De Tocqueville thought that there was no real risk of presidential despotism. This was because the federal government was obliged to share power with the component states of the Union; and because even at the federal level the president had to share power with a representative Congress. There was, however, an important reservation. The checks and balances of the Constitution only worked because the federal executive had very few domestic functions. The president’s role was limited to the conduct of foreign affairs and commanding the armed forces. His office therefore provided little scope for would-be despots. In 1832, the writer pointed out, the federal payroll comprised just 12,000 civilian officials, as opposed to 138,000 in France at the same date. In any democracy, De Tocqueville argued, the risk of despotism is directly proportionate to the degree of control exercised by the executive over its internal affairs.

Since De Tocqueville wrote, events have combined to falsify his grounds for optimism. The federal government, and therefore the president who directs it, now has functions encompassing most aspects of public welfare. Its 12,000 civilian employees of 1832 have grown to two million in 2025, in addition to another million employees of the individual states, many of whom are employed in federal programs. In the same period, federal government expenditure has increased from an estimated 0.02% of GDP to 23%, dwarfing the expenditure of the individual states. This is a pattern common to all modern democracies. At the time of the census of 1851, the United Kingdom employed just 1,628 civil servants, as against 560,000 now. At the end of the 19th century, government expenditure in European countries stood at about a tenth of GDP on average, as opposed to just under half today. Even these figures do not capture the whole picture. Until relatively recently, the main limitation on the power of governments was their ignorance. The German sociologist Max Weber defined bureaucracy as “domination through knowledge”. That domination has been greatly increased by modern techniques of information gathering, storage and retrieval.

Suggested Reading

The totalitarianism of the open society

By Matthew Crawford

Article II of the US Constitution concentrates all executive power in the president’s hands. He has an electoral mandate independent of Congress. He hires and fires all federal agents and employees. All of them are answerable to him. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. He nominates all federal judges, subject to Senate confirmation. He is not answerable to Congress for the way that he uses these powers, except by way of impeachment, and only then for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Since a decision by the Supreme Court in 2024, the president has also been constitutionally immune from criminal liability for acts done in his public capacity.

These awesome powers are characteristic of presidential systems, and the only other region where presidential democracies have been the norm is Latin America. Every Latin American country has adopted the US constitutional model, with greater or lesser variants. And every one of them has at some points in its history experienced the subversion of its democracy by its president or the usurpation of presidential powers by a military dictator. The only significant European country to have a presidential system comparable to the US is France. The constitution of the Fifth French Republic was created for a relatively benign strongman, General de Gaulle, but the French presidency may well in 2027 fall into the hands of a markedly less benign strongman of the extreme Left or Right.

The great German-American constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein observed that the success of the American presidential model was due to factors unique to the United States: its historical prosperity, its relative freedom from external threats, its political culture. These things had, as he put it, “converted an intrinsically absurd constitutional mechanism into a cherished national myth”. When transplanted to a less privileged environment, Loewentein pointed out that the American model has almost always failed. His emphasis on the moral and physical environment of democracies was an important insight. After all, the moral and physical environment may change. All democratic constitutions, whether formal and legal like that of the USA, or informal and political like Britain’s, are vulnerable to the collapse of the basic cultural norms on which democracies depend. When this happens, the formal institutional framework usually survives. There are elections, legislatures, courts and so on in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the rule of law and substance of democratic accountability have gone, replaced by a brutal autocratic reality.

Hence the historic significance of Donald Trump. There is a tendency to suggest that Trump is a by-product of American democratic politics, difficult, perhaps, to accommodate within traditional political categories, but nothing like the totalitarian tyrants of the 20th century. This view is fundamentally mistaken. Trump exhibits the three classic symptoms of the totalitarian mind: a personal cult around a charismatic leader; the total identification of the state with himself; and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of any opposition or dissent. He has dismantled the checks and balances of the world’s oldest and most formal constitution in an astonishingly short time. By now, the examples are all too familiar: the bogus claims to emergency powers, part of the classic toolkit of despots the world over; the deployment of ICE’s paramilitaries on the streets of American cities; the attempt to impose taxes (in the shape of tariffs) by executive order; the brazen corruption. He has also conformed to the pattern observable throughout history — that sooner or later the authoritarian rulers of powerful states become international predators.

The core principle of the rule of law is that the state has no power to coerce anyone other than in accordance with public and settled rules of law applicable generally, and not just at the discretion of the ruler. That principle has been directly violated by presidential directions not to enforce mandatory legislation of which the president disapproves, such as the laws against international bribery, or mandatory congressional appropriation of funds to things like education or foreign aid. Trump’s identification of the state with himself and his war on dissent have led him to vindictive attacks on any prominent voice which opposes him, attacks which directly violate the basic principles of the rule of law. We have seen the use of public authority to pursue private vendettas against those have crossed him, including two Democrat governors, a mayor of Chicago, various retired generals, a former director of the FBI, a former director of the CIA, law firms who acted for his enemies, various universities whose teaching staff do not see the world as he does, and just about anyone who worked on Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election or Jack Smith’s investigation of the Capitol riots of 6 January, 2021. Some of these acts have been stopped by the courts, provoking from the President a stream of vulgar abuse against the judges responsible. These things follow a pattern that exposes Donald Trump’s systematic unwillingness to be constrained by the rules that mark the difference between a democratic chief executive and a tyrant.

It is easy to say, as we observe these things, that the current constitutional problems of the United States are all down to the megalomania of one individual. But that is to underestimate the gravity of the situation. The real problem is that this unlikely figure represents something very attractive for many Americans. They were not deceived when they elected him in 2016, let alone 2024. Trump made no secret of his plans and his impatience with democratic constraints during the campaign. Yet half of American voters voted for him. On current polling, at least a third of the electorate would vote for him again if it was not for the two-term limit. There is, however, no two-term limit for voters. The people who want to confer supreme executive power on someone like Trump will still be around in future presidential elections. The critical question, therefore, is not why Trump behaves as he does, but why so many Americans applaud him.

All mature societies are divided by differences of interest and opinion, some of which are fundamental. A liberal democracy can only survive if these differences are transcended by our common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process, even when we disagree with the outcome. This calls for cultural values which do not come naturally to human beings. You have to care more about ensuring that the decision-making process works, than about “winning” on any particular issue. It requires a large measure of political sensitivity, tolerance and cooperative empathy among both politicians and citizens. It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow-citizens with whom they disagree, and not as enemies to be trashed or prosecuted. In the United States, the polarization of opinion has meant that people have lost their common respect for the decision-making process if it yields results that they do not like, as it inevitably will from time to time. Without that, people who are disappointed with democratic governments spontaneously turn to more authoritarian regimes.

The origin of the current polarization of opinion in the United States lies not with the Right but with the Left. The liberal consensus of the Sixties and Seventies approached the political process with a high degree of entitlement, and achieved a considerable measure of control over the courts, executive agencies, universities and other cultural institutions. Liberals used this cultural control to move into intolerant identity politics and critical theory, and to promote social and cultural policies for which there was no consensus in the population at large. They treated alternative opinions as lacking legitimacy and therefore unworthy of notice. The word “deplorables”, which may have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, sums up this attitude perfectly.

The Right-wing backlash, however, has been a great deal worse than the liberal arrogance which provoked it. Today it is the Republican Party which has an invincible sense of entitlement. Hence its irrational rage against Presidents Clinton and Obama, its persistent constitutional obstructiveness under both of them, and its ruthless use of voter suppression and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats. Hence also the refusal to accept adverse election results on the basis of invented allegations of fraud. These things have happened because the MAGA movement, which today dominates the Republican Party, is not prepared to accept the legitimacy of any political views but its own. The result has been to junk the political culture that made the Constitution workable.

We can see this process unfolding in Congress’s abandonment of its traditional role as a bipartisan guardian of the Constitution. A good example is the willingness of the relevant Senate committees to confirm the parade of stooges and crackpots that Trump nominated to major federal offices in his second term, people who would swiftly have been shown the door in an earlier era. Perhaps the low point of Congressional partisanship came with the refusal of the Republican majority on the Judiciary Committee to schedule confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s last Supreme Court nomination until his term ended so that his Republican successor could fill the vacancy instead. The same people then accelerated the hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, the last appointment of Trump’s first term, so as to get it confirmed before he left office. There was nothing unlawful about any of this, but it illustrates the ease with which even the most carefully designed democracy can be subverted once the underlying spirit has gone. The result has been the most partisan Supreme Court since the Thirties, and arguably since the 1850s.

The delegitimization of political opponents can be seen at its crudest in the current issues about redistricting and voter suppression. Redistricting, otherwise known as gerrymandering, is a device used to dilute the votes of one’s political opponents. It has been described as a way of enabling incumbent lawmakers to pick their electors instead of the other way round. In Rucho v Common Cause (2019), the Republican-appointed majority the Supreme Court held that there was nothing unlawful about overtly partisan redistricting. I believe that the only other country in the world which expressly allows the practice is the Pacific republic of Micronesia (population: 100,000). In June 2025, Trump persuaded the Republican majority in the Texas state legislature to redraw their congressional districts so as to artificially eliminate five serving Democrat representatives and replace them with Republicans. Other States with incumbent Democrat majorities responded by redistricting to create extra Democrat seats at the expense of Republicans. In some states, such as California and Virginia, these changes were approved in state-wide referenda. Recently, Republican lawmakers in Indiana, who had resisted the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, were deselected in the Republican primaries in favor of Trump-backed candidates committed to allowing the gerrymandering to go ahead.

What are the lessons of all this for the United Kingdom? There are important institutional differences between the United States and Britain. Britain, like most European democracies, has a parliamentary system, and parliamentary systems are better at dispersing power than presidential systems. The British prime minister and his government are daily answerable to the House of Commons for everything that they do. Their hold on power lasts only as long as they retain the confidence of the House. A would-be despot in our system would have to carry many more people with him to succeed. Boris Johnson was the leader of a party with a large overall majority in the House of Commons, but was nevertheless unable to find enough supporters among them to remain in power. In Britain, judges are appointed by a non-political Judicial Appointment Commission. The executive therefore cannot stuff the judiciary with its ideological supporters. In Britain, meanwhile, the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies are fixed at prescribed intervals by a non-political Boundary Commission. Election expenses are limited by law. The courts are vigilant in challenging ministers who exceed their legal powers or use them for illegitimate purposes, and they act a great deal faster than the federal courts in the US. Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament and escape parliamentary scrutiny of his negotiations with the European Union was quashed in judicial proceedings which lasted less than two months from their commencement to the Supreme Court’s judgment.

All of this means that, under the current law, our institutions are better equipped to resist the despotic tendencies of democratic politics than those of the United States. Even so, Britain’s institutional defenses against despotism have some serious weaknesses. The first is that under our constitutional settlement it is impossible to entrench any of the legal protections against the establishment of a British despotism. The statutory provisions about electoral boundaries, electoral expenses or judicial appointment could be swept away by legislation by a majority of one in each house of Parliament, or after a year in the House of Commons alone. There are substantial advantages in our unwritten political constitution, which has enabled us to adapt to radical social and political changes in our society that would have broken most written constitutions. But we have to recognize that a greater exposure to the threat of totalitarian takeover is the price for these advantages.

The second institutional weakness is that like the American Congress the House of Commons is elected from single-member constituencies on the first-past-the-post system. No political party has achieved a majority of the national vote in the UK since 1935. The effect of FPTP is artificially to increase the impact of electoral swings. This will normally give the largest party an overall majority in the Commons, even if it lacks one in the electorate at large. In a two-party system such as we had until recently, it has been a valuable source of stability. In a multiparty system, as ours is now becoming, the effect is intensely destabilizing. The largest of seven parties may have a quite small proportion of the popular vote. The present government has one of the largest overall parliamentary majorities since the war, with only a third of the popular vote. No government has ever before enjoyed an absolute majority in Parliament on such a small proportion of the national vote. In local authority elections, insurgent parties have sometimes achieved large majorities of council seats on small proportions of the vote. Such parties can capture the House of Commons, too, without the need to negotiate coalitions that might restrain their exercise of power. It is worth remembering that, albeit under a very different political system, Hitler became Chancellor of a minority government on just 37% of the popular vote in the general election of 1932, the last free election to be held in Germany before the war. In Britain, less than that percentage can capture not just the highest office in government but an overall majority in the House of Commons.

Thirdly, the leaders of the three traditional UK-wide parties are no longer chosen by their MPs: unless someone can contrive to be the only candidate. Normally, they are chosen by their grassroots members. This has been a very significant change. MPs are there to represent the public interest. It is in their personal interest to appeal to a much broader spectrum of opinion than just their own base, if they want to be re-elected anyway. Most grassroots members look at the world differently. Their parties are no longer the mass movements they once were. Their membership rolls are small, and consist mainly of enthusiasts who congregate at the outer edges of the political spectrum. They are interested in no one’s opinion but their own. The result is that party leaders — and therefore potential prime ministers — are chosen by very small groups of activists who are unrepresentative of those who vote for their party, let alone the electorate at large. Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss were the natural products of that process. In a system where the endorsement of a political party is a precondition for election, this is a promising scenario for a would-be despot.

Again, the United States is a warning. Candidates for the presidency and Congress are selected in primaries, which are usually closed: in other words. limited to a party’s registered supporters. And like their British equivalents, these people are generally activists at the outer edge of the political spectrum. This has enabled Donald Trump to arrange the deselection of sitting Republican Congressmen who cross him or who show any tendency to independent judgment, replacing them with candidates endorsed by himself. This has happened recently in Texas, Kentucky and Louisiana, and the effect has been to reduce the Congressional majority to a servile loyalty to one man, at a time when he is becoming unpopular in the nation at large. This not only could happen here but it does. In November 2019, Boris Johnson personally purged 21 members of his own party who did not share his vision of Britain’s relations with the European Union, refusing to allow them to stand as Conservatives at the general election and thus ensuring that they lost their seats.

