Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 – an act that set in motion the Protestant Reformation. The publication of the Freedom of Speech Bill (2026) by the Adam Smith Institute on 1 April 2026 is, I believe, a comparable moment for the fight against censorship in Britain.
Britain possesses a remarkable variety of mechanisms by which it can destroy you for speaking. Many citizens do not realise this because they have learned – gradually, imperceptibly – to say and think almost nothing at all.
England – and by extension Britain – once prided itself as a place uniquely adapted to liberty. Today, it leads the English-speaking world in criminalising and constraining it. Acts that began life as well-intentioned attempts to curb football hooliganism in the 1980s or to prevent teenage suicide have metastasised into a sweeping regime of speech suppression which now punishes political dissent more harshly than violent physical disorder. Between the commencement of the Public Order Act 1996 and the Online Safety Act 2023, the British state has constructed a censorship machine of considerable breadth. This apparatus masquerades as an antidote to harm, all while ignoring legitimate digital harms such as doxxing – something the state appears to tolerate and even to weaponize for political ends through third-party organisations and NGOs.
All of the issues flowing from this censorship apparatus are addressed by the Freedom of Speech Bill (2026).
The Bill is designed to be adopted by any political party that values freedom of expression. My co-authors are Preston Byrne, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, a dual-qualified free speech lawyer who has overseen the introduction of the Wyoming GRANITE Act in the United States (designed to protect American citizens from foreign censors such as Ofcom) and who led the defence of 4chan and Kiwi Farms against Ofcom’s attempted overreach into foreign jurisdictions; and Elijah Granet, who holds dual English and American legal training, with professional experience in legislative drafting and OPC-style proofreading.
The Model Bill is a template – a menu of options – for any UK politician or citizen who wishes to halt the collapse of Orwell’s country into Orwell’s fiction. It is not a radical proposal. The Freedom of Speech Bill is perfectly aligned with Britain’s liberal history and its traditional values – values that are sane, just, and which the UK’s current speech laws conspicuously fail to reflect. The radicals are the politicians, pressure groups, and corporations who are either actively driving the transformation of the United Kingdom into Censorship Island, or quietly acquiescing in it.
A party which argues such a Bill is unnecessary thereby accepts complicity – or at least contentment – with continuing censorship and political punishment. To be charitable, some do not understand how, or why, this is occurring. Assuming the latter, let me set out the core problems the British public faces, and how this Bill remedies them.
Issue 1: Criminal Speech Law
This is the internationally infamous dimension of Britain’s treatment of its citizens over speech. For the working classes – the playthings and the meat in the meat-grinder of our legal system – the restrictions faced are usually criminal. You will not hear about these people in the press as speech martyrs because they cannot afford to fight these cases and journalists rarely cover them.
In 2022, a British Army veteran was arrested for posting a meme and subjected to attempted ‘re-education’. A Twitter user was sentenced to 150 hours of community service for a single tweet. A barrister was forced to fight a ‘politically motivated’ campaign against him for observing that free speech was dying in Britain (Mr J Holbrook v Tom Cosgrove QC & Ors [2023] EAT 168.). In 2025, two parents were arrested for complaining about their child’s school in a WhatsApp group, their messages deemed ‘malicious communications’. These are not extremists: they are ordinary people who said ordinary things
The state’s preferred instruments are the Communications Act 2003, s 127 – for ‘grossly offensive’ messaging, whether public or private – alongside the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Together, these two statutes account for around 12,000 arrests annually. And as Lane notes, 2025 polling found that an astonishing 42 per cent of Britons say they regularly suppress their own opinions on controversial subjects
There is also the Public Order Act 1986, ss 4A and 5 – the ‘alarm and distress’ offences. These can be racially aggravated under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, allowing the state to label you a ‘criminal racist’ for displaying a sticker containing truthful information. Once so branded by statute, you can be professionally and socially destroyed. Some 10,000 to 15,000 people are convicted under this route each year.
