Reform UK leader Nigel Farage warned the U.S. Congress that censorship laws in Britain will have a stifling effect on free speech throughout the West and urged the American government to pressure London to adhere to its values of liberty.
Appearing before the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, Brexit boss Nigel Farage likened his native country of Britain to “North Korea” with its increasingly censorious stance towards online speech.
“We’ve kind of forgotten the Voltairian principles that we will fight and defend to the death your right to say something that we fundamentally disagree with. That is the absolute foundation, if you think about it, of free speech, of democracy, of living in freedom,” he said.
Mr Farage pointed to the arrest of Father Ted creator Graham Linehan in London this week over social media posts about transgenderism as an example of the creeping authoritarianism in his country.
“He put out some tweets months ago when he was in Arizona, and months later, he arrives at Heathrow Airport to be met by five armed police,” Mr Farage told the committee.
“He’s not even a British citizen. He’s an Irish citizen. This could happen to any American man or woman that goes to Heathrow that has said things online that the British government and British police don’t like.”
“At what point did we become North Korea? Well I think the Irish comedy writer found that out two days ago,” he lamented.
The Reform boss also pointed to the case of 42-year-old mother Lucy Connolly, who was given a 31-month sentence for a tweet put out in anger following the Southport mass stabbing that saw three young girls murdered by second-generation migrant Axel Rudakubana. Connolly, who also lost a child, deleted the post within hours, but was jailed nevertheless.
“I wanted to bring her with me today as living proof of what can go wrong. Sadly, the restrictions that have been put on her, banned her from making the trip, which is a very, very great shame,” Farage said.
The Brexit leader stated that while he and other parents were rightly concerned about the content available online to their children, the solution is not politically led censorship, suggesting that perhaps some hardware limitations could be implemented instead for minors.
Farage hailed Vice President JD Vance for his landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, during which he warned that the greatest threat to European liberty came from within, from those who would seek to censor their own citizens. Farage said that the speech “did us all a service” and “got this debate up and running”.
However, Farage urged the United States to put further pressure on Britain and the European Union to rescind speech restrictions, warning that the laws across the pond could have a “knock-on” effect in the United States and that it could negatively impact trade between the UK and U.S. should American tech companies face multi-million dollar fines from London.
Unsurprisingly, pro-censorship Democrats at the hearing attempted to dismiss concerns and to tarnish Mr Farage as a witness, with Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) accusing Farage of being “far-right”, and Jerry Nadler (D-NY) claiming that Mr Farage was a “fringe” politician, despite Farage having led the Brexit campaign and currently leading the most popular party in the United Kingdom.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), on the other hand, also expressed deep concern over the “attacks on free expression in Europe, the censorship, the arrests for offensive posts, the chilling effect it all has on speech.”
“We are more concerned frankly as Americans about the limits the DSA (Digital Services Act) and the Online Safety Act in the UK put on Americans’ First Amendment rights and the shakedown of American tech companies,” Congressman Jordan added.
The Chairman said that the UK and EU laws forcing American tech companies to change their terms of service to police speech are creating additional costs and warned that, rather than having multiple rule sets for different regions, the companies are likely to impose the same standards on U.S. citizens. Jordan also accused the countries of attempting to penalise American companies financially to prop up their own alternatives, which he argued have so far failed due to Europe’s highly regulated economies.