It is, however, a mistake to concentrate exclusively on institutional barriers to despotic government. The United States has succumbed to despotic politics in spite of having a carefully written constitution expressed to be “the supreme law of the land”, and despite boasting a strong tradition of judicial and legislative independence. The recent history not just of the United States but of other democracies, such as Poland and Hungary, shows that even with a written constitution institutional barriers to despotism are permeable. The executive branch of the state is so powerful in the modern world that it can swamp any system of checks and balances if its directors are prepared to be sufficiently ruthless. Ultimately no democracy, however robust its institutional framework, can resist the collapse of the cultural values on which democracy depends.

The main problem faced by modern democracies is common to the United States and Britain and indeed to most of Europe. Public expectations of the state are so high that no state can possibly satisfy them. Either the state is incapable of satisfying them full stop  — or else it can satisfy them only at the expense of other equally important expectations. No policy area arouses higher expectations than the economy. People expect their lot to improve, generation by generation. We have got used to the idea of ever-increasing prosperity, because that has been our experience since the Second World War. But historically there have been very few societies and very few periods of history in which economic growth has been sustained for more than a short period, say two or three generations. Governments can create the conditions for economic expansion. They can refrain from wealth-destroying policies. But they cannot actually generate prosperity. Yet people’s voting choices tend to be based on the assumption that they can, and that economic misfortune is necessarily the responsibility of government.

This matters because, historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic good fortune. Western democracy was born in the 19th century, in an age of creative optimism, economic expansion and Western domination of the world. This is particularly relevant to the current state of the US. The country has enjoyed a great deal of economic good fortune. The indications are that this may be coming to an end. Looking at the US economy as a whole, it is in good shape by international standards. Its growth rate is impressive too. The problem is that most earners have not experienced the benefits. Middle class and blue-collar incomes were traditionally based on extraction, agriculture and manufacturing. These sectors were labor-intensive activities calling for many different skill levels, and were therefore relatively efficient distributors of the benefits of American prosperity. But they have experienced little real growth since the Eighties. Technological innovation is essential to growth, but it is disruptive, altering the distribution of wealth in favor of the innovators. American productivity has for some decades been generated mainly by a few dynamic sectors of the economy, such as the tech industries and financial services, which employ relatively small numbers of intellectually gifted people. The benefits are increasingly concentrated in the hands of these elites. This is reflected in high levels of graduate unemployment among young people who have tried to make their careers in other fields. Older skills have become redundant or displaced by competition from low-wage economies. In the longer term, then, the outlook is bleak, as the American technological lead over countries like China and India shortens and in some areas disappears altogether. We are already seeing this in areas like AI and electric vehicles.

I illustrate these points by reference to the United States, which is probably the extreme example. But this is not just an American issue. In Britain, the most dynamic sectors of the economy are financial services, which account for about a tenth of GDP; digital services including AI which account for another 7%; and the technically advanced areas of manufacturing. These are also sectors whose prosperity disproportionately benefits an educational and technocratic elite.

Economic frustration has a lot to do with declining belief in democracy and rising support for authoritarian alternatives. The Pew Research Institute has been tracking confidence in democracy internationally for some 30 years. Its surveys suggest that in most Western countries, a majority of people are dissatisfied with democracy. The figure is 62% in the United States. In France, Italy, Spain and Greece, the proportion is significantly higher. In Britain, it is 51%. The same surveys establish an exact relationship between dissatisfaction with democracy and economic pessimism.

One of the more striking electoral trends in Western democracies has been the high levels of support for authoritarian parties among the young, who for obvious reasons are those mainly affected by the closing out of economic opportunities. Studies of the US presidential election of 2024 suggest that 56% of American men under 30, and 40% of American women in the same age group, voted for Trump. This was a substantial increase on the 2016 election, even though Trump’s autocratic tendencies had become more obvious in the meantime. In Britain, surveys of opinion, such as those published in 2020 by the Bennett Institute in Cambridge, or in 2023 by the Open Society Foundation, all suggest that disillusionment with democracy is strongest among younger citizens. They are much more dissatisfied than their elders were at the same stage in life, and the situation is getting worse. Nor again, are Britain and the United States alone. In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is the most popular party among voters under the age of 35.

In the life of any political community, the shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterized by a resort to autocracy across much of the continent. Britain, the United States and France escaped that fate, but in all three countries, there were powerful authoritarian movements of Left and Right that drew their strength mainly from economic misfortune. When people are disappointed, they blame “the system”, the “deep state” or the whole class of democratic politicians. They lash out, spontaneously turning to strongmen, and kidding themselves that strongmen get things done. All this is consistent with the historically high levels of electoral support for authoritarian figures such as Marine Le Pen, the leading lights of Alternativ für Deutschland, and (until recently) Viktor Orban, all of them, incidentally, politicians for whom Trump has expressed admiration.

Political polarization, which has done so much to undermine constitutional values in the United States, has not gone as far in Britain. But it is a phenomenon of growing importance. In recent years the issue which has done most to undermine constitutional values in Britain in recent years is Brexit. The referendum created a sense of entitlement in the majority which inhibited compromise and invited absolute outcomes. This was the mentality summed up in the oft-repeated statement that “the British people” had voted to leave the EU. In fact, just over half of the British people voted to leave the EU. The statement implied what many people said out loud, that the 48% who voted to stay were not for this purpose to be regarded as part of the British people and did not count. The effect was to delegitimize the views of nearly half the population who had voted to remain and wanted to retain a closer relationship with the EU even while leaving its institutions. There are obvious parallels with the attempt of the MAGA movement in the United States to delegitimize the views about immigration, tariffs or foreign relations of the 49% of the electorate who voted Democrat in the 2024 election. In Britain, this attitude reached the outer limits of hyperbole in September 2019 when the Attorney General (of all people) told the House of Commons that having voted to frustrate the government’s plans for the hardest possible form of Brexit, the Commons had “no moral right to sit”. This approach encouraged a more authoritarian style of government, characterized by the Conservative purges of November 2019; the manipulation of the procedures of the House of Commons to silence opposition; and ultimately the attempt to prorogue Parliament at a critical point in negotiations with the European Union.

I have dwelt a little on Brexit not to rake over the embers of old quarrels, but because it is the extreme example of polarization in modern British politics, and the most significant single cause of the decline of a shared political culture. It fragmented our political world, cutting across party lines, sundering the four nations of the United Kingdom and dividing us by class, by region, by economic status and by generation. It split families and alienated friends, something reflected at a trivial level in polls which suggest that a surprisingly large proportion of the population would object if their children dated someone on the other side of the political divide. This has had a continuing impact on our politics, because Brexit was not just a policy. It was the badge of a certain outlook on the political world, reflected in many other areas of political controversy, not least immigration and climate change. In the recent local elections, we witnessed the steep decline of the center as voters migrated to the outer edge of the political spectrum. Like American voters, they lashed out at the inability of governments to deliver a better life.

Many of them are protesting, like the MAGA faithful, against the whole political process and the whole class of politicians. Donald Trump essentially stands for a rejection of deliberative politics because it gets in the way of the kind of decisive outcomes that he and his supporters favor. Those who think like this rarely reflect on how dangerous it is. Politics is the essential mechanism of the democratic state. You cannot have democracy without politics, or politics without politicians. Those who reject politics are really rejecting democracy itself. Their position almost inevitably involves a resort to authoritarian forms of government.

Unfortunately, those who lash out against the political process are not entirely mistaken. There are major issues in our world that democracy has historically proved unable to address: because the electoral cost is too high. Climate change is probably the most obvious example. Across the world, democratic electors reject measures designed to deal with climate change because they almost always involve reducing consumption or raising its cost. The effect is to pass on the problem in aggravated form to the next generation. There are other examples. We cannot resolve the high cost of housing in Britain without loosening planning and environmental controls to which existing home-owners are understandably attached. Almost any attempt to reform the funding of old-age pensions and care at a time of increasing longevity risks an electoral backlash from the beneficiaries of the current system, who are numerous and who vote more diligently than any other group. It is no coincidence that many of these dilemmas of the democratic state involve conflicts between the interests of different generations. It is the young who will suffer most if we fail to deal with climate change. It is the young who cannot get onto the housing ladder until they are middle-aged and often not even then. It is the young whose taxes support the cost of old-age provision. It is the young who are unable to find jobs in a stagnant economy. It should be no surprise that it is the young who are most disenchanted with democracy.

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How Britain lost control

By Jonathan Sumption

Democracy has a natural tendency to create interest groups for whom the preservation of their current advantages — or the acquisition of new ones — are the dominant factors in their political choices. Political philosophers from Aristotle to Montesquieu have observed that a harmonious society requires what they have called “virtue”. What they meant by virtue was an ability to put common interests above personal ones. In a democracy, though, this kind of virtue is almost impossible to achieve. It is asking a lot to expect people to look beyond their own interest at the broader interests of society, and to future problems that may not materialize until after their deaths. Historically, it has never happened. But the political cost of voting exclusively according to our current material interests has never been as high as it is now. The inability of democracies to adopt unwelcome measures in response to critical issues is likely, in the long run, to lead to a much more autocratic model of government.

Democracy is fragile. Its history in the West has been relatively brief — barely a century and a half. The default condition of mankind has always been some form of autocracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which has published a “Democracy Index” since 2006, reckons that only 25 of the 167 countries covered, encompassing 6.6% of the world’s population, ranked as full democracies. Even before Trump’s second term, the United States was not one of them. It ranked only as a “flawed democracy”, thus putting it in the same category as fragmented countries like South Africa and unstable ones like most of South America. Today, most of the world’s population lives under authoritarian regimes of one kind or another. Britain and the countries of Western Europe still rank as full democracies. Unfortunately, though, we cannot take it for granted that they still will be there in the next generation.

This essay was adapted from the St George’s House Annual Lecture, delivered at St George’s Chapel Windsor on Tuesday 14 July 2026.

Brexit was an act of gross economic vandalism. Many Leavers understood that at the time. Most were indifferent. When push came to shove, an economic hit seemed, to those who thought about it at all, to be a price worth paying for autonomy. “Take Back Control” proved to be a winning formula. Ten years on, we are in a better position to decide how much control we have really gained, and how much it has been worth to us. Control and autonomy are legal and constitutional concepts, but their value depends on political realities. In a world of huge nations like the United States and China, it is in the interest of smaller nations to join together in powerful multinational blocs like the European Union (EU). Its members have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own ability to exercise “control” over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the EU.

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The arguments about Britain’s relationship with Europe need to be considered in the light of our long-standing international priorities and current geopolitical position. These show a remarkable consistency. Britain is a European country, sharing the political, economic and intellectual culture of Europe in spite of important institutional differences. Engagement with Europe has been a strategic necessity for Britain for centuries. Ever since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it has been a consistent theme of British foreign policy to maintain a balance of power on the European continent and to resist the domination of the continent by any single power. This has been driven by a desire to influence the political priorities of European nations and to shape their policies in Britain’s own interest, something that is difficult to do if the continent is dominated by a single hegemonic power. 

Britain’s single-minded pursuit of this objective has involved the patient cultivation of European allies. Queen Elizabeth I landed armies in France and the Netherlands to contain the hegemony of Spain. In the 18th century, when France was the great European hegemon, British governments intervened to resist it with the support of powerful European allies. Britain was the only European power to challenge revolutionary and Napoleonic France throughout the period from 1794 to 1815, at a time when France occupied much of Europe. Britain’s long stand-off with 19th-century Russia, at a time when Russia occupied Poland and had ambitions in the Balkans, European Turkey and Central Asia, was guided by the same instincts.

The rapid expansion of a newly united Germany in the final decades of the 19th century presented Britain with a new challenge. In a famous memorandum of 1907, the Foreign Office mandarin Sir Eyre Crowe described Britain’s pursuit of a balance of power in Europe as “almost a law of nature”. His point was that now that the dominant European power was Germany, Britain must follow its traditional policy and contain it. In two world wars, Britain intervened to fight the Kaiser’s Germany and then Hitler’s.

For centuries, the bulwark of Britain was not the Channel, but the Rhine or the Oder. The concern was always that, faced with a dominant European power across the Channel, Britain would lose control over its own destiny. The policy was not simply strategic, but also cultural and economic. It was cultural because the long conflicts with, successively, Napoleonic France, Tsarist Russia and Imperial and Nazi Germany were seen as ways of confronting powerful despotisms and preventing the extinction of a liberal world order. It was economic because a Europe dominated by a single power would be in a position to disrupt British trade and finance as Napoleon’s continental system had sought to do. Historically, these instincts have served Britain well.

There has always been a contrary strand of British strategic thinking which rejected this approach. It can loosely be called Atlanticism, although the expression is geographically inaccurate, for it was based on a far wider view of Britain’s world than just the Atlantic. It stood for a policy of disengagement from the problems of the European continent and concentration on the wide oceans. It presented empire and the Navy as alternatives to Europe and the army. It has generally been associated with prominent figures in the Tory party. In his influential tract The Patriot King (1738), the Tory philosopher Henry Bolingbroke, who had been Queen Anne’s chief minister, articulated this view. He urged Britain to avoid getting involved in continental affairs. “The water is more properly our element,” he wrote, “and in it we find our greatest security.” William Pitt the Elder, although not a Tory, had once taken the same view. The Tory romantic Benjamin Disraeli said something very similar in 1866, and Churchill, a liberal at the time but a romantic Tory at heart, said it again in 1901. It was an unwise policy even then, and all three statesmen discarded it when they achieved power. 

