When Keir Starmer visited the White House in February 2025, J.D. Vance used the occasion to raise what he called “infringements on free speech” in Britain. Our then Prime Minister, sitting a few feet away in the Oval Office, was having none of it. “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom,” he said, “and it will last for a very, very long time.” He added that he was “very proud of our history there”.
Was Sir Keir right to dismiss those concerns? I want to answer that question not with anecdotes, of which I have a great many, but with numbers.
Arrests, charges and convictions
Let’s start with a new report from Big Brother Watch, entitled Britain’s Free Speech Problem. Its headline finding is that between January 1st 2021 and December 31st 2025, 62,199 people were arrested in the UK on suspicion of committing just three communications offences. These are section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalises sending a “grossly offensive” message over a public electronic network; section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988; and section 179 of the Online Safety Act 2023, the new “false communications” offence.
That’s a shocking figure, but it’s an underestimate. Several police forces didn’t respond to Big Brother Watch’s Freedom of Information requests, including Police Scotland. Big Brother Watch estimates the true figure is 73,023. So on a conservative estimate, the police are arresting an average of 34 people a day for things they’ve said, the vast majority online, and the true figure is closer to 40 a day. Russia, incidentally, is thought to arrest around 400 people a year for similar offences.
Of those 62,199 people, 18,520 were charged and 12,292 were convicted. That’s more than 12,000 people with criminal records for speech offences in five years. And that number is likely to go up if the proposals to curtail the right to trial by jury, first put forward by David Lammy when he was Justice Secretary, become law. Research by the Free Speech Union found that in the year to June 2025, 14% of people tried for speech offences in a magistrates’ court were acquitted, compared with 33% in the Crown Court, where the case was heard by a jury. Twelve ordinary men and women, it turns out, are less likely than a district judge to conclude that an intemperate tweet merits a criminal conviction. Leave the decision to them and more people will be convicted.
Is it getting worse?
But is the number of people being arrested for speech offences actually increasing? Yes, it is, as a similar piece of research by the Times established last year. It FoI’d every police force in England and Wales and asked how many arrests they’d made relating to just two of those three offences: section 127 of the Communications Act and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act.
