3 days ago
Lord Lebedev speaks out on press freedom
Peers have raised the alarm over what they describe as a growing threat to free speech in the UK, warning that recent police investigations into journalists, artists, and festival performers are undermining fundamental liberties.
Lord Lebedev organised the House of Lords debate on the growing number of people being arrested or questioned by police for perceived communication offences.
He asked the government 'what estimate they have made of the number of people arrested daily for non-threatening, online communication offences, and what assessment they have made of the implications of such arrests for freedom of speech '.
Opening the Grand Committee debate on Thursday, Lord Lebedev, the proprietor of the London Standard, said: 'Free speech is the fundamental freedom – the freedom on which all our other liberties depend.
'There is no cause so noble, no argument so sound, that it does not deserve to be challenged.'
Lord Lebedev, who is a shareholder in The Independent, made an impassioned appeal about the importance of freedom of expression as he recalled his upbringing in the Soviet Union.
'For me – personally – the word dissident has a special resonance,' he said.
'I grew up in Soviet Russia, a regime where expressing the wrong opinion could lead to imprisonment. The famous house on Granovski Street - where I grew up - had once been home to the likes of Khruschev, Molotov and Trotsky.
'During my childhood the presence of secret policemen – there ostensibly to 'protect' us – was a constant reminder that a word out of place could mean cancellation in its most brutal form.'
He cited a string of recent police interventions, including journalist Allison Pearson being visited by officers over a tweet, a criminal investigation launched into Bob Vylan's IDF chant at Glastonbury and Turkish human rights campaigner Hamit Coskun's conviction for burning a Quran.
The incidents suggest the UK risks bringing 'back blasphemy laws by the back door', Lord Lebedev argued.
'You do not need to admire any of the people I mentioned above to find this deeply concerning,' he said.
'The right to free speech means nothing if it does not mean the right to offend.'
He criticised current laws such as the Malicious Communications Act and the recording of so-called 'non-crime hate incidents', over 133,000 of which have been noted since 2014.
Lord Lebedev accused successive governments of encouraging a culture of censorship and wasting police resources on speech rather than crime.
'Juxtaposed with 90 per cent of all crime unsolved in 2023 and 89 per cent of violent or sexual offences going unsolved in 2024, it is hard to conceive of a worse waste of police time,' he said.
Lord Kempsell described the debate as 'timely and important' when Britain's 'legislative framework feels like it was built for the internet of 20 years ago'.
He said: 'I think anybody listening to the debates in your lordships house today will have concluded that in 2025 the United Kingdom is in a state of free speech emergency.
'Police are now making more than 30 arrests a day for online offensive messages. A 121 per cent increase from 2017.'
Baroness Fox of Buckley echoed the concern, warning that 'the police are going to lose credibility' by persistently targeting people for online speech.
'They take their direction from the top and the message is clear: speech crimes are on a par with or even more dangerous than real crimes,' she said.
Referring to riots last year sparked by the murders of three young girls in Southport, Baroness Fox said the government's public campaign in the wake of the violence urging people to 'think before you post' was 'menacing'.
She highlighted the 31-month prison sentence handed to Lucy Connolly over her 'offensive' tweet about setting fire to migrant hotels, while rioter Philip Prescott, who attacked a mosque, was only sentenced to 28 months.
'No wonder the police see online communication is on a par with violent actions,' she added.
Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Doocey called for better data transparency in police forces.
The Lib Dem peer said: 'Arrests for malicious communications are rarely made in isolation. They frequently overlap with sexual offending, harassment or hate crime.
'We also know that some police forces include serious domestic abuse-related crimes within this category.
'This complexity makes it difficult to isolate online offenses in the data, or to calculate how many might widely be classified as non-threatening. Nevertheless, as other noble Lords have mentioned, arrest for malicious communication have risen sharply, up by nearly 60 per cent between 2019 and 2023.
'But although the police are making more arrests, many of these cases never get to court. Now, some of this is because the courts are backlogged and some cases now are being listed for 2029.
'But the falling conviction rate also raises legitimate questions about how the police are enforcing these laws, with genuine concern that in some cases, their approach may be too heavy handed, with implications for freedom of speech.'
Responding, Home Office minister, Lord Hanson of Flint, 'welcomed the debate' but said 'we must remember that online abuse is not a trivial matter, nor is it inconsequential'.
He added: 'The government is clear that freedom of speech is a fundamental right, and it underpins our democratic society.
'I stood up dispatch box in the wake of the offences last year in the August riots after three young girls were murdered and set out clear boundaries on those issues.
'But also said that there was important regard to protests and to people expressing a view on political issues.
'Arrests by the police are manifestations of what we expect the police to do, which is to enforce the law as passed by both Houses, without fear or without favour, and based on the information they have at the time or is put before them. The police are operationally independent.'