Britain has rarely adopted a policy of “splendid isolation”, and when it has done, for example in the 1770s and 1780s or at the end of the 19th century, it has paid a high diplomatic and military price and has soon reversed course. European crises invariably become English ones. Reality dawns on statesmen when they find themselves having to grapple with the problems of international relations. Political disengagement from Europe has often been a slogan, but rarely a viable policy.

Atlanticism received a boost from the experience of the two world wars of the 20th century, which still have a dominant place in Britain’s conception of itself. Even before the United States joined the First World War, it contributed substantially to the funding of the British war effort and was a major supplier of munitions. Its contribution to Britain’s survival and eventual victory in the Second World War was decisive. The British Empire, and especially India and the old dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, made a critical contribution in both wars. The world wars boosted a certain idea of British exceptionalism. Winston Churchill, who believed in the political unification of Europe but without Britain, encapsulated the idea in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in four volumes between 1956 and 1958. This strongly romanticized account presented Britain’s relations with the “old” empire and the United States as a natural brotherhood distinct from its relations with continental Europe. It stood for the notion, common across the political spectrum in the Fifties, that Britain might act as the godfather of European union, but its own destinies were separate, maritime and global. 

Yet, if Atlanticism were ever a serious policy option, it was only so at a time when Britain could deal with the United States, if not as an equal, then at least as a comparable power. That depended on Britain’s status as a world power, the ruler of a global empire and a dominant economic force on the trade routes of the world. In the Fifties, when the European Economic Community was born, these conditions were ceasing to apply.

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The creation of the European Economic Community and its subsequent transformation into the EU revived all the old geopolitical dilemmas of Britain, but presented them in a new light. British policy after the Second World War was dominated by an obsessive but ambivalent attitude to Germany. At the Anglo-American conference in Quebec in September 1944, the two countries agreed upon a policy of deindustrializing Germany so as to convert it into an economy that would be “principally agricultural and pastoral”. The allied occupation authorities drastically limited Germany’s mining and steelmaking capacity, dismantled its industrial plant, suppressed its industrial patents and destroyed the financial relationships between German banks which had been a major factor in Germany’s industrial strength. Britain encouraged the post-war reconstruction of France so as to serve as its bulwark against a reborn Germany. 

This policy of industrial containment was progressively abandoned from 1947, as the USSR, which was in the process of converting the states of Eastern and Central Europe into satellites, emerged as the principal threat to European peace. In the Fifties, however, the old fear of Germany returned as a result of the spectacular speed of German economic reconstruction. In the course of the decade, West German industrial production increased by a factor of two and a half. Measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per head, West Germany overtook Britain.

The European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951. The Messina Conference of 1955 decided in principle to create a Common Market of the six states of the West European continent. The Treaty of Rome gave effect to that decision in 1957. Britain and France both feared a revival of German power, but took precisely opposed views about the implications of these decisions. France regarded European integration as a means of binding an economically powerful Germany into a European bloc which they were confident that they could dominate. France also believed that only an integrated European bloc would be able to stand up to the United States. Britain, on the other hand, accepted the dominant role of the United States in the post-war world order, but believed that the objectives of the six founding members of the Common Market necessarily implied an eventual move to a European federal state dominated by Germany. The prospect rang all the alarm bells that had terrified British statesmen for 500 years. In a memorandum of February 1956, Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared that the Messina proposals “will mean Western Europe dominated in fact by Germany and used as an instrument for the revival of power through economic means. It is really giving them on a plate what we fought two wars to prevent.”

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By Jonathan Sumption

Although the prospect of a dominant Germany was a particularly sensitive point, the problem would have been the same whether Germany dominated the new group or not. A supranational state comprising the whole of Western Europe would inevitably marginalize Britain. The only solution would be to join it, a possibility which was rejected out of hand. It was rejected partly because Britain was unwilling to subsume its own sovereignty in a new proto-state and partly because of its preferential trading arrangements with the Commonwealth and the British Empire. Instead, the government tried to persuade Germany and France to abandon their plans and urged the United States to withdraw its support for them. It failed in all three cases. In 1956, Harold Macmillan regarded European integration as a recipe for the division of the world into three spheres of influence, American, Soviet and European. This was a profoundly unwelcome development for Britain, because British attachment to sovereignty would inevitably result in Britain’s exclusion, with dire results for its international influence. Two years later Macmillan, now Prime Minister, told de Gaulle that he was convinced that the Common Market would turn into the modern equivalent of Napoleon’s continental system, an economic and political weapon targeted against Britain.

***

These debates foreshadowed British arguments for and against Europe for the next 60 years. When Britain eventually did join the Common Market at the third attempt in 1973, there was none of the idealism which had motivated the continental founders of the European Economic Community (EEC). It was seen by the politicians as damage limitation and by the public as a mere trading arrangement. There were many factors involved in the decision to join, including the lackluster performance of the British economy in the Fifties and the growing dynamism of the European market. But the main geopolitical factor, especially in the eyes of Macmillan, was the desire to influence the development of Europe in Britain’s interest and to maintain Britain’s historic role in European affairs. As a result, fears about the loss of sovereignty on the one hand and exclusion from a dominant European bloc on the other continued to guide British policy under both Conservative and Labour governments.

For a time the dilemma was evaded. In the referendum on EU membership held in 1975, the case made for membership was entirely about trade, and not about political integration. The political leaders who made the case for EU membership fell into two groups. There were those who believed that the European aspiration to ever closer union was just rhetoric, and that it would never happen. This group has proved to be mistaken. And there were those like Edward Heath, the Prime Minister who negotiated British entry, who understood the direction in which the EU was bound to move, but believed that it would happen gradually, and that over the years a new European identity would be created which the British would accept. This group has proved to be over-optimistic.

In the late Eighties, all the old ghosts came back to haunt the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. There was, first of all, the advent of Jacques Delors as president of the European Commission. Delors was a French socialist who presided over a rapid expansion of the competences of the EU. Under his influence, it moved into areas of social policy in ways which were extremely unwelcome to the Conservative governments of these years. Then came German reunification, which revived the old fears of German domination of Europe. France and Britain divided along the same lines as they had done at the foundation of the EEC. Thatcher was intensely suspicious and publicly fearful. President François Mitterand of France, after some initial hesitation, stuck to the traditional French policy of trying to neuter Germany by binding it into European political structures traditionally dominated by France. Finally, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 provided for a single European currency. Monetary union was in effect a German concession to France’s integrationist agenda in return for French support for German unification. In Britain, the old geopolitical dilemmas now had to be confronted.

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The Labour government which took office in 1997 set out to mend fences with Europe after the years of abrasive relations under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, articulated the classic doctrine of British foreign policy. Citing four centuries of history, he declared that Britain’s destiny had always been to “help shape Europe”. “The fact is,” he said, “that Europe is today the only route through which Britain can exercise power and influence.” Enlargement of the EU was the one way in which Britain’s age-old pursuit of a balance of power could be continued. The Labour government continued the policy of its Conservative predecessors of supporting the expansion of the EU to the east, in the hope that this would create informal alliances with aspirant countries in Central and Eastern Europe and dilute French and German influence. The policy of enlargement was successful in one sense. The EU grew to 28 members by 2007, bringing the whole of the west and center of the European continent into its orbit with the exception of Switzerland and Norway (which accepted EU laws by treaty but declined full membership), and the Balkan states (all of which have current applications to join and are adopting policies converging with those of the EU). Yet, in another sense, the policy of expansion failed. The new members turned out not to have the diluting effect that Britain had anticipated. They quickly signed up to the integrationist agenda of the European Commission, except in the case of Hungary and, briefly, Poland. The solidarity of the enlarged community was spectacularly demonstrated by Britain’s inability to fragment the bloc when it came to negotiating the terms of its exit after 2016.

Britain’s dilemmas were encapsulated in the argument within the Labour government about the euro. John Major’s government had negotiated an opt-out from the single currency, but that resolved only part of the problem. The Eurozone would inevitably become a center of European economic decision-making in which Britain, as a non-euro country, would have little influence. Tony Blair wanted to join the euro for political rather than economic reasons. He believed that it would increase British influence in Europe and that it would help to create a European identity in Britain. As a political judgment, that was plainly right. It also reflected the long-standing traditions of British foreign policy. Economically, however, monetary union made little sense. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, supported by senior Treasury officials, believed that the issue should turn on Britain’s domestic economic interest and not on her classic pursuit of political influence in Europe. He considered that the UK should not adopt the euro unless certain exacting economic tests of economic convergence were satisfied. As an economic judgment, that was right too, and it was the view which prevailed. It was a seminal moment.

***

Britain’s traditional policy had been to maximize its influence in Europe in order to protect its own economic and strategic interests. By the end of the 20th century, the emergence of the EU as the dominant continental bloc meant that this could only be done from the inside. Viewed in this light, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU in 2020 marked the abandonment of five centuries of intelligent British statesmanship. Without Britain, the EU’s consolidation into a single political bloc, which Britain had always taken the lead in resisting, was likely to accelerate. At the same time, Brexit marginalized Britain, ensuring that it would have no voice and very little influence over the developing economic superpower. 

There is also a more general sense in which Britain’s departure from the EU was a misfortune not just for Britain, but also for Europe. It detached Britain from one of the most imaginative and fertile projects in the continent’s history. The institutions of the EU are unappealing: remote, undemocratic, bureaucratic and foreign. But the EU has transformed the continent’s economic fortunes. It has brought to states on its geographical periphery, such as Ireland, Poland and Slovenia, a large measure of convergence with the historically more prosperous countries of Western Europe. It has eased the emergence of Eastern Europe from dependence on the controlling hand of Russia, and helped to restore and sustain liberal democracy in the countries which disappeared behind the Iron Curtain in 1945. It has contributed to the maintenance of the longest period of peace in Europe’s history. 

British Cassandras have been consistently wrong in their forecasts, tinged with hope, that the EU would collapse under its own weight. They were wrong when they dismissed the project as utopian at its foundation in the Fifties. They were wrong when they said that it would be destroyed by the euro crisis after 2009. They have always underrated the political will to sustain it.

Inevitably, the consolidation of continental Europe has marginalized Britain and reduced its ability to control its own destiny. Announcing the terms of departure agreed with the EU in December 2020, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that at 11pm on 31 December Britain would, among other things, “take back control of our trade policy”, “take back control of our waters, with this treaty affirming British sovereignty over our vast marine wealth” and “take back control of our laws”. These sentiments exhibit a rather primitive attitude to national sovereignty and the ways in which it may be used for national advantage. Entering into a multilateral treaty such as the treaties constituting the EU was not a surrender of national sovereignty. It was an exercise of national sovereignty, involving a partial surrender of autonomy, and therefore of control, in order to obtain advantages which the participants could not have achieved on their own: greater geopolitical weight and friction-free access to a market 10 times the size of their domestic market.

Take, by way of illustration, the emotive subject of fisheries, which is presumably what Boris Johnson had in mind when he spoke of “our vast marine wealth”. In theory, Britain could restrict all fishing in British waters to British vessels. It now has the legal right to do that. But practical realities are against it. About 40% of fish caught by British vessels are landed in the EU, and well over half of fish landed in Britain are exported, mostly to the EU. Moreover, most fish species migrate between British and EU waters. Collaborative arrangements with the EU are therefore required in order to manage fish stocks in the interest of both sides. Fisheries are an interesting example. Because of the high proportion of European fishing stocks located in British waters, it is one of the few issues on which Britain and the EU have comparable bargaining power. Yet this has proved to be of very little practical value.

Looking more broadly at Britain’s relations with Europe, the economic balance is even less favorable. The EU is Britain’s biggest as well as its closest trading partner. It takes about 40% of British exports, whereas Britain takes only about 10% of EU exports, substantially less than the United States or China. As became clear during the Brexit negotiations, Britain depends much more on the EU than the other way round. The political weight of the EU, the size of its market and the asymmetric nature of Britain’s relationship with it means that Britain is bound to be dominated by it whether it is a member or not. The EU sets standards and imposes rules with which Britain is economically bound to comply, even though it is legally a free agent. This has not changed since Brexit. The difference is that Britain now has no say in the standards and rules that the EU applies. A legal dependence has simply been replaced by a practical one. Influence has been traded away for nothing.

The idea that Britain can compensate for this by reorienting its trade towards other markets through trade agreements was much canvassed during the referendum campaign, but it has proved to be an illusion. Almost all the trade deals negotiated by Britain since 2020 have simply replicated the deals that Britain previously enjoyed through the EU. The rest (with Australia and India) are with geographically distant countries and are widely thought to have been dearly bought. The reasons are not hard to find. The move towards global free trade, which seemed so promising a generation ago, has stalled and in many areas has been reversed. Most other markets are at least as protectionist as the EU, and Britain has fewer levers to open them up. International bargaining in this field depends on economic weight.

In any trade negotiation, Britain can offer access to about 70 million consumers, whereas the EU can offer access to some 450 million, more than six times as many. We would have been better off negotiating as part of a coalition of 520 million consumers. The one exception concerns Donald Trump’s tariff wars of 2025. Britain was able to negotiate more favorable reliefs from the United States than the EU, mainly because of Trump’s political antagonism to the EU. How much of an advantage that is remains to be seen. Trump is an impulsive and wayward force in world politics, who will observe US treaty obligations for as long as it suits him and not a moment longer. In the short run, Britain cannot allow its economic fortunes to depend on a partner as erratic and unreliable as the United States has recently proved to be. In the long run, the United States is likely to revert to its traditional support for European consolidation, with an agenda in which Britain will have limited weight.

