DANIEL HANNAN: Trump is a detestable man in my eyes, but that doesn't stop him having a point about the demise of free speech in Britain

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Many of us will have felt conflicted by the idea that Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to link a trade deal to free speech in Britain.

Brits hate being pushed around by foreigners. At the same time, though, most of us know that the US administration has a point about the loss of freedom of expression in this country.

We have gone, in one generation, from being a place where you could say what you liked, provided you stopped short of harassment, intimidation or incitement, to being a place where you can have your collar felt for criticising your local council.

However much we resent being lectured from overseas, most of us will feel a sense of shame that it has come to this. We ought to guarantee free speech, not as a favour to our American cousins, but because it was our invention in the first place.

On Sunday, the US state department issued an extraordinary statement, announcing that the administration was ‘concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom’.

It cited the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was prosecuted two years ago for standing outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth holding a sign that read: ‘Here to talk if you want.’

She went on trial at Poole Magistrates’ Court last month for the alleged breach of a buffer zone and a verdict is due to be delivered on Friday.

Dr Tossici-Bolt is a cause celebre for various conservative groups in the US, who see her both as a persecuted Christian and as a shocking example of how the land of John Milton and J. S. Mill has turned its back on free expression.

On Sunday, the US state department announced that the administration was ‘concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom'

Left-wingers, who already loathed the Trump administration, are bridling at its presumption and colonial mindset. Because they see international relations as a hierarchy of power and oppression, the US is one of the few countries they can feel good about disliking.

The funny thing is that they don’t mind calling out human rights abuses in other countries. They are generally happy to use trade policy as a lever when it comes to, say, the repression of dissidents in Belarus, or the arrest of journalists in Iran.

But they struggle to understand that senior Republicans feel the same way about censorship in the nation that they regard as the fount of their own freedoms.

Labour MPs fulminate, quite rightly, against the ban on girls’ education in Afghanistan. Well, free expression is every bit as much a universal value to American conservatives.

It used to be seen that way here, too. We clung to free speech during our conflicts with the Nazis and the Soviets. Indeed, we clung to it with particular fierceness, precisely because we felt it made our society better than theirs.

Then, starting in the late 1990s, we passed a series of laws that elevated the imagined sensitivities of approved minorities over everything else – free contract, free association and, most definitely, free speech.

Today, a grandmother can be visited by cops for making rude remarks about a local councillor.

A journalist can have the rozzers on her doorstep over a year-old tweet that suggested British Muslims were largely pro-Hamas.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer with US President Donald Trump at the White House earlier this year

A schoolgirl can be badged as racist for complaining that her classmates are not speaking English.

A toddler can be expelled from nursery for ‘abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity’. (I’m not making this up: the Department for Education this week confirmed that a child ‘aged three or four’ was suspended from a state school for this very infringement in the academic year 2022/23.)

All of these cases come, so to speak, from the same political direction. All of them are especially outrageous when set alongside the hatred we hear on anti-Israel marches, or the abuses that, until very recently, eco campaigners were able to get away with.

But the truly monstrous thing is not that we have a two-tier justice system.

It’s that such things can happen at all in this country.

If you’re anywhere near my age or older (I was born in 1971), you’ll have associated such policies with totalitarian states. ‘It’s a free country,’ we used to tell each other. It has been a long time since I heard any British person use that phrase without irony.

It was bad enough to be confronted with our record by the US Vice-President, J. D. Vance.

To have a Trump administration source declare ‘No free trade without free speech’ is the ultimate humiliation, because it brackets us with authoritarian states.

We can no longer pretend that our restrictions on free expression are simply about public order or slander or harassment.

We have been exposed before the world as what we knew ourselves to be: a petty, authoritarian nation where the police are regularly involved in cases that concern nothing more than insulting language.

I write, by the way, as a long-standing critic of Donald Trump. I believe his character flaws and his disregard for the constitution make him unfit for office; his attacks on Canada and Denmark are disgusting; his readiness to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding is degrading; and his trade policies threaten a global downturn.

I don’t even believe he has much interest in free speech, at least not when he dislikes its content. But none of that means that he is wrong about censorship in Britain. If free speech means anything, it means allowing people we dislike to have their say.

The Trump administration has built up some pretty obnoxious Brits.

It is seeking to rehabilitate Andrew Tate, the so-called ‘king of toxic masculinity’. It has convinced itself that Tommy Robinson is in prison for saying unpopular things about Islam, rather than for repeatedly defying court orders in a libel case.

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But here is a hard thing that needs saying. Being obnoxious does not disqualify you from equal rights under the law.

Both Tate and Robinson can fairly claim to be victims of a two-tier justice system, in the sense that they would not have been treated so harshly had their political opinions been more fashionable.

A man can be a victim and a villain at the same time.

Tolerating unpleasant people is as good a test as any of an open society. A free country allows people to do all manner of offensive things, provided they stop short of physical intimidation.

If you want to burn a copy of the Koran, or maintain that the Holocaust never happened, or argue that gay relationships should be criminalised, or wish a painful death on the monarch, you are saying things that most people will find disagreeable.

But you are not threatening anyone.

It is extraordinary that the leader of the Conservative Party should need to say that she does not want Britain to be ‘persecuting people for expressing themselves’, as Kemi Badenoch did yesterday. But that is the point we have reached.

We have forgotten the most basic premise of freedom, namely that it applies to people we find thoroughly detestable. Donald Trump is, to my eyes, a detestable man.

But that doesn’t stop him having a point.

• Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is president of the Institute for Free Trade