America Must Lift Britain’s Iron Curtain

In 1946, former and future Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended over Europe, separating the Eastern Bloc from Western Christendom. Said curtain was woven by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, who excluded Churchill from meetings in Tehran and Yalta in order to divide Europe up amongst themselves. A fifth-column of communist subversives — embedded in FDR’s Treasury and State Department — helped coordinate the carving up of Germany into East and West. The Berlin Wall was built in 1961, and stood until President Reagan, defying State Department and National Security Council advisors, told President Gorbachev to tear it down. Citizens on both sides demolished it by hand two years later, in 1989. Without opposition from Reagan and Churchill, the Evil Empire would have continued to sweep Europe, claiming millions more lives in wars, famines, and Gulags before inevitably exhausting itself through centrally planned economics. Their speeches saved lives.

In the same speech, Churchill coined the phrase “the special relationship” to describe diplomatic ties, based on shared history and heritage, between the United States and Great Britain. “But we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world”, Churchill urged, appealing to “Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law [which] find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.” That “freedom of speech and thought should reign” and the law be applied without political fear or favour is what separated the Anglosphere from Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and the third-world.

The special relationship should be stronger than ever, with Anglophiles in the White House. The bust of Churchill — a permanent fixture of the Oval Office, proposed by former US Ambassador to the UK and USSR, Averell Harriman — has been reinstated by President Trump, after both Presidents Obama and Biden removed it. But a new iron curtain of censorship now encircles the UK and Europe, imposed upon discontented majorities by politicians purporting to defend democracy. I keep hearing from friends in the Administration, watching what’s happening on our side of the Atlantic, that “the motherland has fallen”. As a denizen of an increasingly dystopic Britain, I encourage the US to lift this digital Iron Curtain.

On the eve of his exile, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn identified “the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation” from tyranny as being “a personal nonparticipation in lies”. Totalitarianism is sustained by each person’s willingness to lie. The Party is victorious over Winston Smith, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, when it convinces him to affirm that 2+2=5, that he loves Big Brother, and to betray his lover, Julia, to spare himself torture. Solzhenitsyn observed this willingness to deceive oneself, on behalf of the state, among the inmates in the Gulag system. Nikolai Adamovich Vilenchik said, after his 17-year sentence, “We believed in the Party — and we were not mistaken!” Orthodox communists justified their own imprisonment under false charges in order to preserve their faith in Marxist ideology: “They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness—otherwise insanity was not far off.”

Others testified against their spouses — “anything to aid the Party!” Yelizaveta Tsvetkova could not bear the thought of her teenage daughter hating the Communist Party, and so made a false profession of guilt from within prison so that her daughter would stop writing to her and join the Komsomol (Young Communist League). Deceit, delusion, and the “renunciation of any personal development whatsoever”, Solzhenitsyn concluded, “is the price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.”

It should alarm our American friends, then, that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has lied to President Trump’s face on more than one occasion. When Vice President Vance mentioned “infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British … but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens” during their Oval Office meeting, Starmer said “We’ve had free speech for a very long time, and it will last a long time, and we are very proud of that.” He repeated this lie when President Trump visited Turnberry, Scotland last month, telling GB News’ Bev Turner, “We’re not censoring anyone.”

Starmer’s answer came days after implementing the Online Safety Act (2023), which he and his party voted for. The legislation censored footage of the ongoing protests outside hotels housing illegal immigrants, and a speech delivered by Katie Lam MP in the house of Commons, detailing the racist torture inflicted on English girls by Pakistani rape gangs. The Act created a new offense, under Section 179, of sending a message “to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience, [with] no reasonable excuse for sending the message”. Atop the existing Public Order Act (1986), Malicious Communications Act (1988), Communications Act (2003), and Public Order Act (2023), police have a plethora of statutes to cite when arresting people for “offensive” speech. 30 such arrests are made every day — over 12,000 a year (with eight of the 43 police forces in England & Wales refusing to publish arrest data).

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has also promised to increase the number of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) recorded against the public. NCHIs require no proof to be placed on the permanent record of the accused. A complainant is treated as a victim purely by reporting that they perceive a comment or social media post to be “motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice” toward a protected characteristic (race, sexuality, gender identity, religion, etc.). Police are discouraged from causing “secondary victimisation” by asking the complainant for evidence. Over 250,000 have been recorded against unknowing members of the public since they were introduced in 2014. When former police officer Harry Miller sued the College of Policing in 2019, after an officer told him “We need to check your thinking”, Justice Knowles said in his ruling, “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” It seems that is no longer the case.