Trade flows are not everything. However, the trade-off between autonomy and collaboration raises dilemmas which affect British policy-making across the board. An ever expanding range of issues, both economic and non-economic, call for international cooperation, in which political weight counts. The EU’s member states have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own relative position is likely to weaken in the next few years, as powerful pressures push the EU towards further European integration and ultimately towards the creation of a federal superstate. This is because Europe’s ambitions will be impossible to achieve without developing common political institutions superseding national governments in major policy areas. Obvious areas for consolidation include capital markets, fiscal policy, debt issuance, defense procurement and aerospace. There will be more technological joint ventures on a European scale, such as the Galileo Project for a European GPS system, to which Britain contributed both financially and technically before Brexit but from which it has now been excluded. There will be determined attempts to achieve European autonomy in financial markets, from which Britain’s financial services industries (currently accounting for 12% of its GDP) will be excluded.

***

This brings one to the critical question of the relations of Europe and Britain with the United States and China, the world’s current economic superpowers. Donald Trump is likely to add to the pressure for European consolidation. The foreign policy of the United States has passed into the hands of a man who is determined to use the economic and military power of the United States to demand of America’s traditional friends a relationship based on subservience and clientage rather than alliance and shared interests. Europe is unlikely to accept such a relationship, but, outside the EU, Britain may have no alternative. The end of Trump’s presidency in January 2029 can be expected to bring an end to his highly personal and eccentric style of government, but not necessarily to America’s belligerent outlook on the rest of the world. Insularity in foreign relations has deep roots in American politics. Trump himself made no secret of his plans during the presidential election campaign. It must therefore be assumed that a majority of the American electorate welcomed his destructive instincts. The same voters will be around in 2028. Those bidding for Trump’s mantle can be expected to offer them more of the same. The Democratic Party will no doubt offer a less confrontational style of government, but is unlikely to risk its electoral chances by promising to reverse what Trump has done. The ultimate result will be the disintegration of the current web of international alliances centered on the United States, and its replacement by new networks based on other centers of power.

In Asia, the alternative center of power is likely to be China. Seventy years ago, China’s GDP was smaller than Belgium’s. Today it has the second-largest economy in the world, with a combination of relatively cheap labor, plentiful natural resources and impressive industrial and technological skills that enable it to undercut other advanced economies. Under Xi Jinping, it has immeasurably expanded its geopolitical ambitions in the Asia–Pacific region and its economic reach worldwide. Xi’s China, like Trump’s America, looks for relations with other countries based on political clientage. This can descend, in China’s case as in America’s, into crude bullying. Its Pacific neighbors, such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan, and its African clients, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Angola, Djibouti, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire, have learned this lesson to their cost. In Europe, meetings with the Dalai Lama, protests against China’s persecution of the Uyghurs or of democracy activists in Hong Kong, or official dealings with Taiwan are met with trade sanctions.

Integrated political and economic blocs such as the EU have a better prospect of defending themselves against the suffocating embrace of the United States and China. The EU has proved to be too fragmented to stand up effectively to the United States in the tariff wars of 2025 as China has successfully done. This was cruelly exposed when the EU’s program of countermeasures was undermined by ideological differences among member states, by the economic vulnerability of some of them and by their common dependence on the United States for the defense of Ukraine against Russia. Europe is likely to pay dearly for that weakness. Trump will come back for more. It is difficult to believe that subservience will remain the EU’s policy for long.

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In dealing with China, the EU has not faced the same difficulties and has been much more robust. Lithuania, for example, has been able to stand up to persistent Chinese bullying and trade sanctions provoked by its decision to allow Taiwan to open a representative office in Vilnius. This is because, although Lithuania is a tiny country, it is a member of the EU, which can hit back hard and has done so. The EU is China’s largest trading partner, with a volume of trade in 2024 eight times larger than the UK’s. Britain is not as well placed to resist Chinese pressure over, for example, China’s demand for a super-embassy on Tower Hill, the presence in Britain of Hong Kong dissidents or its universities’ freedom to study China’s human rights record.

The UK has traditionally made the American alliance the cornerstone of its foreign policy and has opted out of the political structure of the European Community. Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States has proved to be both a blessing and a curse. It was critical in the Second World War and in the Cold War. It still is critical to Britain’s security in the fields of nuclear weaponry and intelligence. But it has come at the price of distorting Britain’s view of itself and its place in the world. It has allowed the UK too often to turn away from the reality of being a regional European power some 20 miles off the French coast, with a European history, culture and sensibility. 

It has also encouraged Britain to forget that the United States is some 3,000 miles away and has a hard-nosed view of its own national interest. The special relationship helped lull Britain into taking a more detached view of moves towards European integration in the Fifties and Sixties than was in its national interest. It also offered the Brexiters an opening to argue in 2016 that Britain’s links with Washington might provide an alternative to its participation in an integrated Europe. By promising a quick bilateral trade deal (which never materialized), they suggested that Britain could abandon the EU with equanimity on the hardest of terms. Britain has now discovered that the American comfort blanket is threadbare. As a result, its subservience to the United States seems likely to be more complete and longer lasting than that of the EU.

***

It is of course possible that national ambitions among the countries of Europe will prise Europe apart again and prevent the economic and political consolidation that the continent needs. But Britain has too often counted on this happening, while “ever closer union” slowly became a reality. History has borne out Jean Monnet’s prediction that “Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”. 

Barring a major crisis in Britain’s own affairs, it is unrealistic to expect Britain to rejoin the EU. What is more likely is a succession of ad hoc agreements for cooperation with the EU in defined areas including economic regulation, international trade, migration, defense procurement and foreign policy. Europe will be in a position to dictate its terms. Some of these agreements will involve substantial British contributions to European budgets. Some will involve accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in specific areas. The red lines of the past are likely to fade. In this untidy fashion, Britain will obtain a modest degree of influence over European policy decisions, but it will be substantially less than the control that we might have exercised as members.

***

Extracted from The Brexit Effect, 2016–2026, published by Cambridge University Press. 

***

Tolerance does not come naturally to mankind. For most of human history, what people have believed about morality, about government and about the natural world was laid down by authority, usually by people claiming to speak in the name of God. It is salutary to be reminded that freedom of expression, as an idea, has a short history. It is essentially the legacy of the European scientific revolution of the 17th century and the European enlightenment of the 18th century. These movements rejected the way that men had thought for centuries. They rejected mere authority as a source of truth, in favor of observation, reasoning and rational discourse. It took much longer for the same notions to penetrate people’s ideas about politics, government and law. The legal protection of free speech is barely two centuries old in Europe and North America. And it has only ever been accepted with reservations.

Recent criticisms of Europe by American politicians like JD Vance have reminded us that there is a profound gulf between American and European conceptions of free speech. The United States comes closer than any other country in the world to absolute free speech. The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech”. No ifs, no buts. Since the early 20th century, this has been held to apply to state legislatures as well. The American courts were eventually persuaded to recognize exceptions for incitement to imminent violence, obscene and defamatory material, child pornography and fraud, but that is all. Even these exceptions have been very narrowly interpreted.

The European model has been very different. Freedom of expression is an important but not an absolute public interest in Europe. In principle, it may be overridden by a wide variety of other public interests if there is a sufficiently compelling case for doing so. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression, but subject to a long list of potential exceptions: national security, territorial integrity or public safety, the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals, the protection of the reputation or rights of others, the protection of confidences, or maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

In Britain, the list of exceptions recognized by the law grows longer all the time: speech that discloses secret intelligence, speech that prejudices current legal proceedings, speech that supports proscribed terrorist groups, hate speech directed at racial, religious or sexual minorities, “grossly offensive” messages sent through the post or over electronic networks, and so on. Most of these exceptions are concerned in one way or another with public order and social harmony. In Britain we have not usually specified opinions that it is illegal to hold in public, but other countries have. In Germany, Austria and Belgium it is a criminal offense to deny, trivialize or approve of the Holocaust. Spain, France and Switzerland go even further. It is an offense in those countries to question the existence or gravity of anything which is regarded as a crime against humanity. In many countries it is illegal to display the swastika. In Latvia and Lithuania, that extends to the hammer and sickle and other symbols of Soviet communism.

There is an inevitable tendency for people to want to exclude from freedom of expression whatever ideas they personally cannot abide. Milton’s Areopagitica, published in 1644, is one of the most eloquent pleas for freedom of expression in the English language, but he excluded Catholics and atheists, whose views he regarded as beyond the pale. So did John Locke, although he at least offered reasons for their exclusion. He thought that Catholics were intolerable because they were not interested in truth, and atheists because having no fear of God, they could not be relied upon to honor any social obligations. The authors of the famous early 18th-century tracts known as Cato’s Letters argued the case for free political speech but made an exception for what they called “factious scribblers” and “turbulent babblers”.

The problem, as George Orwell pointed out, is that free speech is worthless unless it extends to things that people do not want to hear. We all have different lists of things that we do not want to hear. Suggested candidates for legally enforced censorship include a variety of allegedly extreme or unacceptable positions such as gender-criticism, climate denial, antisemitism, blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed or the Koran, totalitarianism, eugenics, satanism and many others. Many of these demands reflect the sensitivities of particular ethnic, social or religious groups who say that their position is special. Censorship is often the child of collective grievances. People who feel that the world has been unjust to them are likely to claim that their position is special too. If some opinions are to be banned as beyond the pale, then why should my list of unacceptable beliefs be privileged over yours? The truth is that if we believe in freedom of expression, we have to tolerate things that we regard as intolerable. Otherwise the whole concept is meaningless.

Since we have to draw a line, where do we draw it? The starting point, I suggest, is to ask why we instinctively believe in freedom of expression in the first place. I think that there are three main reasons.

The first is that constraints on our ability to communicate facts or opinions invade our autonomy as moral agents and thinking creatures. When the constraints are imposed by the state, they imply a relationship between the individual and the state which is morally repellent. They reduce us to the status of mere instruments of other people’s power. Whether the suppression of free speech comes from governments or pressure groups or public opinion, it ushers in a narrow-minded, intolerant and authoritarian world in which the fear of giving offense or challenging existing shibboleths eliminates some of the most creative and original products of the human spirit.

The second reason for believing in freedom of speech is that we live in a democracy whose entire political order depends on the free exchange of ideas. It depends on our ability to freely receive information, on an acceptance of diversity of opinion and on a large measure of tolerance of intellectual and emotional differences. Our collective life depends on the resolution of issues between citizens by marshaling objectively verifiable facts. It depends on ordered debate about their implications under common rules that exclude coercion, and on a culture in which the outcome of our processes of collective decision-making is accepted even by those who disagree with it.

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A third reason why we believe in freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental. It is the one which received its most eloquent expression from Karl Popper’s classic work, The Open Society and its Enemies. No one person or group, however respectable or expert, has exclusive access to wisdom or truth. This is not just because of the limits on the capacity of the human mind. It is also because truth and wisdom are dynamic concepts. They are informed by a stock of experience which is constantly increasing. All statements of fact or opinion are provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. But knowledge and experience are not closed or immutable categories. They are inherently liable to change in response to fresh discoveries or insights. Knowledge advances by testing conflicting arguments, not by suppressing them. Understanding increases by exposure to uncomfortable truths. In a world of free expression, some of what people say will certainly be wrong, hurtful or even objectively harmful. But the principle which we would have to accept in order to justify censoring these statements is more damaging than the statements themselves. We cannot have truth without accommodating the possibility of error, or wisdom without accommodating the possibility of folly. In the end we have to accept the implications of human inquisitiveness, creativity and imagination. The alternative is to entrust significant parts of our intellectual world to external authorities whose capacity for objectivity, truthfulness and wisdom is no greater than our own.

Ever since the 17th century, our civilization has been based on the notion that truth is independent of human will. It may be only partly knowable, and more or less difficult to identify, but it exists somewhere out there whether we like it or not. We have built our intellectual world on the footing that we get closest to the truth by objective study, logical reasoning and open debate, by what Mill called the “collision of adverse opinions”. I am not suggesting that this is guaranteed to produce truth or the wisest possible outcomes, but experience suggests that in the long term it is more likely to do so than any system of intellectual controls.

These reasons for believing in freedom of expression suggest a number of conclusions that we should bear in mind when we come to think about exceptions.

In the first place, freedom of expression is concerned with the transmission of information or opinion. Not everything that is spoken or written deserves protection. If I write you a letter or an email consisting of nothing but foul-mouthed abuse, I may be committing an offense under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003. Low level communications of this kind are devoid of intellectual, cultural or political value. In a sense I may be regarded as having communicated my opinion of you, but that hardly counts as an infringement of my right of freedom of expression.