If the state wishes to go further, there is the Public Order Act 1986, Part III, 19 – used extensively following Labour’s election victory in 2024. The summer riots provided the government with a pretext to deploy it as a Swiss-army knife against white working-class dissent. The provision requires only that an imaginary observer might believe your words could stir racial hatred. It was used to imprison childminder Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to 31 months. As Byrne has pointed out, the Bill’s Section 9 addresses exactly this scenario by importing the American Brandenburg test for incitement, under which Connolly’s speech would be subjected to a rigorous three-part analysis before any criminal liability could attach.
Solution: The Freedom of Speech Bill (2026) repeals all of the above statutes and pardons those convicted under them (s.24 and Schedule 1).
Issue 2: Civil Speech Law and Professional Regulation
For the middle classes, speech tends to be weaponised differently – through denial of entry to public life via sackings, suspensions, and strike-off by professional regulators (rendering years of expensive qualification worthless), or through organised smear campaigns when financial destitution is not available as a lever. The latter is often outsourced by the state to bodies such as the aptly named ‘Hope Not Hate’.
The power of professional regulation over the individual is chronically under-discussed. The Nursing and Midwifery Order 2001, Health Professions Order 2001, Legal Services Act 2007, and Medical Act 1983 all empower regulators to control the speech of their registrants, denying them the ability to work on the basis of their expression. These regulators have routinely expanded their remit to penalise private speech made wholly outside professional duties. The examples cited alone give the state the means to silence 371,000 allied health professionals, 800,000 nurses, 300,000 doctors, and 192,000 lawyers. This is why professionals – lawyers included – are so reluctant to speak on matters of clear national importance: sheer self-interest prevails.
In ordinary employment law, you can be dismissed for speech made outside the workplace. You are left to rely on ECHR Article 10 and the Equality Act 2010’s philosophical belief protections to prevent this. Such defences are routinely overpowered – and usually bypassed entirely by internal HR processes long before any external challenge becomes viable. Challenging such a decision is rarely an option for the Englishman, unless he is already a public figure able to engage in crowdfunding.
Solution: The Freedom of Speech Bill (2026) disempowers regulators from intervening in the private speech of professionals, and gives workers a route to challenge – and win against – employers who penalise lawful expression (ss 13, 15, 16, and 21). Schedule 3 amends the Employment Rights Act 1996 to protect lawful speech made outside the workplace. Schedule 4 amends the Equality Act 2010, adding ‘lawful speech’ as a protected characteristic – inverting the existing HR-to-homelessness pipeline.
Issue 3: Business and the Internet
The censorship apparatus now runs through private enterprise. Ofcom already treats broadcasters as responsible intermediaries under its Broadcasting Code, barring ‘hate speech’ and drawing explicit attention to the speech-suppression provisions of the Public Order Act 1986.
The Online Safety Act 2023 extends the same logic to internet companies on a far greater scale. Passed in October 2023 and fattened by Ofcom’s endless codes of practice, it rapidly revealed itself as the most far-reaching censorship mechanism yet devised in any Western democracy. Ofcom may require firms to answer information notices, submit to interviews, and comply with inspection demands. Named senior managers may personally commit a criminal offence if they fail to take all reasonable steps to prevent certain information offences by their company; in the more serious cases, this can carry up to two years’ imprisonment.
The genius – if one may call it that – of the OSA lies in its engineered vagueness. Rather than tightly targeting child abuse or terrorism, it grants Ofcom and compliant platforms a catch-all mandate: mitigate any ‘risk of harm’, criminal or not, defined post hoc. Part 3 imposes a ‘duty of care’ on any service offering user-to-user interaction. Section 5 extends this to virtually the entire internet. Section 12 expands ‘content of concern’ to include perfectly legal material deemed harmful by future risk assessments.
Under Section 110, Ofcom may demand access to platforms’ internal moderation systems, source code, or private records, backed by ruinous fines and criminal liability under Section 176. The Act also translates the state’s misinformation hysteria into law. Under Section 179(1), it is theoretically possible for an April Fools’ joke to attract criminal prosecution for knowingly sharing false information causing ‘non-trivial psychological harm’. Even asserting that Britain is a ‘free country’ might logically risk a charge.