In 2023, Starmer also promised to restore penalties for platforms hosting “legal but harmful” content, removed from the final version of the Act, if elected to government. This would have created pressure for American-based social-media companies to censor content ruled likely to cause “physical or psychological harm” by regulator Ofcom. This included the removal of “misinformation and disinformation”, including vindicated criticism of government policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. An unelected, ideologically captured quango could soon have jurisdiction over the terms of service on social media for both British and American users.

This will sound familiar to American readers. In 2022, the Intercept published an exposé on the Biden Administration’s plan for a “Disinformation Governance Board” within the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS had access to a portal where members of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” taskforce could request Twitter, Meta, and Microsoft employees remove specific posts from platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. The CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee included Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde.

Before the 2020 election, representatives from companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, and LinkedIn met regularly with CISA and FBI representatives. The “Twitter Files”, released after Elon Musk acquired the platform, revealed that the FBI and CIA had frequent input into Twitter’s content moderation policies. Other former CIA, FBI, NSC, and USAID employees were given executive positions at Twitter and Meta. This collusion between Big Tech, bureaucrats, and intelligence agencies caused information about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, or criminal activity by President Biden’s son Hunter, to be suppressed and dismissed as “misinformation and disinformation”.

Vice President JD Vance cautioned Europe’s leaders against using accusations of “misinformation” to silence speech, at February’s Munich Security Conference. While holidaying in the Cotswolds, the VP raised concerns about free speech “on this side of the Atlantic” with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, saying, “I think the entire collective West, the transatlantic relationship, our NATO allies, certainly the United States under the Biden administration, got a little too comfortable with censoring rather than engaging with a diverse array of opinions…. I just don’t want other countries to follow us down what I think was a very dark path”.

In summer 2024, the National Security and Online Information Team (the NSOIT, known as the “Counter Disinformation Unit” during the COVID pandemic) contacted TikTok to request the Trust and Safety team remove content referring to illegal migrants as “undocumented fighting-age males” (this term was cited as an example of “contemporary Far Right narratives” by former government Counter-Extremism Commissioner, Dame Sara Khan and state-funded communist group HOPE Not Hate in a report given to the government last December). The Team, based in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, also flagged videos about “a ‘two-tier’ system” for removal. NSOIT is now spending £2.3 million in taxpayer funds to create a “counter disinformation data platform”, using tools developed to identify ISIS fighters in recruitment videos, and monitor “concerning” narratives about immigration and two-tier policing online. The Home Office has also assigned a new policing unit to monitor “anti-migrant posts” on social media.

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan has issued a subpoena for TikTok to provide all messages pertaining to the company’s “compliance with foreign censorship laws”. Jordan travelled to London to meet with Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle and Nigel Farage, and EU officials in Brussels, in August. “The biggest takeaway from our week here in Europe”, Jordan told a press briefing, “is that nothing has really changed our concerns.”

Efforts to suppress discourse about two-tier policing appear to have backfired for two-tier Kier. During the Vice President’s visit, the State Department published a damning report, stating “The human rights situation worsened in the United Kingdom during the year [2024 – 2025].” It identified “credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression”, and found that:

“While many media observers deemed “two-tier” enforcement of these laws following the Southport attacks an especially grievous example of government censorship, censorship of ordinary Britons was increasingly routine, often targeted at political speech.”

Although the report states that British law “prohibited arbitrary arrest and detention”, and that the government “generally observed these requirements”, many involved in the protests and posting on social media following the Southport murders were treated unfairly by the justice system. Addressing the nation, Starmer called all those demonstrating after the massacre “far-right thugs” and promised that “Individuals will be held on remand, charges will follow, and convictions will follow.” Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson threatened to prosecute and extradite people who “repost, repeat, or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial/religious hatred”. The Crown Prosecution Service shared a video telling Brits to “Think before you post!” Lord Toby Young believes this messaging prejudiced the pleas of those charged with “incitement to racial hatred” offences: with many denied bail, and advised their sentence would be shorter than if they were held on remand awaiting trial.

One such case is Lucy Connolly, the wife of a conservative councillor, sentenced to 31 months in prison for a deleted tweet. Her mistreatment alarmed the White House, after it was amplified by commentator Charlie Kirk during his visit to Britain in June. Contrast her case with Labour councillor Ricky Jones, acquitted of all charges after calling counterprotestors “disgusting Nazi fascists”, and instructing a mob of his fellow socialists to “cut all their throats and get rid of them all”. Connolly was denied bail and encouraged to plead guilty: told by her barrister that she would be home with her husband and daughter by Christmas.