The second conclusion to be drawn from our reasons for believing in free speech is that we should not suppress the expression of facts or opinions simply because they give offense, however understandable that offense may be. If we are not free to say things that other people regard as objectionable, we have no freedom of speech at all. In a famous statement of principle, Lord Justice Sedley observed in the High Court in a case about a Christian fundamentalist street preacher that “free speech includes not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to promote violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”

Thirdly, it cannot be a good reason for suppressing some assertion or opinion that we think it is wrong or even that everybody thinks it is wrong. Few propositions are incontrovertibly false, in the sense that they are inherently incapable of being affirmed by hitherto unknown facts or fresh analysis. As a general rule, the best answer to misleading speech is counter-speech, i.e. reasoned refutation. Of course, counter-speech does not always work. The barrage of rubbish generated by the internet, generally mediated by algorithms which serve people up with material that confirms their existing prejudices, is a serious challenge. But counter-speech is more likely to work than suppression. Once upon a time, the authorized consensus was that the sun moved round the earth, because that view was supported by Biblical authority, then regarded as a source of incontrovertible truth. Galileo was condemned for denying it. The same point can be made about statements of opinion. Once upon a time the religious and social consensus justified slavery and the imprisonment of homosexuals, because this had been regarded as obvious for centuries. Once upon a time it was taken for granted in Britain that black people were inherently inferior. These views have almost entirely died out in advanced societies in the face of rational discourse.

In 2021 the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific society, called for legislation to ban the dissemination by anti-vaxxers of “false information” about vaccines, by which they meant information rejected by the scientific consensus. The case for vaccination is not inherently irrefutable. But in the current state of our knowledge, the debate has been won hands down by supporters of vaccination. That has only been possible because there has been a debate. Suppressing public opposition to vaccination will simply drive it underground where it will be more difficult to refute. Holocaust denial is another example. It is an absurd position which has been discredited not by legislation but exposure to the evidence. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote some of the greatest judgments of the US Supreme Court in support of free speech, once observed that the guiding principle was that almost all certainty is an illusion. We might always be wrong, he said. All of us can all point to public statements which are untrue, mischievous or absurd, sometimes manifestly so. But manifestness is not a very useful criterion for censoring other peoples’ opinions. Nearly every received opinion which rational examination has discredited was once regarded as manifest by those who held it.

Finally, the concept of free speech assumes that adults are capable of distinguishing what is good from what is bad in the torrent of information to which we are all exposed. In a democratic society, it is necessary to proceed on that assumption, even though we know that it is not always true. In a society which treats every person as entitled to equal consideration and respect, we cannot distinguish between adults according to their degree of intelligence or discernment or their skill in ordering their lives. In a democracy, we have to assume that adults are capable of making discerning choices in their own interest, because the alternative is an authoritarian world in which their choices are taken away from them by the state.

All of this suggests that the threshold for banning the transmission of information or opinion should be exacting. Any exception must, I suggest, be based on some consistent principle, not just on people’s subjective likes and dislikes. The exception should also be consistent with the basic rationale for wanting freedom of expression in the first place. And it must be clearly defined, because if the boundaries of the exception are unclear, we will end up with a freedom that is at least partly discretionary. A freedom which depends on the discretion of the enforcers is no freedom at all.

I suggest that the only speech which we are justified in suppressing by law is speech which is coercive. By that I mean speech which deprives us of our choices because it is threatening, or directly incites violence or manipulates people in highly vulnerable categories, especially children.

The suppression or punishment of speech is a coercive act. The traditional principle of English law has been that it is only justified if the alternative is coercion of a different kind, the coercion which follows from a breakdown of public order. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, the earliest systematic survey of the common law, published in the 1760s, Sir William Blackstone described a free press as “essential to the nature of a free state”. This was why the common law did not allow pre-publication censorship. Blackstone added that after publication, an author could be punished or mulcted in damages if his words were contrary to public order. This was because the state’s ability to maintain public order was also essential to the nature of a free state and to its role as the guardian of liberty. In Blackstone’s day, the courts were much more willing to take action against provocative speech, because the state had fewer means of maintaining public order. There was no general police force in Britain until the 1830s. In the first half of the 19th century, as Britain became a more orderly, better policed society, speech became less dangerous and the courts became more active in protecting it. However, direct incitement to violence is still the main exception sanctioned by English law to the principle of freedom of expression.

The most interesting analyses of this question come from the American case law. The Americans have a related doctrine known as the “fighting words” exception. Their case law denies that this amounts to censorship, because they distinguish between the content of the message and its consequences. Restrictions on free speech are unacceptable if they are directed to the content of the message. They have to be addressed exclusively to the circumstances in which the words were uttered and to their likely consequences. A rather similar line has been taken in some decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. A good example is the case of Faber v. Hungary, decided in 1992. Faber was a Right-wing activist who had been convicted in Hungary of standing at a site in Budapest where Jews had been massacred in the Second World War and holding up a banner with a fascist symbol. His conviction was held by the Strasbourg court to violate the Human Rights Convention because the mere act of holding up the banner was incapable of disturbing public order or inciting violence. The fact that it was offensive and liable to outrage those who saw it was not enough. That was an objection to the content of Faber’s statement, not to its likely consequences. I think that that is also the approach of English law, even though English judges have been less articulate in saying so. Calling for violence in a university debating society is objectionable but not illegal, whereas calling for violence in front of a howling mob in a city center is likely to be both.

In September of last year, Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months imprisonment for an inflammatory tweet. The case aroused much controversy. Her unsuccessful appeal against the sentence was supported by the Free Speech Union, and the sentence was roundly denounced in The Daily Telegraph and on GB News. This seemed to me to be strange. Her tweet said: “Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” If she had expressed this opinion at a meeting of the Women’s Institute, there would have been no problem. The actual circumstances were that the murder of three children in Southport had been attributed (in fact wrongly) to an asylum seeker, at a time when there was rising tension against immigrants in much of the Midlands. If a rabble-rouser stood on a soap-box in front of an angry mob and urged them to head for the nearest immigration hostel and burn it down, the vice of words like these would have been obvious. Doing it on social media is worse because the reach of the internet is so much greater. Its algorithms thrust words like Connolly’s under the noses of people who are already likely to agree. The internet is not a private conversation. It can whip up a violent mob in minutes. Connolly soon regretted her post and deleted it three and a half hours later, but in the short time that it was up, it was viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times. It was one of a number of wild statements on the internet following the Southport murders which provoked serious riots across England later that day and violent attacks on mosques and immigration hostels. Connolly was not a free speech martyr. Her conviction was in line with a perfectly rational principle reflecting a centuries-old limitation on free speech.

Incitement to violence is not the only restriction that our law places on free speech. Some of the other restrictions are principled exceptions which are perfectly consistent with the underlying principle of free speech. Others are unprincipled exceptions which should have no place in a rational system of law.

Let’s start with the legal restrictions which I suggest we should accept. The Online Safety Act, which was passed in 2023, is a complex and in some ways clumsily drafted piece of legislation, which hits many targets that were not intended. However, its principal purpose is to require providers of online content to have age verification checks so as to control access by children to manipulative or corrupting material such as pornography or material advocating suicide or self-harm. I have pointed out that the concept of freedom of expression involves treating adults as capable of discernment and of intelligently ordering their lives. The same assumptions cannot apply to children, who are by definition in a state of developing but incomplete maturity, and who do not have the full range of liberties available to adults. It is fair to regard the manipulation of children’s sensibilities as closely analogous to the coercion from which we seek to protect adults.

Next, there are laws which regulate the way in which our right of free speech is exercised, rather than the content of our speech. These too are, in principle, acceptable. For example, you cannot picket abortion clinics within 150 meters of their doors or buy advertising time for political causes on television. The law restricts the picketing of abortion clinics because it harasses women at an emotionally difficult time of their lives, but you can still protest against abortion in ways that do not amount to harassment: you can stand with your placards 160 meters away, demonstrate in Trafalgar Square, write articles in the press, publish podcasts on YouTube, distribute leaflets, and so on. The law forbids political advertising on television in order to provide some limit on the power of big money to buy influence over political debate in a democracy. However, you can still do party political broadcasts, put up posters on billboards, take advertising space in newspapers, or hold political rallies. These restrictions are not directed against the content of any spoken or written statement. There is no infringement of the right to freedom of expression simply because there are some places where you cannot speak. A notice saying “Silence” in a courtroom, church or library is not an infringement of free speech.

My final example is more controversial. It is about the laws relating to defamation and privacy. The law of libel and slander allows people to claim damages from those who have told lies about them. The law of privacy allows those whose privacy has been invaded without any justification in the public interest to claim damages from the intruder. There are legitimate concerns about the granting of injunctions, especially in privacy cases, but I see no reason why the law should not, after proper investigation, correct the financial consequences of lies and intrusions into our private lives by awarding compensation for the damage which these things can cause. I do not regard that as censorship. It simply adjusts as between private individuals the financial consequences of free speech.

If these are legitimate restrictions on freedom of speech, there are others which have been imposed over the last half-century and which ought to cause us real concern. They are designed to protect people not from coercion or manipulation but simply from being offended.

A good example, which is currently topical, is the provision of the Terrorism Act 2000, which forbids public expressions of support for proscribed terrorist organizations. The Act forbids any conduct which involves assisting or participating in the work of a proscribed terrorist organization, which is fair enough. However, it then goes on to forbid expressions of support even where they do not assist the work of the organization but merely amount to the peaceful expression of a favorable opinion about it. Unlike the restrictions which I have just been discussing, this is a direct attack on the content of certain statements. There are people who think that terrorism in the service of a good cause is fine. I think that this is foolish, but should not be criminal. Arresting hundreds of people in Parliament Square for holding up placards saying that they support Palestine Action is an unprincipled interference with freedom of expression.

The main restrictions of this kind come under the broad heading of hate crimes, which is probably the most intrusive and least justifiable interference with freedom of expression in Britain. Hate crimes are based on the Public Order Act of 1986. Their scope has been expanded by successive amendments since the original Act was passed. The position can be summarized as follows: it is an offense to use language which stirs up racial hatred, religious hatred or hatred based on sexual orientation. In the case of religious hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation, the language used has to be threatening. This probably means words which threaten imminent violence, which broadly accords with the law’s traditional approach to breaches of the peace. However, in the case of stirring up racial hatred, the offense is much wider. The language used need not be threatening. It is enough that it should be abusive or offensive. In the case of religious hatred, there is a broadly drawn exception which allows people to discuss or criticize, or express antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of any religious belief or practice. This may be described as a proviso for the benefit of Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and the late Bertrand Russell, all of whom have had harsh things to say about religious beliefs. Yet there is no such exception in the case of race or sexual orientation. In 2024, 140,561 hate crimes were recorded by the 43 police forces in England and Wales. The breadth of the offense can be seen from the facts that the police have arrested Christian preachers for their street sermons, parents engaged in a dispute with their daughter’s school, and the Irish comedian Graham Linehan for tweeting that women confronted by trans men in women-only spaces should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls”.

In addition to hate crimes properly so-called, there is an anomalous category known as “non-crime hate incidents”. The police have a common law power to record incidents. Non-crime hate incidents are not criminal offenses, but are simply incidents which the police are administratively directed to record. They have real consequences and will usually entail intimidating visits and warnings from the police. They will show up on enhanced criminal record checks and may stop people getting jobs. The police defend the practice on the ground that such incidents may lead to real crimes if repeated. This seems rather far-fetched. The job of the police is to enforce the criminal law, not to regulate behavior which is perfectly lawful but may be loutish, offensive, politically incorrect or contrary to received opinion. Different police forces have recorded as non-crime hate incidents gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, and even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration. Harry Miller, who was visited by Humberside police at his workplace and questioned about his gender-critical tweets, took them to court. The conduct of the police, said the judge, offended against a “cardinal democratic principle”. “In this country,” he said, “we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” Yet last year, more than 13,000 non-crime hate incidents were recorded by police forces in England and Wales.

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“Hatred”, “threatening” and “abusive” are vague terms which cry out for precise definition, but there is no definition of these words in the Public Order Act. “Offensive” is an even vaguer term, which is likewise undefined. On the face of it, the word extends to anything that causes offense. As for non-crime hate incidents, they have no statutory basis at all and therefore no definition either. The looseness of these concepts means that in reality action depends on the discretion of individual police officers. This is not a proper function for a statutory public service or a satisfactory basis for penalizing speech. A police state can fairly be defined as a state in which the police have discretion as to what constitutes an offense. The prosecuting authorities have tried to resolve this problem in a highly unsatisfactory way. The Crown Prosecution Service and the police have agreed to define a hate crime as anything which is perceived by the victim or anyone else to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, the definition which they use is subjective. If the complainant thinks it is a hate crime, then it is a hate crime. One would think that hatred implied a very high degree of animosity, but the Crown Prosecution Service has suggested that it can include ill-will, ill-feeling, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment, and dislike. Yet all of these, humanity being what it is, are hazards which most of us must expect to live with. Remarkably, until 2021 the College of Policing, which sets standards for the police, after explaining that a hate crime depended on the perception of the victim, added the following observation:

“The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers and staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.”

Carried to its logical conclusion, this approach gives racial minorities a right of veto; an entitlement to silence opinions to which they object.

In 2021, the guidance was changed in response to criticism by the Court of Appeal in Miller’s case. The Court of Appeal did not object to the subjective character of the definition, but it held that the guidance was unlawful because it was far too wide. It interfered with Miller’s right of freedom of expression and was likely to have a chilling effect on the discussion of controversial issues like gender. However, the changes to the guidance were minimal. The guidance now says that at the point of receiving the complaint, no justification or evidence is required, leaving open the possibility of seeking such evidence later. The effect is that the investigation of a hate-crime is still dependent on the personal sensitivities of the complainant and the discretion of the police.

