by WorldTribune Staff, September 9, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
In his proposed preface to Animal Farm (“The Freedom of the Press”), George Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
A civil liberties group’s research, based on freedom of information requests, reveals that at least 62,000 people were arrested across Great Britain over a recent five-year period for speech crimes.
Sky News host Rita Panahi reported in 2025 on how UK police detained a couple after the father complained about his daughter’s primary school teachers in a WhatsApp group. ‘This couple were held in a cell for 11 hours, arrested in front of their crying children. After a five-week investigation, there’s no case to answer. If you think there’s free speech in the UK, you’re kidding yourself at this point.’
Censorship laws such as the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, and the Online Safety Act 2023 were used by British government to arrest 62,199 people for “communication offences”, including offensive jokes online, between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2025, the Big Brother Watch group reported.
That averages out to more than 30 arrests per day.
Free speech advocates say the laws make it a crime to send or share electronic messages that are judged to be “grossly offensive,” “menacing,” “indecent,” or “obscene,” or messages meant to cause annoyance or needless anxiety.
Director of Big Brother Watch Silkie Carlo said: “There is mounting concern among the public that speech policing is out of control in Britain and it’s long overdue that the government takes action.
“Andy Burnham must now launch a free speech reset and order an independent review of our laws and police training around speech, in order to fix this Orwellian mess.
“Thousands of people are being arrested for controversial speech, online jokes and non-violent protest. People have even been arrested for holding blank pieces of paper, and urged to take ‘online thinking skills’ courses by police. Enough is enough.”
Even for those who merely face arrest and are ultimately not charged, “the process of being arrested is punitive and a temporary restriction on liberty that can have lasting effects,” Big Brother Watch said.
Commenting on the report, the founder of the Free Speech Union, Lord Toby Young, wrote in the Mail on Sunday: “Why are the authorities spending so much time policing our tweets when they could be policing our streets?
“Shoplifting, mobile phone theft and sexual offences are all on the rise, yet the police seem increasingly obsessed with catching thought criminals. The sheer number of people being arrested for online offences, even though only one in five end up being convicted, cannot help but have a chilling effect on free speech.
“People up and down the country daren’t say what they think about a whole range of issues for fear they’ll get a knock on their door at four in the morning by a couple of plainclothes officers wearing rainbow lanyards.”