Justice Melbourne Inman opened his verdict by saying “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive.” The same judge gave Antonio Boparan only 18 months for dangerous driving, which caused the paralysis and early death of an 11-month-old girl. Boparan served only 9 months before gaining early release. Judge Inman sentenced Mohammed Abbkr to a hospital order, without any prison time, for attempted murder after he doused two men in petrol and tried to burn them alive. In August 2024, Habeeb Khan — who had 11 previous convictions for 15 offences, including racially aggravated public order offences — posted a video online posing with an AK-47, threatening to kill Tommy Robinson and members of the defunct English Defence League. Judge Inman sentenced him to 27 months in prison — four fewer than he gave to Lucy.

After Lucy’s conviction, Northamptonshire Police and the Crown Prosecution Service distorted quotes from her police interview, writing in a statement that Lucy “told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them”. During her appeal hearing, she was subjected to a struggle-session by Crown Prosecution Service barrister Naeem Valli. Her opposition to “unchecked” illegal immigrants was cited as proof of her “racist mindset”, and her appeal was denied. The presiding Judge, Lord Justice Hollroyd, reduced the sentence of Labour politician Lord Nazir Ahmed of Rotherham from five-and-a-half years to two-and-a-half years for three sex crimes, including sexual assault of a boy and attempted rape of a young girl, in 2023. Lucy was then denied release on temporary licence by the prison governor, as a punishment for speaking to sympathetic press.

Meanwhile, Jones pled not guilty, was given bail, and represented by Garden Court Chambers — the number one ranked barristers’ chambers in the country. Despite Jones meeting the Brandenburg standard of inciting imminent lawless action, and Lucy not, Jones walks free while Lucy remains in prison. The presiding judge in his case, Rosa Dean, sits on a voluntary Diversity and Community Relations Judges committee. At all stages, the justice system gave sympathy and lenience to Jones, while seeking to make an example out of Lucy. In Britain, punishments are meted out not on moral grounds, but along political lines. It makes a mockery of our tradition of Common Law and writ of Habeas Corpus, and is the essence of a two-tier system.

The report also mentions those prosecuted for silent prayer and conversations within “Safe Access Zones” around abortion clinics. During his Munich address, Vice President Vance mentioned ADF International client Adam Smith-Connor, who was fined £9,000 for praying silently within the vicinity of an abortion centre. The State Department posted on X in support of another ADF client, Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was convicted of a public order offence for holding a sign saying “Here to talk, if you want” inside an abortion buffer-zone. In March, diplomats from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour met with Christians persecuted for preaching and silent prayer. Believers within the Trump Administration are appalled by the Pitești-esque persecution of Christians in Britain, and will not drop the issue until the laws are repealed.

But, fear not: responding to the State Department report, a UK government spokesperson assures us that “Free speech is vital for democracy around the world including here in the UK, and we are proud to uphold freedoms whilst keeping our citizens safe.” Quite the exercise in Double-Speak.

It is encouraging to know that our Potemkin Prime Minister isn’t fooling anyone. The Administration recognises the connective tissue between censorship and unwanted policies like mass immigration being imposed upon the public. Speaking to Breitbart in August, a State Department official said:

“One of the reasons free-speech is so important is that it enables citizens to have accurate information and honest conversations about policy failures of the ruling class – immigration is a prime example of this. We are monitoring free-speech developments in the UK closely and with great concern.”

Responding to my reporting that counter-extremism strategy Prevent classified “Cultural nationalism” — the belief that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” — as an “extreme right-wing terrorism” ideology, the State Department condemned the civil service’s “efforts to censor, marginalize, or stigmatize individuals for their beliefs”. Censorship and immigration have a symbiotic relationship: with concerns about immigration suppressed before and while it happens, and criticisms of multiculturalism and crimes committed by immigrants criminalised as “incitement to racial hatred” after the fact. Britain will not solve its immigration crisis without the ability to speak about it; and it will not have the freedom to do so unless the yoke of censorship is lifted with assistance from our American allies.

Fortunately, America has no qualms about intervening on behalf of the beleaguered British public. Secretary Rubio has promised visa sanctions will be levied against “Foreign officials have taken flagrant censorship actions against US tech companies and US citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so.” There is no shortage of candidates among Starmer’s cabinet or the civil service. Vance played kingmaker on the right during his recent visit: convening a roundtable of Conservative rising stars, and barbecuing with James Orr and Thomas Skinner. The heir-apparent is hoping to make Trumpism contagious across the West.

America spent four decades embroiled in failed foreign policy ventures, fighting regime-change wars in nations that hate them. I recommend they park their figurative tanks on Parliament Green instead. Britain will welcome them as liberators.