All of this originated with the Macpherson Report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which was published in 1999. Macpherson made two recommendations which are relevant for present purposes. First, he recommended that the police should systematically record “racist incidents”, a category which he defined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. That is the origin of the subjective definitions currently used by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Secondly, he recommended that racist incidents should include both crimes and non-crimes. That is the origin of the category of non-crime hate incidents. Experience has shown the Macpherson recommendations have proved to be extremely damaging. Speaking in the House of Lords last November, Lord Hogan-Howe, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, observed that the recording of hate crime was a well-intended change which had gone wrong. “The definition of a crime is objective and the definition of hate crime is subjective,” he said, “during the time this has been in place, online crime and online hate crime have grown massively, and the application of the hate crime definition has been inconsistent.” Recently, Britain’s largest police force, the Metropolitan Police, announced that it would stop dealing with non-crime hate incidents. The current commissioner, it was announced, “has been clear he doesn’t believe officers should be policing toxic culture war debates, with current laws and rules on inciting violence online leaving them in an impossible position”. So far the Met’s example has not been followed by other police forces.

The most famous test for determining what can and what cannot properly be suppressed is the “harm principle” proposed by John Stuart Mill, the great Victorian apostle of free speech, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty. Mill taught that the only purpose for which power might properly be exercised against individuals against their will was to prevent harm to others. Hate crime and non-crime hate incidents are symptoms of a modern tendency to redefine harm so that it extends to the discomfort caused by having to endure rudeness, contradiction or dissent. When interest groups object to someone’s opinion of them, they commonly call for a subjective approach to its impact. Harm is whatever the relevant target group perceives as harm. It depends on their “lived experience”, as the phrase goes. This way of looking at the harm done by free speech is particularly common when the offended group is a racial, religious or sexual minority. The argument is that words may undermine the dignity of the groups against whom they are directed. Words wound, it is said, especially when they relate to another person’s identity or status. Words are therefore viewed as a form of violence comparable to physical assault. But there are obvious problems with this approach. One is that concepts such as undermining human dignity are too uncertain and subjective to serve as part of the definition of a criminal offense. Another is that there is an important difference between violence and words. Violence is coercive. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive except in those cases where they are calculated to provoke violence.

Today, racial, religious or sexual minorities are said to need protection from hurtful words. The desire to accommodate groups who feel themselves oppressed is understandable. It assists social inclusion. Racial, religious and sexual differences are highly sensitive matters, but they are also major issues in our society, as well as in other countries of Western Europe and North America. They need to be openly discussed without fear of criminal liability. Discussion certainly cannot be suppressed without inviting serious suppressed anger which will ultimately be destabilizing and very bad for community relations. Historically, minorities have been the main victims of censorship and other forms of intellectual and social intolerance and the chief beneficiaries of freedom of speech. As I have pointed out, people once believed in the persecution of sexual minorities, the inferiority racial minorities and the exclusion of religious minorities. These notions were supported by the social consensus of the age, but died out in the face of rational discourse. In general, rational counter-argument is a better way of addressing hate speech than the attempt to suppress it through criminal law.

The suppression or punishment of speech tends to start from the best of motives. Its progress is gradual and frequently unperceived. But the ultimate result is objectionable. Recent legislation and police practice has, I fear, moved away from the distinction between coercion and liberty, which represented the only rational basis for curtailing freedom of expression. The result has been to reduce large parts of the law in this area to incoherence.

Once you start proscribing speech on the sole ground that it offends or distresses people, you open the door to the censorship of any words that people do not like. Without a coherent principle governing the permissible limits of free speech, there is effectively no free speech on some issues, except for those who confine themselves to the inoffensive and the anodyne. I think that that would be a retreat into an unpleasant world.

***

 This article was adapted from the Shrieval Lecture, given at Hereford Town Hall on 12 November 2025.

Recent criticisms of Europe by American politicians like JD Vance have reminded us that there is a profound gulf between American and European conceptions of free speech. The United States comes closer than any other country in the world to absolute free speech. The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech”. No ifs, no buts. Since the early 20th century, this has been held to apply to state legislatures as well. The American courts were eventually persuaded to recognize exceptions for incitement to imminent violence, obscene and defamatory material, child pornography and fraud, but that is all. Even these exceptions have been very narrowly interpreted.

The European model has been very different. Freedom of expression is an important but not an absolute public interest in Europe. In principle, it may be overridden by a wide variety of other public interests if there is a sufficiently compelling case for doing so. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression, but subject to a long list of potential exceptions: national security, territorial integrity or public safety, the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals, the protection of the reputation or rights of others, the protection of confidences, or maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

In Britain, the list of exceptions recognized by the law grows longer all the time: speech that discloses secret intelligence, speech that prejudices current legal proceedings, speech that supports proscribed terrorist groups, hate speech directed at racial, religious or sexual minorities, “grossly offensive” messages sent through the post or over electronic networks, and so on. Most of these exceptions are concerned in one way or another with public order and social harmony. In Britain we have not usually specified opinions that it is illegal to hold in public, but other countries have. In Germany, Austria and Belgium it is a criminal offense to deny, trivialize or approve of the Holocaust. Spain, France and Switzerland go even further. It is an offense in those countries to question the existence or gravity of anything which is regarded as a crime against humanity. In many countries it is illegal to display the swastika. In Latvia and Lithuania, that extends to the hammer and sickle and other symbols of Soviet communism.

There is an inevitable tendency for people to want to exclude from freedom of expression whatever ideas they personally cannot abide. Milton’s Areopagitica, published in 1644, is one of the most eloquent pleas for freedom of expression in the English language, but he excluded Catholics and atheists, whose views he regarded as beyond the pale. So did John Locke, although he at least offered reasons for their exclusion. He thought that Catholics were intolerable because they were not interested in truth, and atheists because having no fear of God, they could not be relied upon to honor any social obligations. The authors of the famous early 18th-century tracts known as Cato’s Letters argued the case for free political speech but made an exception for what they called “factious scribblers” and “turbulent babblers”.

The problem, as George Orwell pointed out, is that free speech is worthless unless it extends to things that people do not want to hear. We all have different lists of things that we do not want to hear. Suggested candidates for legally enforced censorship include a variety of allegedly extreme or unacceptable positions such as gender-criticism, climate denial, antisemitism, blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed or the Koran, totalitarianism, eugenics, satanism and many others. Many of these demands reflect the sensitivities of particular ethnic, social or religious groups who say that their position is special. Censorship is often the child of collective grievances. People who feel that the world has been unjust to them are likely to claim that their position is special too. If some opinions are to be banned as beyond the pale, then why should my list of unacceptable beliefs be privileged over yours? The truth is that if we believe in freedom of expression, we have to tolerate things that we regard as intolerable. Otherwise the whole concept is meaningless.

Since we have to draw a line, where do we draw it? The starting point, I suggest, is to ask why we instinctively believe in freedom of expression in the first place. I think that there are three main reasons.

The first is that constraints on our ability to communicate facts or opinions invade our autonomy as moral agents and thinking creatures. When the constraints are imposed by the state, they imply a relationship between the individual and the state which is morally repellent. They reduce us to the status of mere instruments of other people’s power. Whether the suppression of free speech comes from governments or pressure groups or public opinion, it ushers in a narrow-minded, intolerant and authoritarian world in which the fear of giving offense or challenging existing shibboleths eliminates some of the most creative and original products of the human spirit.

The second reason for believing in freedom of speech is that we live in a democracy whose entire political order depends on the free exchange of ideas. It depends on our ability to freely receive information, on an acceptance of diversity of opinion and on a large measure of tolerance of intellectual and emotional differences. Our collective life depends on the resolution of issues between citizens by marshaling objectively verifiable facts. It depends on ordered debate about their implications under common rules that exclude coercion, and on a culture in which the outcome of our processes of collective decision-making is accepted even by those who disagree with it.

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A third reason why we believe in freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental. It is the one which received its most eloquent expression from Karl Popper’s classic work, The Open Society and its Enemies. No one person or group, however respectable or expert, has exclusive access to wisdom or truth. This is not just because of the limits on the capacity of the human mind. It is also because truth and wisdom are dynamic concepts. They are informed by a stock of experience which is constantly increasing. All statements of fact or opinion are provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. But knowledge and experience are not closed or immutable categories. They are inherently liable to change in response to fresh discoveries or insights. Knowledge advances by testing conflicting arguments, not by suppressing them. Understanding increases by exposure to uncomfortable truths. In a world of free expression, some of what people say will certainly be wrong, hurtful or even objectively harmful. But the principle which we would have to accept in order to justify censoring these statements is more damaging than the statements themselves. We cannot have truth without accommodating the possibility of error, or wisdom without accommodating the possibility of folly. In the end we have to accept the implications of human inquisitiveness, creativity and imagination. The alternative is to entrust significant parts of our intellectual world to external authorities whose capacity for objectivity, truthfulness and wisdom is no greater than our own.

Ever since the 17th century, our civilization has been based on the notion that truth is independent of human will. It may be only partly knowable, and more or less difficult to identify, but it exists somewhere out there whether we like it or not. We have built our intellectual world on the footing that we get closest to the truth by objective study, logical reasoning and open debate, by what Mill called the “collision of adverse opinions”. I am not suggesting that this is guaranteed to produce truth or the wisest possible outcomes, but experience suggests that in the long term it is more likely to do so than any system of intellectual controls.

These reasons for believing in freedom of expression suggest a number of conclusions that we should bear in mind when we come to think about exceptions.

In the first place, freedom of expression is concerned with the transmission of information or opinion. Not everything that is spoken or written deserves protection. If I write you a letter or an email consisting of nothing but foul-mouthed abuse, I may be committing an offense under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003. Low level communications of this kind are devoid of intellectual, cultural or political value. In a sense I may be regarded as having communicated my opinion of you, but that hardly counts as an infringement of my right of freedom of expression.

The second conclusion to be drawn from our reasons for believing in free speech is that we should not suppress the expression of facts or opinions simply because they give offense, however understandable that offense may be. If we are not free to say things that other people regard as objectionable, we have no freedom of speech at all. In a famous statement of principle, Lord Justice Sedley observed in the High Court in a case about a Christian fundamentalist street preacher that “free speech includes not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to promote violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”

Thirdly, it cannot be a good reason for suppressing some assertion or opinion that we think it is wrong or even that everybody thinks it is wrong. Few propositions are incontrovertibly false, in the sense that they are inherently incapable of being affirmed by hitherto unknown facts or fresh analysis. As a general rule, the best answer to misleading speech is counter-speech, i.e. reasoned refutation. Of course, counter-speech does not always work. The barrage of rubbish generated by the internet, generally mediated by algorithms which serve people up with material that confirms their existing prejudices, is a serious challenge. But counter-speech is more likely to work than suppression. Once upon a time, the authorized consensus was that the sun moved round the earth, because that view was supported by Biblical authority, then regarded as a source of incontrovertible truth. Galileo was condemned for denying it. The same point can be made about statements of opinion. Once upon a time the religious and social consensus justified slavery and the imprisonment of homosexuals, because this had been regarded as obvious for centuries. Once upon a time it was taken for granted in Britain that black people were inherently inferior. These views have almost entirely died out in advanced societies in the face of rational discourse.

In 2021 the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific society, called for legislation to ban the dissemination by anti-vaxxers of “false information” about vaccines, by which they meant information rejected by the scientific consensus. The case for vaccination is not inherently irrefutable. But in the current state of our knowledge, the debate has been won hands down by supporters of vaccination. That has only been possible because there has been a debate. Suppressing public opposition to vaccination will simply drive it underground where it will be more difficult to refute. Holocaust denial is another example. It is an absurd position which has been discredited not by legislation but exposure to the evidence. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote some of the greatest judgments of the US Supreme Court in support of free speech, once observed that the guiding principle was that almost all certainty is an illusion. We might always be wrong, he said. All of us can all point to public statements which are untrue, mischievous or absurd, sometimes manifestly so. But manifestness is not a very useful criterion for censoring other peoples’ opinions. Nearly every received opinion which rational examination has discredited was once regarded as manifest by those who held it.

Finally, the concept of free speech assumes that adults are capable of distinguishing what is good from what is bad in the torrent of information to which we are all exposed. In a democratic society, it is necessary to proceed on that assumption, even though we know that it is not always true. In a society which treats every person as entitled to equal consideration and respect, we cannot distinguish between adults according to their degree of intelligence or discernment or their skill in ordering their lives. In a democracy, we have to assume that adults are capable of making discerning choices in their own interest, because the alternative is an authoritarian world in which their choices are taken away from them by the state.

All of this suggests that the threshold for banning the transmission of information or opinion should be exacting. Any exception must, I suggest, be based on some consistent principle, not just on people’s subjective likes and dislikes. The exception should also be consistent with the basic rationale for wanting freedom of expression in the first place. And it must be clearly defined, because if the boundaries of the exception are unclear, we will end up with a freedom that is at least partly discretionary. A freedom which depends on the discretion of the enforcers is no freedom at all.

I suggest that the only speech which we are justified in suppressing by law is speech which is coercive. By that I mean speech which deprives us of our choices because it is threatening, or directly incites violence or manipulates people in highly vulnerable categories, especially children.

The suppression or punishment of speech is a coercive act. The traditional principle of English law has been that it is only justified if the alternative is coercion of a different kind, the coercion which follows from a breakdown of public order. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, the earliest systematic survey of the common law, published in the 1760s, Sir William Blackstone described a free press as “essential to the nature of a free state”. This was why the common law did not allow pre-publication censorship. Blackstone added that after publication, an author could be punished or mulcted in damages if his words were contrary to public order. This was because the state’s ability to maintain public order was also essential to the nature of a free state and to its role as the guardian of liberty. In Blackstone’s day, the courts were much more willing to take action against provocative speech, because the state had fewer means of maintaining public order. There was no general police force in Britain until the 1830s. In the first half of the 19th century, as Britain became a more orderly, better policed society, speech became less dangerous and the courts became more active in protecting it. However, direct incitement to violence is still the main exception sanctioned by English law to the principle of freedom of expression.

