Stephen Glover: Trump's the last man on Earth with the moral right to lecture us. Yet he's the one backing free speech in Britain - while Keir Starmer remains silent
There is a long standing convention that democratic leaders shouldn't lecture other democratic leaders about how to run their countries.
That precept has been torn up by Donald Trump. The man who may be the most immoral and mendacious president in American history – which is saying something – has taken it upon himself to lecture the British Government about free speech.
Trump has distinct authoritarian tendencies – witness his current assault on the independence of Harvard University and his almost complete disregard for the elected representatives of Congress. His championing of free speech is as egregious an example of rank hypocrisy as one is ever likely to find.
He's partly right, of course, and that creates problems for those of us who resent any interference by a foreign leader and abominate Trump while believing that free speech is under attack in modern Britain.
Trump's latest hobbyhorse is the case of Lucy Connolly, who during the riots last August sent a nasty and incendiary tweet in which she wrote: 'Mass deportations now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all I care'.
Although she deleted the tweet quickly, it was viewed more than 310,000 times. Despite having no criminal record, and there being no evidence that her tweet had incited others to violence, Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison. Appeal Court judges declined to reduce that term last week.
Given her previous law-abiding record, and the lesser sentences often handed out to violent criminals, Lucy Connolly was undoubtedly treated very harshly. That said, for former Home Secretary Suella Braverman to describe her as 'a political prisoner' is over the top.
The White House is reportedly 'monitoring' the case, as though it has every right to question the rulings of British courts. This is only the latest evidence of the Trump administration, itself hardly the acme of probity, sticking its nose into our affairs.
In March it dispatched officials from the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour to London to 'affirm the importance of freedom of expression in the UK and across Europe'. What presumption!
The American delegation held meetings with Foreign Office officials, and challenged Ofcom about the generally unexceptionable Online Safety Act, which is one of Donald Trump's perennial beefs.
It also met five British pro-life activists over their censorship concerns. One of them was anti-abortion campaigner Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was recently found guilty of breaching a public spaces protection order outside a clinic in Bournemouth in March 2023, given a conditional discharge, and ordered to pay costs of £20,000.
I was personally on her side since she was only holding a placard some distance from the clinic. But what business is it of officials from the United States to interfere?
How would Trump feel if British civil servants were to travel to Washington to investigate miscarriages of justice, some of which are much more serious than Dr Tossici-Bolt's case?
Such meddling in our affairs would be annoying if Donald Trump were the Archangel Gabriel. It is unendurable given that he is as far from being such an embodiment of virtue as it's possible to conceive.
This professed lover of liberty – egged on by Vice-President JD Vance, who claimed in a speech last February that free speech is 'in retreat' across Britain and the EU – encouraged a mob to storm Congress, the home of American democracy, little more than four years ago.
Perhaps we should send a delegation to look into Trump's new cryptocurrency business. At a $1.7 million-a-head dinner in Virginia last Thursday, the sitting President and his family are estimated to have netted $148 million (£109 million). Trump delivered some anodyne remarks. The fare was described as 'worse than airline food'.
How can such a venal man put himself on a moral pedestal, and presume to keep tabs on free speech in this country? It is utterly preposterous, beyond satire. Even the novelist Anthony Trollope could not have imagined him.
And yet some figures on the Right of British politics evidently think it is acceptable for him to pass judgment on our country. Suella Braverman rushed to Lucy Connolly's defence without it occurring to her that Trump has no business to interfere.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a close friend of Trump's, claimed 'our American Republican friends seem to care more about free speech in the United Kingdom than our own Government'. Just possibly, although I doubt it, but in any event why can't they keep their views to themselves?
Perhaps the silliest response came from someone I admire – Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union. Without disclosing reservations about the US government monitoring human rights abuses in this country, he declared that 'Britain is becoming the North Korea of the North Sea'. God preserve us.
Trump is the last person on this planet with the moral right to tell us how to order our affairs. And yet, as I've said, that doesn't mean all his misgivings are misplaced.
Free speech in Britain is threatened, as Lord Young has correctly argued. A retired policeman was arrested and handcuffed in his own home by six police officers armed with batons and pepper spray after he had suggested a pro-Palestinian social media post was anti-Semitic.
Julian Foulkes was detained by Kent Police. His electronic devices were seized, and officers described the books scattered around his home as 'very Brexity'.
There are countless other cases that give cause for concern. As my colleague Boris Johnson recently pointed out, 'the UK police are now making over 10,000 arrests every year for online comments, more than the police in Russia itself'.
But much as I criticise Sir Keir Starmer when he's at fault, this state of affairs can't be blamed on him alone. Julian Foulkes was arrested in November 2023, when the Tories were in power, and had been for more than 13 years.
According to the Free Speech Union, there were 12,183 arrests over offensive posts on social media and other platforms in 2023, when Starmer didn't yet have a toe in No 10.
The police have been gradually bearing down on free speech for years. The Tories let it happen, and Labour is making things worse. We can't blame Sir Keir Starmer for creating a police state.
Nor should we expect him as a politician to involve himself in Lucy Connolly's case – that is for judges – though he was wrong last August to say that he was expecting 'substantive sentencing' of rioters within days. That surely must have influenced the courts.
What we should now object to is the Prime Minister's smugness, and his pretence that free speech is safe in Britain. When JD Vance alleged in the Oval Office in February that it was threatened, Starmer replied: 'We've had free speech for a very long time, it will last a long time, and we are very proud of that.'
We did have it once, but it's increasingly in peril. Trump is the last man in the world who should be encouraged to say so. Sir Keir Starmer – the British Prime Minister – is the first. Yet he refuses to speak up.
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