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Free Speech Union
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Lucy Powell wants election-time speech duties imposed on platforms like Facebook and X — and praised Lisa Nandy's exit from X over misinformation, even as Nandy pushes a green paper to police trustworthy news. Neither raised a word when Starmer's government tried to cancel local elections or curb jury trial. As Starmer heads for the door, the Burnham government looks set to be even more censorious.
Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has quit X, accusing the platform of favouring abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate and declaring it unhealthy for democracy. But when has Nandy ever cared about free speech?
Britain's Prime Minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, is set to do the bidding of Love Actually actor Hugh Grant and bring the British free press under state control. The Free Speech Union is bracing for the free speech battles that lie ahead under a Burnham premiership.
The Government has brought forward a draft bill to ban conversion therapy practices that is so broad it could criminalise the teachings of religious leaders and the well-intentioned conversations between parents, therapists, and gender-confused children. The Free Speech Union has launched a petition calling on Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham to drop this assault on free speech.
In a reminder of the horrors of Hong Kong's censorship crisis, two bookshop owners have been arrested and accused of displaying seditious items, including material said to incite hatred against the Hong Kong SAR government, its judiciary, and law enforcement agencies. The charge of displaying seditious items carries a maximum sentence of fourteen years in prison. It falls under the Hong Kong Safeguarding National Security Ordinance—commonly known as Article 23—which goes even further than the Beijing-imposed National Security Law introduced in 2020.
A former High Court judge has warned that Labour's plans to curtail the right to trial by jury pose a direct threat to freedom of speech and protest. Sir Stephen Mitchell argues that jury trials are a critical safeguard against politically motivated prosecutions—particularly in Public Order cases where free expression is at stake—and that removing them would hand the Government a mechanism to bypass that protection in sensitive cases.
As the Prime Minister resigns, the Free Speech Union braces itself for what free speech battles we face under Andy Burnham.
Two parallel private members' bills targeting SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits used by wealthy litigants to silence journalists, campaigners, and whistleblowers — have been introduced in both Houses of Parliament this week. Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Sir John Whittingdale MP are behind the respective bills, which would give judges the power to dismiss such cases at the earliest possible stage. The FSU welcomes the move.
In a positive move for free speech, the Education has finally commenced the section in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act that establishes a statutory complaints scheme.
The Conservative peer Lord Ranger is suing the Prime Minister after the Forfeiture Committee — a shadowy Whitehall body — stripped him of his CBE following a House of Lords standards ruling that he had harassed journalist Poonam Joshi on X. His lawyers argue the removal was disproportionate and will chill free speech. The FSU, which has supported others who have lost honours through the same opaque process, warns that the Government's Removal of the Peerages Bill threatens to extend that chilling effect to the Lords itself.
