If you want to see where contemporary speech regulation leads, look to Britain.
My country, the birthplace of the common law tradition and parliamentary liberty, now arrests thousands of its citizens each year for “offensive” speech. Much of what Americans still debate as hypothetical has already hardened into policy here.
While commentators work to enforce elite consensus, perceptions of two-tier policing have fueled public anger.
This did not happen overnight, nor did it require a dramatic constitutional rupture. It emerged gradually, through well-intentioned laws, bureaucratic definitions, and institutional habits that now govern what may be said, by whom and about whom. For Americans who assume such restrictions could never survive contact with the First Amendment, Britain offers a sobering corrective.
Catalog of grievance
The roots of this crisis can be traced to the Equality Act 2010, which laid the groundwork for today’s restrictions on speech. The act provides a legal definition of “protected characteristics,” making it unlawful to discriminate against individuals on the basis of attributes such as sex or race.
The act outlines core areas — race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and gender reassignment — which form the foundation of modern hate-crime legislation. Crimes deemed to be motivated by prejudice or hostility toward individuals with these characteristics can result in longer prison sentences. Yet because prejudice and discrimination are inherently subjective and difficult to quantify, hate-crime legislation erodes the principle of equality before the law.
In total, there are nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. Although not all meet the legal threshold for hate crime, these categories are embedded across workplace training, education, and public services.
Institutionalizing them frames certain groups as uniquely vulnerable to harm, encouraging institutions to treat speech as a risk to be managed rather than a liberty to be protected, and confers a durable victim identity. Through the lens of identity politics, victimhood becomes a proxy for moral authority. Unsurprisingly this logic expands rather than contracts. Campaigns to add further protected traits — such as menopause, misogyny, or afro hair — reflect a constantly growing catalog of grievance.
12,000 arrests a year
This mindset has enabled some of the most restrictive internet-speech enforcement in the Western world. Each year, roughly 12,000 Britons are arrested for online communications deemed “offensive.” In widely reported cases, individuals have received custodial sentences for social-media posts seen by only a handful of people, or have been arrested for deliberately provocative but nonviolent acts. In another case, a man received a lengthy prison sentence for possessing music classified by authorities as “right-wing.” The cumulative effect has been chilling: Free expression now exists largely at the discretion of the state.
Even when not explicitly codified, the logic of victimhood drives these censorious impulses. Nowhere is this clearer than in the evolving concept of Islamophobia — a concept that Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has pledged to “reform.”
With opinion polls faltering, Starmer finds himself electorally dependent on a sizable Muslim voting bloc. He must reassure the public that Britain remains a liberal democracy — one in which citizens are free to criticize, offend, and mock religion. The state’s response has been semantic rather than substantive. Islamophobia is now being reframed as “anti-Muslim hatred,” defined in draft guidance as:
Engaging in or encouraging criminal acts, including violence, vandalism, harassment, or intimidation — whether physical, verbal, written, or electronic — directed at Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim because of their religion, ethnicity, or appearance.
Although this definition is non-statutory and not legally binding, it is likely to encourage further self-censorship around legitimate discussion of Islam. A similar effect followed the adoption of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims’ definition of Islamophobia. The Labour Party and numerous public bodies — including more than 50 local councils, some governing Muslim-majority areas such as Bradford, Birmingham, Rochdale, and Leicester — have adopted it.
RELATED: Pakistani cousin marriage has no place in UK
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Hiding behind ‘Islamophobia’
These same regions have long faced serious criminal scandals, including the sexual abuse of young girls by grooming gangs disproportionately composed of men of Pakistani origin. Official inquiries have documented how institutional reluctance to address these crimes — often citing fear of being perceived as “Islamophobic” — contributed to prolonged failures of safeguarding.
As someone who has written extensively about the cultural practice of cousin marriage, I must ask: Does pointing out the well-documented link between consanguinity and elevated risk of congenital disorders now qualify as “hostility”?
Rather than encouraging honest debate, further definitional expansion risks reinforcing institutional silence. In recent years, National Health Service materials have presented first-cousin marriage in notably neutral or positive terms, while academic journals have warned that criticism of female genital mutilation can shade into racism — sometimes proposing euphemistic language in place of the word “mutilation” itself.
This kind of top-down enforcement rarely sits well with voters. Public frustration grows when large numbers of young male asylum seekers are housed in already strained cities, while criticism of immigration policy is constrained by speech codes. No amount of central planning can engineer a harmonious multicultural society. Rebranding Islamophobia as “anti-Muslim hostility” will not resolve these tensions. It instead grants the state wider discretion to interpret — and restrict — speech.
Expansion of civil claims
The revised guidance goes further, characterizing anti-Muslim hostility as “the prejudicial stereotyping and racialization of Muslims as a collective group with set characteristics.” Like all attempts to police expression, the language is subjective and elastic. What happens if one agrees with MI5 that Islamist terrorism represents the most significant national-security threat? Or if one cites court data showing disproportionate Muslim representation in grooming-gang convictions?
The guidance also gestures toward institutional liability, warning against the “creation or use of practices and biases within institutions.” This invites an expansion of HR enforcement and civil claims based on indirect discrimination. Recent employment-tribunal cases — some involving substantial settlements for “injury to feelings” — illustrate how these standards already operate in practice.
Britain already restricts expression where Islam is concerned. Although blasphemy laws were formally repealed in England and Wales in 2008, they continue to function de facto. In one recent case, a man who burned a Quran was charged with “offending the religious institution of Islam” — an offense unknown to statute. (He later won on appeal.) When prosecution proceeds on improvised grounds, it is not difficult to imagine future cases brought under the banner of “anti-Muslim hostility.”
This is the endpoint of multiculturalism: ad hoc speech regulations shaped by cultural sensitivities and sustained by mass immigration. While commentators work to enforce elite consensus, perceptions of two-tier policing have fueled public anger.
There should be no such thing as a hate crime — only crime. Conditions are likely to worsen before they improve. Open borders and cultural relativism have become default assumptions across much of the West, yet they sit uneasily with the rule of law and freedom of expression.
If you want to see where contemporary speech regulation leads, look to Britain. Americans would be wise to do so while these questions are still debated in theory — rather than enforced in practice.
Uk, Great britain, Free speech, Kier starmer, Lifestyle, Islam, Letter from the uk
