To Americans, Britain is no longer the free country we thought it was

Telegraph

5 hours ago

Every year, the US Department of State releases a report on human rights practices in other countries (CRHRP). One of my first assignments as a political officer at the US embassy was to coordinate and edit one country report.
Not surprisingly, certain governments sometimes take issue with how their policies are characterised in the CRHRP.
For example, South Africa claimed a recent CRHRP was 'inaccurate and deeply flawed' in criticising them for failing to 'investigate, prosecute and punish officials who committed human rights abuses … or violence against racial minorities'. President Cyril Ramaphosa seemed bewildered in May when President Trump took him to task for the murders of white farmers.
His government's defence seems to be that South Africa's horrific levels of crime afflict everyone, not just white people, and that the motives are not racist but merely criminal. That is unlikely to mollify a country impoverished under an incompetent succession of ANC leaders, nor will Ramaphosa's explanation that they haven't actually used their sweeping new Land Expropriation Act inspire commercial farmers who feed the country to invest in their farms. But I digress.
China doesn't just reject US criticism, they've cheekily published their own report criticising the US for 'the chronic disease of racism,' and 'basic rights and freedoms being disregarded'.
Usually, the governments taking the most criticism in the CRHRP are repressive or feckless regimes, from China to Zimbabwe, that suppress free speech, stifle religious expression, or oppress women, minority groups, and political dissidents. That doesn't sound like the England in which I was born over half a century ago.
But this year, the Country Report on the UK flags Britain as a risky place to speak your mind. The CRHRP claims that 'the human rights situation worsened in the United Kingdom during the year,' citing 'credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by anti-Semitism'.
The report notes restrictions on speech – even silent meditation – near abortion clinics, and the Online Safety Act's curtailment of internet speech, policed by Ofcom. It calls out government censorship of speech deemed misinformation or 'hate speech', including in relation to migrants and crimes committed by foreign nationals.
It could have gone even further. In its section on Worker Rights, the CRHRP doesn't discuss the people who have been sacked or disciplined for refusing to accept the forced speech codes of gender ideology, like prison officer David Toshack or nurse Jennifer Melle; or for social media posters who have criticised government action, like teacher Simon Pearson.
Like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water, perhaps Brits can't see what is happening to their freedoms. But looking from the outside, we can, and the State Department has called it out.
In reaction, I expect the British Left to be as indignant and in denial as the establishment in Washington DC is about crime. Now Donald Trump has temporarily taken over local law enforcement in the city, the Leftist establishment and the national media are claiming that violent crime is lower than in recent years.
This ignores some inconvenient realities. First, unreliable numbers. The city has reportedly just settled a lawsuit from a whistleblowing police officer who had alleged that her supervisors were re-classifying serious crimes as lesser offences, to flatter the city's crime statistics. Second, even the supposedly lower murder rate puts Washington among the most dangerous cities in the nation.
Like the DC establishment, the British government and much of the media are happy to ignore Lucy Connolly, who is still in prison after she made an unwise online post (and then deleted it); Hamit Coskun, who was prosecuted after he burnt a book; and the thousands of ordinary Brits who have been accused of 'Non-Crime Hate Incidents,' which is at the very least an astonishing waste of police time.
The Left likes to pretend that the real villains in the fight for free speech are people like Kathleen Stock, Maya Forstater, and JK Rowling, who courageously state objective truth, rather than the gender ideologues trying to force women to accept men in their changing rooms, prisons, and shelters.
George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and other writers of the early 20th century predicted a future where the populace was dumbed down, repressed, and fed information by an authoritarian state. In the dystopian futures they imagined in 1984 and Brave New World, independent, critical thinking was banned and speech violators were punished. That sounds like the logical destiny of Britain if it maintains its present course. There is already a semi-official dogma on gender ideology, immigration, and crime which it is costly to challenge. Censorship and group-think get worse if not disrupted.
Instead of rejecting America's criticism in high dudgeon, I hope Britain will heed the warning of its Atlantic cousins and return to the people their right to speak their minds. For the land of Magna Carta to slowly sink into repression and state control would be a great injustice to Britain's present inhabitants, and an insult to our ancestors' work of centuries.
'The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey)' from Academica Books.