ‘speech crimes’ of late, from telling off-colour jokes to spreading ‘fake news’. Free speech requires principled vigilance, a consistent opposition to all censure, not noisy handwringing only over cases that chime with one’s own worldview.
More to the point, it is an intolerable intrusion into our sovereign affairs for America to tie free trade to free speech. It’s a clear stab at interference in the internal matters of an independent state: ours. I detest our culture of censorship, but I also detest the idea that it is the duty of a distant power to compel us to dispense with it. The former is an assault on our right of self-government, on the liberty of every Briton to speak as he or she sees fit. But the latter is an assault on our right to democratic government, on the freedom of Britons to determine the fate of their nation free from external pressure. I want to restore the sovereignty of the individual in the UK, but not at the expense of the sovereignty of the nation.
Using trade deals to pressure smaller nations to overhaul their domestic policies is always a bad idea. It was bad when Nancy Pelosi, in 2020, said there was ‘no chance’ of a US-UK trade deal if we went for a ‘Hard Brexit’ – that was clear economic blackmail designed to stymie the democratic wishes of the British people. It is bad when Britain’s Labour Party says we should use trade deals to promote ‘Labour values’ around the world. It is bad when the EU enforces punishing tariffs on processed goods from Africa, supposedly to keep Africa eco-friendly. These policies ‘keep Africa prisoner… hampering our efforts to move up the manufacturing value chain’, says African Business. Have you ever thought of treating us ‘as equals, not serfs’, it asked the EU.
And it is bad when the Trump administration considers using free trade as a cudgel against censorious Britain. It is not for America to reshape our domestic politics. As Lord Sumption says, the US does not enjoy ‘jurisdiction over the world’s laws’. I would remind Trump’s White House of the stirring words of Thomas Paine: ‘Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America is a strong and natural proof that the authority of the one over the other was never the design of Heaven.’ He meant, rightly, that America should be free of English diktat. I say the distance between us is proof, too, that England should be free of American diktat.
The weaponisation of trade deals to try to change a state’s internal affairs is a moral blight on modern geopolitics. It has emboldened the economic powerhouses of the world while diluting the sovereignty of smaller states, especially in the Global South. Worse, the White House’s meddling in our free-speech crisis could backfire badly for us Brits. It could make our cultural elites even more resentful of this essential liberty. They’re already haughty and dismissive towards the liberty to speak, viewing it as little more than a ploy by the prejudiced to intoxicate public life with their bigotry. If they now come to see freedom of speech as a Trumpist imposition, their despotic resentments will intensify. Defending ‘British’ cancel culture against the Trumpist free-for-all would become the virtue-signal du jour.
The truth, as history attests, is that freedom can only ever be won, never gifted. It is in the act of fighting for freedom that we become free. The slog of struggling for freedom is the very thing that expands our horizons and swells our confidence and makes us free people. America knows this. As its great jurist, Learned Hand, said in 1944, ‘Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it’. We might add ‘no foreign power’ to that list. Only the men and women of Britain can resuscitate the spirit of British liberty.
‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’ So said that greatest Briton, John Milton, 130 years before America was founded. The two great causes of our populist era are selfhood and nationhood: the sovereignty of the individual against overbearing government and the sovereignty of the nation against the institutions of globalism. Right now, that means fighting back against both Keir Starmer’s censorship and Donald Trump’s attempt to crush that censorship.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