The most interesting analyses of this question come from the American case law. The Americans have a related doctrine known as the “fighting words” exception. Their case law denies that this amounts to censorship, because they distinguish between the content of the message and its consequences. Restrictions on free speech are unacceptable if they are directed to the content of the message. They have to be addressed exclusively to the circumstances in which the words were uttered and to their likely consequences. A rather similar line has been taken in some decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. A good example is the case of Faber v. Hungary, decided in 1992. Faber was a Right-wing activist who had been convicted in Hungary of standing at a site in Budapest where Jews had been massacred in the Second World War and holding up a banner with a fascist symbol. His conviction was held by the Strasbourg court to violate the Human Rights Convention because the mere act of holding up the banner was incapable of disturbing public order or inciting violence. The fact that it was offensive and liable to outrage those who saw it was not enough. That was an objection to the content of Faber’s statement, not to its likely consequences. I think that that is also the approach of English law, even though English judges have been less articulate in saying so. Calling for violence in a university debating society is objectionable but not illegal, whereas calling for violence in front of a howling mob in a city center is likely to be both.

In September of last year, Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months imprisonment for an inflammatory tweet. The case aroused much controversy. Her unsuccessful appeal against the sentence was supported by the Free Speech Union, and the sentence was roundly denounced in The Daily Telegraph and on GB News. This seemed to me to be strange. Her tweet said: “Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” If she had expressed this opinion at a meeting of the Women’s Institute, there would have been no problem. The actual circumstances were that the murder of three children in Southport had been attributed (in fact wrongly) to an asylum seeker, at a time when there was rising tension against immigrants in much of the Midlands. If a rabble-rouser stood on a soap-box in front of an angry mob and urged them to head for the nearest immigration hostel and burn it down, the vice of words like these would have been obvious. Doing it on social media is worse because the reach of the internet is so much greater. Its algorithms thrust words like Connolly’s under the noses of people who are already likely to agree. The internet is not a private conversation. It can whip up a violent mob in minutes. Connolly soon regretted her post and deleted it three and a half hours later, but in the short time that it was up, it was viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times. It was one of a number of wild statements on the internet following the Southport murders which provoked serious riots across England later that day and violent attacks on mosques and immigration hostels. Connolly was not a free speech martyr. Her conviction was in line with a perfectly rational principle reflecting a centuries-old limitation on free speech.

Incitement to violence is not the only restriction that our law places on free speech. Some of the other restrictions are principled exceptions which are perfectly consistent with the underlying principle of free speech. Others are unprincipled exceptions which should have no place in a rational system of law.

Let’s start with the legal restrictions which I suggest we should accept. The Online Safety Act, which was passed in 2023, is a complex and in some ways clumsily drafted piece of legislation, which hits many targets that were not intended. However, its principal purpose is to require providers of online content to have age verification checks so as to control access by children to manipulative or corrupting material such as pornography or material advocating suicide or self-harm. I have pointed out that the concept of freedom of expression involves treating adults as capable of discernment and of intelligently ordering their lives. The same assumptions cannot apply to children, who are by definition in a state of developing but incomplete maturity, and who do not have the full range of liberties available to adults. It is fair to regard the manipulation of children’s sensibilities as closely analogous to the coercion from which we seek to protect adults.

Next, there are laws which regulate the way in which our right of free speech is exercised, rather than the content of our speech. These too are, in principle, acceptable. For example, you cannot picket abortion clinics within 150 meters of their doors or buy advertising time for political causes on television. The law restricts the picketing of abortion clinics because it harasses women at an emotionally difficult time of their lives, but you can still protest against abortion in ways that do not amount to harassment: you can stand with your placards 160 meters away, demonstrate in Trafalgar Square, write articles in the press, publish podcasts on YouTube, distribute leaflets, and so on. The law forbids political advertising on television in order to provide some limit on the power of big money to buy influence over political debate in a democracy. However, you can still do party political broadcasts, put up posters on billboards, take advertising space in newspapers, or hold political rallies. These restrictions are not directed against the content of any spoken or written statement. There is no infringement of the right to freedom of expression simply because there are some places where you cannot speak. A notice saying “Silence” in a courtroom, church or library is not an infringement of free speech.

My final example is more controversial. It is about the laws relating to defamation and privacy. The law of libel and slander allows people to claim damages from those who have told lies about them. The law of privacy allows those whose privacy has been invaded without any justification in the public interest to claim damages from the intruder. There are legitimate concerns about the granting of injunctions, especially in privacy cases, but I see no reason why the law should not, after proper investigation, correct the financial consequences of lies and intrusions into our private lives by awarding compensation for the damage which these things can cause. I do not regard that as censorship. It simply adjusts as between private individuals the financial consequences of free speech.

If these are legitimate restrictions on freedom of speech, there are others which have been imposed over the last half-century and which ought to cause us real concern. They are designed to protect people not from coercion or manipulation but simply from being offended.

A good example, which is currently topical, is the provision of the Terrorism Act 2000, which forbids public expressions of support for proscribed terrorist organizations. The Act forbids any conduct which involves assisting or participating in the work of a proscribed terrorist organization, which is fair enough. However, it then goes on to forbid expressions of support even where they do not assist the work of the organization but merely amount to the peaceful expression of a favorable opinion about it. Unlike the restrictions which I have just been discussing, this is a direct attack on the content of certain statements. There are people who think that terrorism in the service of a good cause is fine. I think that this is foolish, but should not be criminal. Arresting hundreds of people in Parliament Square for holding up placards saying that they support Palestine Action is an unprincipled interference with freedom of expression.

The main restrictions of this kind come under the broad heading of hate crimes, which is probably the most intrusive and least justifiable interference with freedom of expression in Britain. Hate crimes are based on the Public Order Act of 1986. Their scope has been expanded by successive amendments since the original Act was passed. The position can be summarized as follows: it is an offense to use language which stirs up racial hatred, religious hatred or hatred based on sexual orientation. In the case of religious hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation, the language used has to be threatening. This probably means words which threaten imminent violence, which broadly accords with the law’s traditional approach to breaches of the peace. However, in the case of stirring up racial hatred, the offense is much wider. The language used need not be threatening. It is enough that it should be abusive or offensive. In the case of religious hatred, there is a broadly drawn exception which allows people to discuss or criticize, or express antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of any religious belief or practice. This may be described as a proviso for the benefit of Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and the late Bertrand Russell, all of whom have had harsh things to say about religious beliefs. Yet there is no such exception in the case of race or sexual orientation. In 2024, 140,561 hate crimes were recorded by the 43 police forces in England and Wales. The breadth of the offense can be seen from the facts that the police have arrested Christian preachers for their street sermons, parents engaged in a dispute with their daughter’s school, and the Irish comedian Graham Linehan for tweeting that women confronted by trans men in women-only spaces should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls”.

In addition to hate crimes properly so-called, there is an anomalous category known as “non-crime hate incidents”. The police have a common law power to record incidents. Non-crime hate incidents are not criminal offenses, but are simply incidents which the police are administratively directed to record. They have real consequences and will usually entail intimidating visits and warnings from the police. They will show up on enhanced criminal record checks and may stop people getting jobs. The police defend the practice on the ground that such incidents may lead to real crimes if repeated. This seems rather far-fetched. The job of the police is to enforce the criminal law, not to regulate behavior which is perfectly lawful but may be loutish, offensive, politically incorrect or contrary to received opinion. Different police forces have recorded as non-crime hate incidents gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, and even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration. Harry Miller, who was visited by Humberside police at his workplace and questioned about his gender-critical tweets, took them to court. The conduct of the police, said the judge, offended against a “cardinal democratic principle”. “In this country,” he said, “we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” Yet last year, more than 13,000 non-crime hate incidents were recorded by police forces in England and Wales.

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“Hatred”, “threatening” and “abusive” are vague terms which cry out for precise definition, but there is no definition of these words in the Public Order Act. “Offensive” is an even vaguer term, which is likewise undefined. On the face of it, the word extends to anything that causes offense. As for non-crime hate incidents, they have no statutory basis at all and therefore no definition either. The looseness of these concepts means that in reality action depends on the discretion of individual police officers. This is not a proper function for a statutory public service or a satisfactory basis for penalizing speech. A police state can fairly be defined as a state in which the police have discretion as to what constitutes an offense. The prosecuting authorities have tried to resolve this problem in a highly unsatisfactory way. The Crown Prosecution Service and the police have agreed to define a hate crime as anything which is perceived by the victim or anyone else to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, the definition which they use is subjective. If the complainant thinks it is a hate crime, then it is a hate crime. One would think that hatred implied a very high degree of animosity, but the Crown Prosecution Service has suggested that it can include ill-will, ill-feeling, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment, and dislike. Yet all of these, humanity being what it is, are hazards which most of us must expect to live with. Remarkably, until 2021 the College of Policing, which sets standards for the police, after explaining that a hate crime depended on the perception of the victim, added the following observation:

“The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers and staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.”

Carried to its logical conclusion, this approach gives racial minorities a right of veto; an entitlement to silence opinions to which they object.

In 2021, the guidance was changed in response to criticism by the Court of Appeal in Miller’s case. The Court of Appeal did not object to the subjective character of the definition, but it held that the guidance was unlawful because it was far too wide. It interfered with Miller’s right of freedom of expression and was likely to have a chilling effect on the discussion of controversial issues like gender. However, the changes to the guidance were minimal. The guidance now says that at the point of receiving the complaint, no justification or evidence is required, leaving open the possibility of seeking such evidence later. The effect is that the investigation of a hate-crime is still dependent on the personal sensitivities of the complainant and the discretion of the police.

All of this originated with the Macpherson Report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which was published in 1999. Macpherson made two recommendations which are relevant for present purposes. First, he recommended that the police should systematically record “racist incidents”, a category which he defined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. That is the origin of the subjective definitions currently used by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Secondly, he recommended that racist incidents should include both crimes and non-crimes. That is the origin of the category of non-crime hate incidents. Experience has shown the Macpherson recommendations have proved to be extremely damaging. Speaking in the House of Lords last November, Lord Hogan-Howe, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, observed that the recording of hate crime was a well-intended change which had gone wrong. “The definition of a crime is objective and the definition of hate crime is subjective,” he said, “during the time this has been in place, online crime and online hate crime have grown massively, and the application of the hate crime definition has been inconsistent.” Recently, Britain’s largest police force, the Metropolitan Police, announced that it would stop dealing with non-crime hate incidents. The current commissioner, it was announced, “has been clear he doesn’t believe officers should be policing toxic culture war debates, with current laws and rules on inciting violence online leaving them in an impossible position”. So far the Met’s example has not been followed by other police forces.

The most famous test for determining what can and what cannot properly be suppressed is the “harm principle” proposed by John Stuart Mill, the great Victorian apostle of free speech, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty. Mill taught that the only purpose for which power might properly be exercised against individuals against their will was to prevent harm to others. Hate crime and non-crime hate incidents are symptoms of a modern tendency to redefine harm so that it extends to the discomfort caused by having to endure rudeness, contradiction or dissent. When interest groups object to someone’s opinion of them, they commonly call for a subjective approach to its impact. Harm is whatever the relevant target group perceives as harm. It depends on their “lived experience”, as the phrase goes. This way of looking at the harm done by free speech is particularly common when the offended group is a racial, religious or sexual minority. The argument is that words may undermine the dignity of the groups against whom they are directed. Words wound, it is said, especially when they relate to another person’s identity or status. Words are therefore viewed as a form of violence comparable to physical assault. But there are obvious problems with this approach. One is that concepts such as undermining human dignity are too uncertain and subjective to serve as part of the definition of a criminal offense. Another is that there is an important difference between violence and words. Violence is coercive. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive except in those cases where they are calculated to provoke violence.

Today, racial, religious or sexual minorities are said to need protection from hurtful words. The desire to accommodate groups who feel themselves oppressed is understandable. It assists social inclusion. Racial, religious and sexual differences are highly sensitive matters, but they are also major issues in our society, as well as in other countries of Western Europe and North America. They need to be openly discussed without fear of criminal liability. Discussion certainly cannot be suppressed without inviting serious suppressed anger which will ultimately be destabilizing and very bad for community relations. Historically, minorities have been the main victims of censorship and other forms of intellectual and social intolerance and the chief beneficiaries of freedom of speech. As I have pointed out, people once believed in the persecution of sexual minorities, the inferiority racial minorities and the exclusion of religious minorities. These notions were supported by the social consensus of the age, but died out in the face of rational discourse. In general, rational counter-argument is a better way of addressing hate speech than the attempt to suppress it through criminal law.

The suppression or punishment of speech tends to start from the best of motives. Its progress is gradual and frequently unperceived. But the ultimate result is objectionable. Recent legislation and police practice has, I fear, moved away from the distinction between coercion and liberty, which represented the only rational basis for curtailing freedom of expression. The result has been to reduce large parts of the law in this area to incoherence.

Once you start proscribing speech on the sole ground that it offends or distresses people, you open the door to the censorship of any words that people do not like. Without a coherent principle governing the permissible limits of free speech, there is effectively no free speech on some issues, except for those who confine themselves to the inoffensive and the anodyne. I think that that would be a retreat into an unpleasant world.

