George Pickering: A British First Amendment would not work

George Pickering is a researcher at the think tank Bright Blue. He holds a doctorate in Economic History from the University of Oxford.

​“I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people. … It’s not just me who ruins their entire life once a year despite taking meds every day and being told by the so-called best doctors in the world that I am not bipolar, but merely experiencing ‘symptoms of autism.’” ​

​These touching words greeted readers of The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, in the form of a full-page apology by Kanye West for offensive remarks made between 2022 and 2025. However, the rapper’s heartfelt contrition was apparently not enough to spare him from recently being blocked from entering the UK, touching off widespread debate about whether the government ought to have such power over those whose opinions it finds intolerable.

​This controversy could not have been better timed to draw attention to a recently drafted billwhich would enshrine free speech in UK law, similar to the First Amendment in the United States. The proposed Freedom of Speech Bill was described by one of its authors as being “designed to teach English politicians and English activists, listen, there is a way within your constitutional system that you can replicate American free speech protections … It gets the Government out of the business of policing the opinions of the British people.”

​While it is not clear whether the proposed bill is likely to be introduced to Parliament soon, there is no denying the seriousness of the issue it is designed to address. Last year it was revealedthat police in England and Wales were making more than 30 arrests per day for social media posts and other messages which were deemed to have caused “annoyance,” “inconvenience” or “anxiety”. This heavy-handed and costly policing of online speech, alongside other high-profile cases such as the upcoming trial of a woman accused of silently praying near an abortion clinic, highlight the extensive powers the government already has to punish those whose opinions it deems unacceptable.

​But would a Freedom of Speech Bill actually be able to prevent such overreach? The example of the First Amendment to the US Constitution does little to suggest the effectiveness of on-paper protections. Less than a decade after the First Amendment was ratified, congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, which enabled the government of President John Adams to successfully convict leading opposition newspaper editors. Later, during the First World War, the US Supreme Court unanimously decided that Charles Schenck’s right to free speech had not been violated when he was arrested for distributing leaflets arguing against military conscription. And as recently as the 1960s, the comedian Lenny Bruce was routinely arrested for ‘obscene’ jokes which seem mild by today’s standards, including implying that some people are cross-dressers and using the Yiddish word “schmuck”.

​How were US government officials able to curtail these forms of expression, despite the explicit protection of free speech by the supreme law of the land? Surprisingly, the answer to this question was provided more than two centuries before the founding of the United States, by an obscure, provincial French magistrate.

​Étienne de la Boétie may be most widely remembered today as the subject of Michel de Montaigne’s famous writings on friendship.

However, in the mid-sixteenth century La Boétie wrote one of the most strikingly original and influential works in the history of political thought: The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The central argument of The Discourse was that even undemocratic governments require the consent — or at least the acquiescence — of the people, who always vastly outnumber their rulers. “He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body … Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?”

​Violations of the First Amendment in the US would have been no mystery to La Boétie: officials were able to effectively break the law because they knew the public, at the time, lacked the will to insist that they be held to account. The same reasoning explains how the British government was able, for example, to enforce restrictions of uncertain legality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

​Unfortunately, the British public simply does not value free speech.

A YouGov poll found last year that only 28 per cent of people believe that one should be able to speak one’s mind on social media, while 61 per cent felt it was more important that online abuse and threats should be prevented.

Until the public ceases to tolerate violations of free expression the government would continue to limit free speech, either directly or by pressuring private companies to do so, regardless of whether a Freedom of Speech Bill were passed.