Let that headline sink in for a moment. Around 30 people a day, in the country that invented free speech, are being arrested for things they have said online. Over 12,000 arrests in a single year under section 127 of the Communications Act and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. A Telegraph investigation found hundreds more charged under the Online Safety Act itself. This isn't Russia. This isn't China. This is Britain in 2026.

The Two-Tier Reality

Walk into most police stations and try to report a burglary. You will be handed a crime reference number and told nobody is coming. Now send a rude tweet. Officers in stab vests will be on your doorstep before lunch. This isn't a caricature. It is the documented reality of modern British policing.

The public can see the imbalance and it is eroding trust in the police at a speed the Home Office cannot keep up with. When the state has the resources to knock on the door of a grandmother in Stockport over a Facebook comment but cannot investigate your stolen car, something has gone seriously wrong.

The Online Safety Act Made Everything Worse

The Online Safety Act 2023 was sold to the public as a child protection measure. What it actually delivered was a sweeping speech code, enforced not by a court but by unaccountable platform moderators and an ever-growing Ofcom. Platforms overcomply because the fines are ruinous. Legal speech gets scrubbed. Dissenting voices are pushed out of public life entirely.

Labour had every opportunity to rethink this legislation when they came to power. They didn't. They expanded it. They love it. Because a state with the power to police speech is a state that can police its critics.

Repeal Is Not Radical. It Is Common Sense.

The Adam Smith Institute has drafted a model Free Speech Act 2026. It would repeal seven separate Acts of Parliament, create a statutory right to free expression, prohibit the state from censoring lawful speech directly or through third parties, and give citizens a private right of action when their speech rights are violated. This is not fringe thinking. It is a return to the British legal tradition.

Over half a million people have signed petitions to reform or repeal these laws. The public is ahead of Westminster on this issue, as they so often are. Reform UK has made repealing the Online Safety Act a core manifesto pledge and I make no apology for that.

What Reform UK Would Do

We would repeal the Online Safety Act in its current form. We would scrap the catch-all communications offences that are dragging ordinary people through the criminal justice system for saying things the government of the day happens to dislike. We would refocus the police on actual crime: burglaries, thefts, assaults, the things that affect people's lives. And we would trust the British public to be adults who can handle free speech, because we always have been.

The measure of a free country is not how loudly the government praises liberty. It is whether you can speak your mind without the police knocking on your door. By that measure, Britain is no longer free.