A report from a leading civil liberties campaign group has found that the British state has arrested at least 62,000 people over five years for speech crimes, for an average of 34 arrests per day.
Censorship laws such as the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, and the Online Safety Act 2023 have been used by both Labour and so-called Conservative governments to arrest 62,199 people for “communication offences”, including offensive jokes online, between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2025, the Big Brother Watch pressure group has revealed.
The report was based on police data from 38 of the 45 territorial police forces in the UK, obtained following a series of Freedom of Information requests sent to all forces. However, the civil liberties group noted that because some forces failed or refused to provide their data, the true number of people arrested for speech crimes was likely much higher.
The campaign group said that if those forces that failed to supply data were in line with the national average for communications arrests, the total would be around 73,000 over the five-year period, or one arrest for every 940 people in the country.
However, the report noted that there are “shocking disparities” in the arrest rate for speech crimes between different police forces, with some recording as many as ten times the number of arrests as others.
Some of the forces with the highest rate of arrests for communications per 10,000 people between 2021 and 2025 included Cumbria at 25.69, Northamptonshire at 23.35, the City of London at 20.51, Essex at 19.57, and Durham at 17.00.
In contrast, some of the lowest rates increased included Staffordshire at 0.58 people per 10,0000, followed by Surrey at 1.70, Northumbria at 1.87, Dorset at 2.18, and Humberside at 4.13.
While some disparities should be expected across the country, given regional demographic variation, Big Brother Watch noted that the differences on the scale shown by the data defy such an explanation, and that it is likely that some forces had developed a specific censorial culture than others while being enabled by “excessively broad” laws open to interpretation.
“If individuals face substantially different risks of arrest depending on where they live, the principle of equal treatment under the law is called into question,” the campaign group noted.
The report also found significant disparities in the number of charges brought for speech crimes by law enforcement across the country. During the five years studied, 18,520 people were charged with communications offences by the same 38 of the 45 territorial police forces. Like arrest rates, the Cumbria Constabulary led the country with 8.3 charges per 10,000 residents, 2.7 times the national average.
The significant differences also suggest that some police forces are arresting people in cases where there is not sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal charge. However, even those who merely face arrest, “the process of being arrested is punitive and a temporary restriction on liberty that can have lasting effects,” Big Brother Watch remarked.
Commenting on the report, the founder of the Free Speech Union, Lord Toby Young, wrote in the Mail on Sunday: “Why are the authorities spending so much time policing our tweets when they could be policing our streets?
“Shoplifting, mobile phone theft and sexual offences are all on the rise, yet the police seem increasingly obsessed with catching thought criminals. The sheer number of people being arrested for online offences, even though only one in five end up being convicted, cannot help but have a chilling effect on free speech.
“People up and down the country daren’t say what they think about a whole range of issues for fear they’ll get a knock on their door at four in the morning by a couple of plainclothes officers wearing rainbow lanyards.”
Director of Big Brother Watch Silkie Carlo added: “There is mounting concern among the public that speech policing is out of control in Britain and it’s long overdue that the government takes action.
“Andy Burnham must now launch a free speech reset and order an independent review of our laws and police training around speech, in order to fix this Orwellian mess.
“Thousands of people are being arrested for controversial speech, online jokes and non-violent protest. People have even been arrested for holding blank pieces of paper, and urged to take ‘online thinking skills’ courses by police. Enough is enough.”
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