The Trump administration reportedly dispatched a team to meet with victims of Britain’s draconian speech restrictions amid growing concerns over the state of liberty in the United Kingdom.
A group of five diplomats from the U.S. State Department were recently sent on a fact-finding mission in March to Britain to meet with pro-life activists who have been arrested for silently praying outside abortion clinics in the UK, The Telegraph reports.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) team also met with UK Foreign Office officials and members of the Ofcom broadcasting regulator, which was recently empowered to police speech on the internet in Britain by the controversial Online Safety Act.
The legislation has reportedly become a major bone of contention between Washington and London, given the potential for the British authority to impose hefty fines on American social media firms for failing to police content on their platforms.
The Trump administration has publicly chastised Britain for its increasingly restrictive speech codes, and reports have claimed that the issue could become a sticking point during trade negotiations.
Vice President JD Vance raised the issue of free speech in Europe during his landmark February speech at the Munich Security Conference, and singled out the UK as a chief offender.
“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance warned, adding: “I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.”
The Vice President specifically pointed to pro-life campaigners being arrested for silently praying near abortion clinics in the UK.
One such campaigner, 74-year-old grandmother Rose Docherty, who, just days after Vance’s speech, became the first person to be arrested under the so-called “buffer zone” law prohibiting protests outside of abortion clinics, expressed her thanks to the Trump administration.
“All I did was stand peacefully offering consensual conversation to anyone who wanted to take up my offer to talk. I didn’t break the law, I didn’t influence, I didn’t harass, I didn’t intimidate,” she said.
“This can’t be just. It’s heartening that others around the world, including the US government, have realised this injustice and voiced their support.”
Trump allies have also recently raised the case of 42-year-old English mother Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to 31 months in prison over social media posts following the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport by second-generation migrant Axel Rudakubana.
Reform UK leader and longtime Trump ally Nigel Farage remarked: “The Lucy Connolly case alone shows that two-tier Britain is really here. My American friends cannot believe what is happening in the UK.”
During a February meeting in the Oval Office, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer denied that his country has a problem with free speech, saying: “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time.”
According to a report last month from The Times of London, British police arrest more than 30 people every day for supposedly offensive comments on the internet or other platforms, totalling around 12,000 arrests per year.
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