The Mother Country of Great Britain gave the American colonists the idea that free speech is a good thing. That’s why it’s so tragic to see that free speech in the United Kingdom is rapidly becoming a distant memory. I say this because we’ve just learned that the newest “hate crime” in England, a country determined to control its citizens’ speech, is asking someone to speak English.

The British people had long considered freedom of speech one of their core, unwritten rights. It was a cultural norm (or, as the British might have said, “an ancient right and liberty”) and became a reality in the political sphere when it was written into the English Bill of Rights of 1689: “That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.” By 1735, when the Zenger Case, in New York, made truth a defense against libel claims, the right to speech advanced outside of the four walls of Parliament and made its way into the general population.

When the colonists rebelled against Great Britain, they did so because they believed that Great Britain was denying them their inherent (“unalienable”) rights (not just speech but all rights) under the Magna Carta of 1215, the English Bill of Rights, British common law, and the general cultural norms of Britain. Great Britain responded by saying that these rights were limitations on the Crown, not on Parliament.

Given that the Crown was already a fading power by the mid-18th century, with this argument, Britain essentially announced that the British people had no inherent rights but had only the privileges that Parliament granted them. From that point forward, while speech rights advanced in America, they declined in Britain.

That history is how we get to a situation in which asking someone to speak English—the native language of England—is a hate crime in England:

Free speech can be ugly. I absolutely hate it when pro-Hamas activists insist that Israel has no right to defend itself. I shudder and worry when antisemites start saying that Jews are a problem in America simply because they are Jewish. Note, please, that regarding those pro-Hamas people, there’s a vast difference between people stating opinions, no matter how ugly or stupid, and non-citizens who act as spokesmen for groups that advocate terrorism against America.

However, what I hate even more than speech that offends or even frightens me is the government deciding what speech is or is not allowed in the realm of opinions.* As we’ve seen across the world, an unconstrained government will inevitably start deciding which group is most likely to maintain its power and will then define as “hate speech” anything that challenges its power base. Once that happens, you no longer live in a free country; you live in a totalitarian country.

And so it is that Great Britain, which provided the genesis for American ideas about liberty, has morphed into George Orwell’s worst nightmare.

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*This doesn’t mean we should abandon existing limitations on certain speech. As noted, Mahmoud Khalil, a non-citizen, does not have the right to speak on behalf of a pro-terrorism organization. Likewise, defamatory speech can result in civil actions. And, of course, speech that imminently advances criminal activity (such as calling for a president’s assassination or plotting a crime) can be criminally liable. But in the world of ideas or ordinary social interactions, even those that hurt someone’s feelings, the government should not have its thumb on the scale.

UPDATE: I just saw this meme, and it seems apropos:

For more on Britain’s appalling rot, check out this post at Hot Air.

Image: X screen grab.