Nick Robinson: How the simmering row over freedom of speech in the UK reached boiling point
22 September 2025 Share Save Nick Robinson Share Save
BBC
"At what point did we become North Korea?" That was the question Nigel Farage posed when asked by a US congressional committee about limitations on freedom of speech in the UK. He was condemning the "awful authoritarian situation we have sunk into", which he claimed had led to various arrests including that of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan over his views on challenging "a trans-identified male" in "a female-only space". When I heard the question, I confess I thought that the leader of Reform UK had gone over the top. Farage was comparing his country - my country - with a brutal dictatorship that murders, imprisons and tortures opponents. And he was doing it in front of an influential audience of American lawmakers.
Lucy North/PA Wire 'I don't regret anything I've tweeted,' Graham Linehan said earlier this month
When I interviewed his deputy, Richard Tice on Radio 4's Today, I asked him whether he really believed that UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was the same as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Three times I asked the question. Three times Tice swerved it, suggesting Farage was simply using "an analogy". But Farage is not alone in questioning how far restrictions to freedom of speech have gone in the UK. Tensions around the limits of free speech are nothing new and since the advent of social media in the mid-2000s, the arguments have been simmering. Now, though, they're reaching a boiling point.
BENJAMIN CREMEL/AFP via Getty Images Farage lambasted the 'awful authoritarian situation we have sunk into'
During his recent visit, US Vice-President JD Vance said he did not want the UK to go down a "very dark path" of losing free speech. The US business magazine Forbes carried an editorial this month that took this argument further still. In it, editor-in-chief Steve Forbes condemned the UK's "plunge into the kind of speech censorship usually associated with tin pot Third World dictatorships". He argues that, in stark contrast to the United States - where free speech is protected by the first amendment to the constitution, "the UK has, with increasing vigour, been curbing what one is allowed to say, all in the name of fighting racism, sexism, Islamophobia, transgenderism, climate-change denial and whatever else the woke extremists conjure up". So, how exactly did we get to the point where the UK is being compared to a dictatorship and, given how inflamed the conversation has become, what - if anything - would it take to turn down the heat?
Big tech dialled up the debate
The case of Lucy Connolly has become a cause celebre to some in the UK and beyond. The former childminder from Northampton, who is married to a Conservative councillor, had posted an abhorrent message on X, calling for people to "set fire" to hotels housing asylum seekers following the murder of three young girls at a dance class in Southport in July 2024. It was viewed hundreds of thousands of times at a time when the threat of violence was very real.
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