The United Kingdom needs a new generation of Levellers

The country once boasted a proud tradition of free speech, but it’s being eviscerated one arrest at a time.

In 1649, a group of English radicals sent a petition to the House of Commons. In it, they lamented the licensing of printing — which allowed the government to “pre-censor” books and pamphlets — as well as the harsh punishments for publishing unlicensed or “scandalous” ones.

The radicals warned that this kind of censorship would usher in a tyranny, and they insisted that it “seems altogether inconsistent with the good of the Commonwealth, and expresly [sic] opposite and dangerous to the liberties of the people.”

These radicals, known as the Levellers, paid dearly for their defiance. Their leaders were repeatedly imprisoned, and their demands for near-universal male suffrage, religious freedom, and unrestricted speech were crushed.

Yet their bold vision left a legacy. Later champions of free expression, from the authors of Cato’s Letters to John Wilkes, carried their arguments forward. Those ideas crossed the Atlantic, circulated in pamphlets at revolutionary speed, and ultimately found their way into state constitutions and the First Amendment.

Centuries later, it seems Britain is in dire need of a new generation of Levellers.

In April, The Times reported that more than 30 people a day were being arrested for various online offenses, equating to 12,000 arrests a year, according to The Telegraph. In June, Hamit Coskun was fined £240 for a religiously aggravated public order offence after burning a Quran and shouting profanities against Islam outside the Turkish consulate in London — an act of protest against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarian Islamism.

In March, six girls at a Quaker meeting house in London were arrested for “suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” for holding a meeting about a potential non-violent protest. They were part of a group called Youth Demand, which had been carrying out acts of civil disobedience as part of their “fight to end genocide.” Thirty officers were involved in the arrest, which was part of a larger campaign of raids for similar offenses that took place across the city that day.

Nearly 900 people were arrested in London over the weekend for protesting against the government’s ban on the advocacy group Palestine Action under an anti-terrorism law, which in the U.S. would be similar to the Trump administration declaring Students for Justice in Palestine a terrorist organization. Expressing support for a proscribed organization is punishable with up to 14 years in prison.

And Irish comedian Graham Linehan was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport last week. Linehan, a vocal critic of gender self-identification, rejects the idea that biological sex can be changed and opposes access for biological males to female-only spaces. His alleged crime apparently consisted of three tweets from April, one of which read:

The tweets were undoubtedly harsh and deeply offensive to many transgender people, who see Linehan’s stance as a denial of their very identity. Yet tolerating speech that offends our most cherished beliefs is the price of any meaningful conception of free expression, whether in law or in culture.

Even in the U.S., where legal speech protections are stronger than in the U.K., (imminent) incitement to violence can be restricted. However, a provocative tweet from more than four months ago suggesting that someone “punch” others in a hypothetical situation does not meet any meaningful threshold of incitement (imminent or not) — no more than do abstract exhortations to “punch Nazis” or, conversely, to attack “TERFs,” as some trans activists have urged.

All told, it is difficult to escape the depressing conclusion that the home of the Levellers, Cato’s Letters, John Wilkes, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell has taken a deeply troubling turn away from the robust tradition of free speech these seminal figures argued so eloquently for.

With every arrest, the British must remind themselves: Rights lost are not easily regained. And for Americans looking across the pond in horror, a warning: It can happen here, too.