Does the United Kingdom need a First Amendment? That’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, given the government’s unrelenting assault on free speech. If Britons enjoyed the same constitutional protections as Americans, it would have been more difficult to prosecute anyone over the summer for social media posts ‘intending to stir up racial hatred’, the crime for which Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, received two-and-a-half years last week.
The solution is not to pass a new law, but to repeal those laws that limit our freedom of expression
But I remain sceptical. For one thing, there’s no mechanism in our constitution for creating a law that couldn’t be repealed by the next parliament. True, certain laws passed in the Blair and Brown years have proved hard to reverse, such as the Human Rights Act 1998, the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and the Equality Act 2010, but that’s because they enjoy cross-party support, as well as the overwhelming support of the professional managerial class.
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