Liam Downer-Sanderson: Why Conservatives must enshrine free speech in law

Cllr Liam Downer-Sanderson is a councillor for Fulham Town Ward on Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

Free speech is the foundation of every liberty we enjoy.

Without it there is no meaningful democracy, no accountability and no contest of ideas. Yet in Britain that foundation has been steadily chipped away through a series of small concessions that have narrowed the space for open debate.

The arrest of comedian Graham Linehan at Heathrow brought this problem into sharp focus.

Five armed officers detained him over social media posts about transgender issues, prompting widespread condemnation and even forcing Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley to call for a review of the law. Rowley is right. If the police are to do their jobs properly, Parliament must rewrite our speech laws. I am not excusing the heavy-handed approach on display, but the deeper problem is that officers are being asked to navigate vague, contradictory statutes that place them in the middle of culture war disputes.

That is not their role. Parliament has to take the lead.

Kemi Badenoch has spoken of leading the Conservative Party through a period of reflection. At our best Conservatives are free thinkers, confident enough to defend the free flow of ideas however radical or offensive, because it is through challenge that truth emerges. That instinct should now guide our approach to free speech.

Britain’s unwritten constitution has served us well, giving us flexibility where others are paralysed. But it also has a weakness: rights are not entrenched. They can be eroded quietly, sometimes without Parliament or the public even noticing until it is too late.

By contrast, the United States has had its First Amendment for more than two centuries. Whatever the flaws of the American system, no legislature or police force can simply redraw the limits of permissible speech. Here restrictions have grown slowly and steadily, with few checks to stop them.

The results are troubling. Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for an appalling tweet. Ricky Jones, a suspended Labour councillor filmed making a throat slitting gesture and calling for far right protesters to have their throats cut, was acquitted by a jury. Whatever one thinks of the individuals, the contrast is striking.

But we should resist the temptation to treat such cases as partisan scoreboards.

Arguing over who deserved harsher punishment or dismissing judges as biased corrodes confidence in the law. Debating who deserved harsher punishment or dismissing judges as biased corrodes confidence in the law. The authority of the courts rests on the belief that justice is applied impartially, a principle Britain has defended and upheld more consistently than perhaps any other nation over the past few centuries.

If verdicts come to be seen through a political lens, the legal system itself becomes another front in the culture war rather than the neutral ground that holds our democracy together.

John Stuart Mill argued that even wrong opinions are valuable.

They sharpen our thinking and keep truth alive as truth rather than dogma. A society confident in free speech is a society confident in itself. Yet too often both left and right defend free speech only for their own side. The right condemns students who shout down speakers then cheer clampdowns on activists they dislike. While the left campaigns for restrictions on hate speech while excusing its own campaigners when they cross the line. This misses the point. Once the state claims the power to silence one side, it can silence all.

That is why the Conservative Party should bring forward a Free Speech Bill. Such a Bill would replace today’s messy patchwork of laws with a clear standard. The principle is simple: words are free, actions are not. Speech should only cross the criminal threshold if it meets one of three tests:

1. Direct threats: a specific and credible threat of violence against an identifiable person or group
2. Incitement to violence: words intended and likely to lead to imminent violence or serious criminal acts
3. Targeted harassment: repeated words aimed at an individual with the intent of causing serious distress

Everything else, however offensive, provocative or disturbing, should remain lawful.

The Bill should repeal outdated restrictions such as Section 127 of the Communications Act, abolish non-crime hate incidents and place a higher bar on prosecutors to prove both intent and realistic harm. Institutions would still have a duty to protect free expression, but the criminal law would be reserved for genuine threats and incitement, not opinions.

Such a move would reaffirm a central Conservative principle: trusting people to argue rather than trusting the state to censor. It would also show that the Party’s reflection under Badenoch is not simply rhetoric but action that renews liberty and strengthens democracy.

Conservatives now face a choice. A society that trusts its citizens to speak freely, or one that trusts the state to silence.

We should always choose freedom.