Many businesses, confronted with that machinery, will not wait for a court to determine what is unlawful. They will comply pre-emptively – implementing digital identity checks and designing their moderation systems to delete first and ask no questions later. Platforms will not simply remove content proven harmful. They will remove anything that might become a liability. Those without the compliance infrastructure will simply close their doors to British users. By March 2025, benign forums – from hamster care groups to cycling clubs – were shuttering under the burden of OSA compliance. Welcome to the compliance economy, where the Englishman’s right to speak is strangled not only by a police knock at the door, but by preventing access to public discourse altogether.
Byrne’s proposed solution is drawn directly from the American experience. Section 20 of the Model Bill repeals the OSA in its entirety and replaces it with a provision modelled on Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act: no provider or user of an interactive computer service is to be treated as the publisher of third-party content. Crucially, UK criminal law is entirely unaffected – the immunity is civil only. And unlike the current regime, the Bill imposes one clear, enforceable obligation on platforms: detect and report child sexual abuse material to law enforcement within 24 hours of acquiring actual knowledge of it.
Solution: The Freedom of Speech Bill (2026) repeals the Online Safety Act 2023 and the Public Order Act 1986 in their entirety (Schedule 1), and replaces the OSA’s regime with a Section 230-style civil immunity for internet platforms (s.20).
Issue 4: Institutional Use of Speech Penalties for Ideological Restructuring
For institutions, speech controls have become the mechanism by which they have ideologically pruned themselves – removing independent-minded individuals through employment law, and replacing them with protocol-oriented conformists.
In the NHS, in universities, in local government, in regulators, and across the wider public sector, employees are not merely forbidden from saying certain things. They are increasingly compelled to say the right things – through mandatory training sessions, values frameworks, DEI protocols, and disciplinary codes framed in the elastic language of dignity, inclusion, and professionalism. The effect has been to drive out sensible, independent-minded people from every institution of consequence. The state’s surveillance of its own critics extends further than many appreciate. Subject access disclosures, FOI requests, and Cabinet Office vetting guidance later deposited in Parliament revealed that at least fifteen government departments had compiled covert dossiers on individuals critical of ministers, trawling Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X and using the results to blacklist speakers from official events; the Department for Education even treated a favourable response to criticism of its policies as grounds for exclusion.
Legislators’ conception of the internet – who primarily treat it as a dangerous mire of constant threats to good statecraft – is a product of a profound lack of digital literacy in both our judiciary and legislature. Seventy per cent of court judges and 69 per cent of tribunal judges are over fifty; over a third of both groups are older than sixty. Most of those who drafted and implemented the legislation dealing with online speech (The Online Safety Act 2023) first meaningfully encountered digital culture only when forced indoors during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The same low-information hysteria that has driven internet regulation explains why the government responded to the fictional Netflix series Adolescence as though it were a green paper.
Solution:
The Freedom of Speech Bill (2026), s 13, bars the state from penalising lawful expression or maintaining codes and policies that suppress it. Section 14 bans non-crime speech monitoring and requires the destruction of existing records held in violation of that rule – directly addressing the secret dossier problem. Section 16 bars compelled ideological speech in employment, education, licensing, accreditation, funding, and public benefits. Schedule 3 protects lawful expression made outside the workplace. Schedule 4 bars compelled endorsement of messages or viewpoints under the Equality Act 2010.
Conclusion
The obvious remedy is repeal. The Freedom of Speech Bill (2026), published by the Adam Smith Institute, offers exactly that – alongside clarity, and narrow definitions of what speech may lawfully be prohibited. At present, no such certainty exists.
The Model Bill does not seek consensus with pro-censorship forces. As Byrne has put it, the question is binary: do you want the United Kingdom to have a free speech right equivalent to the First Amendment, or do you not? The establishment must answer for a legal regime that causes half the British population to self-censor out of fear, and which results in tens of thousands of arrests each year for the act of speaking one’s mind. They are unable to defend it, because it is indefensible.
America does not suffer under its First Amendment; there is no indication Britain would if it gained one in the form of this bill. Until political parties make the choice to push for and adopt this Bill, our nation will remain a cautionary tale in the realm of free speech.
Michael C R Reiners is an English lawyer, constitutional writer, and architectural historian. He is co-author, with Preston J Byrne and Elijah Granet, of the Freedom of Speech Bill (2026) published by the Adam Smith Institute; and the creator & editor of Reiners.org.uk which publishes his essays, proposed legislation, and selected work by other writers.
