On the heels of Veep JD Vance’s 100% correct slam on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over speech rights, the latest Big Brother stunt from the United Kingdom has hit the airwaves.
A 74-year-old Scottish woman was arrested for silently holding up a sign outside an abortion clinic asking people walking in if they wanted to chat with her.
Rose Docherty is the first person arrested under the so-called “Safe Access Zones Act,” a 2024 law forbidding even the peaceful exercise of speech within 200 meters of abortion clinics.
Vance restricted himself with Starmer to criticizing the terrible effects UK speech laws might have on Americans as a result of their enforcement against US companies.
But the Docherty arrest proves that doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Hers is far from the only such case: 2023 saw Isabel Vaughan-Spruce arrested in Birmingham for silently praying outside a clinic; in 2022 Adam Smith-Connor was charged in Bournemouth for the same “crime.”
And that’s to say nothing of the UK’s overall Orwellian approach to speech, which sees people arrested for Facebook posts that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow stateside.
Britain is a nominal democracy and our closest trans-Atlantic ally — but on this issue looks increasingly to be voluntarily lowering an iron curtain.
Indeed, the whole affair underlines the truth of Vance’s earlier remarks on the issue at the Munich Security Conference, calling out “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.”
It remains beyond the power of the Trump administration to change the UK’s repressive speech laws.
But their existence alone must serve as a reminder that the right to free speech requires careful safeguarding at home — look no further than the past decade for proof of that.
There is no liberal democracy without a commitment, political and social, to free speech. Let’s pray our British “cousins” remember that before it’s too late.
