Does the UK need a US-style First Amendment?

How can we change the law to guard free speech and build an anti-censorship culture to tackle the daily threats to free expression? A proposed new Freedom of Speech Bill looks promising.

Apr 04, 2026

I spend a lot of time as a legislator in the House of Lords, working on trying to stop the law increasing its censorious powers, expanding the state’s stifling power to criminalise speech said to create hate, harm and offence. I recently supported Lord Jon Moynihan who tabled two detailed amendments trying to untangle present laws in order to allow a presumption of free speech. See his speeches here. (You can also watch and a couple of my contributions further down.)

Jon Moynihan on removing criminalisation of some ‘hate’ speech.

Jon Moynihan on removing criminalisation of elements of hate crime itself.

So it is exciting to see this new initiative from The Adam Smith Institute: a proposed new rigorously drafted and legally sound Freedom of Speech Bill. The Bill has been jointly authored by a radical lawyer based in the US, Preston Byrne, the ASI’s legal fellow and partner at Byrne & Storm LLP, alongside Cambridge-educated English lawyer Michael Reiners, who writes on UK constitutional and political issues, and Elijah Granet, who has dual English and American legal training with professional experience consulting in legislative drafting and analysis.

The proposed law announces itself as: ‘A BILL to recognise and restore the ancient liberty of free speech; to protect expression by the public, subject only to narrow and objective exceptions; to restrict the power of public authorities and essential services to interfere with lawful expression; to repeal or amend enactments which criminalise expression by reference to offence or distress; and for connected purposes.’

You can read the proposed Bill here.

In a joint essay on why they feel this US-proposed UK Free Speech Act is needed, its authors write: ‘This Bill, if enacted, would have a similar effect as the First Amendment in the United States of America, protecting British citizens from government censorship. However, in addition to its protections, the Bill would also prohibit the state from withholding information (other than that which could compromise national security)... There is rarely a liberty more important than that of speech - Thomas Paine, the great contemporary of Adam Smith, wrote “he who dares not offend, cannot be honest”.’ (See the full essay at the Adam Smith Institute website.

Preston Byrne’s Freedom of Speech Bill is a fantastic contribution to this discussion and has already created a lively debate that hopefully adds to re-energising the growing campaign to make speech less strangled by law. But can we really emulate the First Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1791, that provides that ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech or of the press’?

In 2025 Britain, is the spirit that informed the American’s revolutionary First Amendment feasible? And is changing the law the key arena for change? We debated that very question at the Battle of Ideas festival in 2024 – a discussion I really enjoyed chairing because I kept changing my mind. It featured Nico Perrino, executive vice president, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Tom Slater, editor, spiked, Thomas Walker-Werth associate editor, The Objective Standard, and Toby Young general secretary, Free Speech Union.

Use this button to listen to the debate on the Battle of Ideas Audio Archive:

LISTEN TO THE DEBATE

Is law change enough?
Law change, and parliament’s role in repealing laws, are definitely desirable, but absolutely not sufficient to tackle the retreat from belief in free speech as a cornerstone of democratic values. For example, parliament recently passed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. but campus life for students and academics continues to be a minefield of EDI and censorious regulatory trip-wires that curtail open discussion. The fight for free speech always needs the dynamism of grassroots, bottom-up pressure.

Also, this week the Home Office has announced that at long last it has dumped its invidious non-crime hate incidents. Brilliant news. Those of us who have constantly tried to bring in amendments and force successive governments to act, may well be pleased that at last – via the current Crime and Policing Bill – Labour has succumbed. But we also need to recognise that the real force for change came from outside of parliament.

Credit must go to many people: from former police officer Harry Miller, co-founder of the campaign group Fair Cop (whose LONG fight is summed up here), to journalists such as Allison Pearson (whose writing about her personal experience of NCHIs gained international attention). And credit, too, to all those individuals who fought back (and spoke out), often by taking their cases to the Free Speech Union, which admirably amplified just how far-reaching and unjust these mechanisms for police intimation of citizens for everything from their online posts to ‘wrongthink’ opinions, often expressed privately.

The fear now is that while non-crime hate incidents have been dispatched formally, the culture behind them remains undisturbed. Their ideological premise is still deeply embedded, both in the labyrinth of hate-crime legislation on the statute books but more broadly in policing, HR departments across public- and private-sector workplace. This culture has been especially damaging for younger generations socialised into believing that words, attitudes and beliefs are harmful, and can be interpreted as ‘hate’ subjectively by the alleged victim or a third party and assumed to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards people with protected characteristics – not proven, but presumed.

That is why some free-speech campaigners are concerned that non-crime hate incidents may well be rebranded (and already the Labour government is talking about using anti-social behaviour regulations such as respect orders, that will be used to surveil, silence and punish those accused of having hateful attitudes.

Building a culture of free speech
So, while we at the Academy of Ideas welcome any law change that rolls back censorship, we feel lots more needs to be done to take on the culture of associating speech with harm. We believe this is essential to counter today’s culture that actively undermines the habit of exercising free speech and has weakened our collective capacity to tolerate disagreement, risk offence and argue ideas in public. I discuss this in depth in a filmed interview with Swiss magazine Schweizer Monat below.

We aim to restore a confident and resilient culture of free expression, and one way we do that is by creating practical opportunities – events, forums and networks – where people come together and can speak freely, exercise the neglected muscle of arguing openly without taking offence and test ideas in public.

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In the meantime, HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to Preston Byrne, Michael Reiners, Elijah Granet and the Adam Smith Institute for its Freedom of Speech Bill. That’s the sort of ‘special relationship’ we need with colleagues in the US. Let’s hope it gets a proper hearing in parliament and amongst the public, so that it becomes part of the anti-censorship culture we so desperately need.

Claire