***

This essay is adapted from the Shrieval Lecture, given at Hereford Town Hall on 12 November 2025

Our approach to the whole issue of free speech is still largely moulded by attitudes born in the Enlightenment, when the main enemy of freedom of expression was the state and certain quasi-state institutions, such as the established churches. But in modern liberal democracies, the real enemy of free speech is not the state but the pressure of opinion from our fellow citizens. This is not a new insight, but it is a frequently forgotten one. Most of our issues were recognised by the great Victorian apostle of free speech John Stuart Mill, a thinker whose uncanny ability to anticipate the dilemmas of our own age can still take us by surprise. Mill foresaw that in a democratic age, such as was just dawning in Victorian Britain, a culture of conformity would be a greater threat to freedom of expression than any action of the state. Society, he wrote, is capable of practising “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself”.

Tolerance does not come naturally to human beings. For most of human history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society and about the moral codes of humanity was laid down by authority, usually by people claiming to speak in the name of God. Pluralism and diversity of opinion have only been accepted as desirable for the last three or four centuries. They are essentially the legacy of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the European Enlightenment of the 18th. These movements rejected mere authority as a source of truth, in favour of observation, reasoning and rational discourse. But like all cultural phenomena, theirs was a fragile construct. In recent years, we have reverted to the older, more authoritarian model which prevailed before the 17th century, although God no longer has much to do with it.

A large part of the explanation has been the decline of individualism. Mill’s outlook on life was profoundly individualist. He once declared that if all mankind were of one opinion and only one person of the contrary opinion, there could be no justification for silencing him. But today individualism is widely rejected as a social value. It is regarded as selfish, uncaring and antisocial. This attitude has undermined the case for freedom of expression; it reflects a view of society as a single great organism which must have a single collective notion of what is true and good. Free speech is seen as a tool of oppression.

It is true that in a world of free speech, the most powerful voices will belong to people influential enough to have a public platform. This is so even in an age when speech has been democratised by social media. However, in a world of free speech, what the powerful say will be open to challenge. The alternative is a world in which public discourse is dominated by a different and more sinister form of power — the power of those with loud enough voices and sharp enough elbows to drown out others. That power will not be open to challenge. The idea of a community with a common outlook on the world sounds more inviting than a community divided by ideological or economic conflict. However, as long as human beings retain their individuality, their intellectual curiosity and their scepticism, a common outlook cannot be achieved without systematic coercion — which is what we are witnessing today.

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John Stuart Mill anticipated many things, but he did not anticipate the internet. Social media can conjure up instant online lynch mobs. They make a powerful amplifier available to the most intolerant strands of opinion. The algorithms which determine what material is placed under people’s noses expose them only to sentiments which they already agree with, thus intensifying their opinions and eliminating not only dissent but even nuance and moderation. Mill assumed that the pressure to conform would come from self-righteous majorities. But social media has conferred immense power on self-righteous minorities, often quite small minorities.

The most remarkable illustration of this is the vicious campaign currently being conducted to silence those who believe that gender is based on an immutable biological fact. Polling evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of people believe that gender is determined at birth and cannot be altered by medical or surgical intervention, let alone by simple choice. That view is consistent with the current scientific orthodoxy, which regards gender as binary. Yet pressure from a noisy minority has created a situation in which the public expression of the prevailing and probably correct view about gender can lead to dismissal from employment, the cancellation of speaking engagements and publication contracts, and an avalanche of public shaming and abuse.

John Stuart Mill taught that the only purpose for which power might properly be exercised against individuals against their will was to prevent harm to others. But what we are presently witnessing is a subtle redefinition of the whole concept of harm to include the harm said to be caused by having to endure contradiction. The argument is that words wound, especially when they relate to another person’s identity or status; a university or a workplace where a person is exposed to disagreement must therefore be regarded, in the standard catchphrase, as “unsafe”.

The difference between violence and words is obvious. Violence is coercive. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive except in those cases where they are calculated to provoke violence. Yet in North America, Britain and much of the Anglosphere, this notion of harm has captured institutions. Recent research in the United States suggests that 29% of university professors have been pressured by university authorities into avoiding controversial subjects; 16% have either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their words, their teaching or their academic research, while another 7% say that they have been investigated. Those working on any subject involving ethnic or religious sensitivities are particularly vulnerable. More than 80% of students report that they self-censor their work for fear of stepping out of line.

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Underlying much of this debate is a fundamental challenge to the objective notion of harm. When interest groups object to someone’s opinion, harm is whatever they perceive as harm. It depends on “lived experience”, as the phrase goes, particularly when the offended group is an ethnic, religious or sexual minority. The desire to accommodate minorities who feel themselves oppressed is understandable. It assists social inclusion. But carried to its logical extreme it gives them a right of veto, an entitlement to silence opinions. And it is being carried to its logical extreme. In many countries, including Britain, hate speech is in some circumstances a criminal offence or an aggravating factor when accompanied by some other criminal conduct. The British police and prosecution authorities have agreed upon a definition of their own devising, according to which a hate crime means any action which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, they have adopted a subjective definition dependent on the feelings of the victim rather than an objective assessment of the words used.

All of these problems have been intensified by a powerful generational divide. A mass of anecdotal evidence suggests that venues, publishers, and other media who shun controversial views are often pushed into it by their junior staff. This rage of a younger generation against their own societies is not wholly irrational. Liberal democracy has always depended on economic good fortune. The turn in the economic fortunes of Western democracies has persuaded a whole generation that they will be the first cohort for many decades who will be worse off than their parents. The postwar generation seems to them to have lived on the fat of the land, deferring intractable issues like climate change, capricious patterns of inequality and poisonous race relations for their children and grandchildren to deal with.

The perceived power of vested interests and the inertia of democratic decision-making have combined to persuade much of the younger generation that debate is worthless and direct action the only answer. The European and American sense of moral and intellectual superiority provokes attempts by a younger generation to discredit their legacy. Hence the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement (even in societies such as Britain where the police do not routinely murder people of colour), the demands for “decolonisation” of school and university syllabuses, and so on. The influential French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that what people regard as objective truth or independent opinion is really no more than the product of entrenched power structures. Debate is pointless in such a world; to get anywhere, you have to break the power structures. I do not imagine that the young enemies of free speech have read Foucault’s opaque prose. But many of them act on the same principle. An angry and frustrated generation is unlikely to accept the conventions of rational discourse or the messy compromises of democratic politics as readily as their parents did. Indeed, successive surveys by the Washington-based Pew Research Institute suggest that support for democracy is declining among the young in much of the West, especially in Britain and America.

These developments have fundamentally changed the argument about freedom of expression. The issue now pits different groups of citizens and different generations against each other. The people who scream abuse at their adversaries from the roadside or from their social media accounts would claim to be exercising their own rights of free expression. The impact of their anger is indirect. They create an oppressive climate in which other people are silenced and may lose their careers, their livelihoods and their reputation, or else may simply be forced to keep away from controversial subjects. The screamers do not themselves bring about these consequences. They simply influence the mood in a way which causes other people, such as editors, publishers, universities and employers, to persecute dissenters, because in a world of heightened intellectual tensions they prefer to keep their heads down. An editor is under no obligation to give space to people of controversial views. A publisher is under no obligation to publish them. A university cannot be made to employ them. So, when the freedom of expression of one group is used to silence others, how is the state to mediate?

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The law has generally been on the side of free speech. In the United Kingdom, to be criminal, words have to be inflammatory and intended to — or known to be likely to — stir up hatred against vulnerable categories of people. For good measure, there is a broad exemption for the protection of free speech which in principle permits discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse. The British police have recorded as “hate incidents” gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration. But when these cases have come before the courts, they have usually been thrown out. In one case where the police took action against a gender-critical tweeter, the judge remarked that their conduct offended against a “cardinal democratic principle”. “In this country”, he added, “we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

But there are limits to what law can achieve. The government and the courts are impotent to protect people against the worst threats to free speech: the howling trollers of the internet, the addictive outrage of the street protesters, or the oppressive self-censorship of publishers, journalists and academics. These things can only be addressed by a profound cultural change, which it is beyond the power of law to bring about. Changing this culture depends on you, on me, on every one of us. The only reason that activists try to disrupt and suppress unwelcome opinions is that experience shows that it works. Venues do not book controversial speakers. Publishers do not publish controversial books. Prominent commentators do not step out of line or, if they do, they are bullied into issuing cringing apologies.

None of us has to behave like this. All of us can contribute to the solution by being willing to make it clear where we stand, not just on free speech itself, but on the subjects which have become taboo. I return to the ideas of John Stuart Mill. He recognised that what was needed was the courage of individuals to defy the mob. In language which might have been directed at our present problems, he wrote that “precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable in order to break through that tyranny that people should be eccentric”. By eccentricity, he meant diversity of opinion. “That so few now dare to be eccentric”, he wrote, “marks the chief danger of the time”.

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If, for example, we believe that gender is not an optional status but a biological fact, we can say so, instead of being shamed into silence. If we reject concepts dear to particular ethnic or religious groups, we should say so and refuse to back down or apologise when they take offence. We have to discuss the unmentionable, challenge the unchallengeable. I am not recommending rudeness or abuse, but there is a larger place for reasoned objection than we realise.

The greatest challenge will be self-censorship by venues, publishers, the media, and academic institutions. They will say, perhaps only to themselves or in the privacy of their editorial boards or faculty meetings, why should we expose ourselves? Why should we quarrel with our young and idealistic junior staff or students who do not wish to sully their hands with this or that book, film, or lecture? Why should we court the unpleasantness involved in speaking up? The answer to that was given by Mill in his inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews, after he had been elected as its Rector in 1867. “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion,” he said; “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.

Free speech is not a luxury. Ever since the 17th century, the civilisation of mankind has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as an objective truth, independent of human will. It may be only partly knowable, and more or less difficult to identify, but it exists somewhere out there whether we like it or not. We have built our intellectual world by objective study of the available material, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just social constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. They have made possible the phenomenal economic prosperity and intellectual achievement of the last four centuries.

The basic principles of rational discourse on which all this depended are now under challenge. Reason is rejected as arrogant. Feeling and emotion are upheld as suitable substitutes. Freedom is treated as domineering, enlightenment as offensive to the unenlightened. Current campaigns to suppress certain opinions and eliminate debate are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to contradict, for fear of provoking their outrage and abuse. These things are symptoms of the closing of the human mind and the narrowing of our intellectual world. Something in our civilisation has died.

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No one can be entitled to intellectual safety. That is because statements of fact or opinion are necessarily provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. Once upon a time, the authorised consensus was that the sun moved round the Earth and that blood did not circulate round the body. These propositions were refuted only because current orthodoxy was challenged by people once thought to be dangerous heretics and disturbers of the peace. Historically, most societies have abhorred democracy, rejected religious and political tolerance, and regarded the whole idea of racial or gender equality as ridiculous. These ideas, which were thought to reflect obvious moral truths, died out in most countries in the face of rational argument. Knowledge advances by testing conflicting arguments, not by suppressing them. Understanding increases by exposure to uncomfortable truths.

For those of us who live in democracies, our collective life depends on the resolution of issues between citizens by marshalling objectively verifiable facts. It depends on ordered debate about their implication under common rules which exclude coercion and falsehood. It depends on a culture in which the outcome of our processes of collective decision-making is accepted even by those who disagree with it. That is what is at stake in the current debate about free speech. The alternative is a narrow-minded, intolerant and authoritarian society in which the fear of giving offence or challenging existing shibboleths eliminates the most creative and original products of the human spirit.

Ultimately, we have to accept the implications of human creativity. Some of what people say will be wrong. Some of it will be hurtful. Some of it may even be harmful. But there are greater values at stake. We cannot have truth without accommodating error and tolerating the challenge to received ideas. We cannot live together in society without allowing people to say things that other people regard as foolish, hurtful or untrue. It is the price that we pay for allowing human civilisation to advance and flourish. It is worth fighting for.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered last weekend at the Christchurch Town Hall, for the New Zealand Free Speech Union.

Writing my history of the wars, with the final volume out next week, has occupied 43 years of my life. So what have I learned in the course of my long Odyssey through the chronicles and archives of this remote period? More important, what might others learn? No historian writes entirely for their own satisfaction. They have an imaginary reader in mind whose pleasure is the ultimate test of their work.

The Late Middle Ages was a time of extraordinary contrasts. It was a period in which men, and occasionally women, created works of lasting beauty: buildings, sculpture, jewellery, paintings, novels and histories. It was the age of Chaucer and Gower, of Froissart and Christine de Pisan, of the exquisite miniatures commissioned from the Limbourg brothers by the great Duke of Berry, of the emotionally overpowering sculpture created by Klaus Sluter for the Dukes of Burgundy a generation before Donatello, of the dramatic churches of Mont-Saint-Michel and St. George’s Windsor. The image of decline that hangs over the whole period could not be further from the truth.

Yet the age which created these things was also an age of cruelty and destruction unparalleled in any earlier period and few later ones. Many of its finest buildings were left in flames by passing armies. Paintings and illustrated manuscripts were dispersed, sculptures vandalised,  the work of jewellers and goldsmiths dismantled and melted down to contribute to the costs of war. It has been estimated that France lost about a third of its population, most of them non-combatants, on top of the terrible toll exacted by periodic outbreaks of famine and epidemic disease. It was a time of morbid pessimism and anxiety, when human life was cheap and men and women contemplated the imminent end of the world.

The history of the 14th and 15th centuries is dominated by outsize personalities. The great captains take pride of place, many of them immortalised by Shakespeare: Mauny, Chandos, the Black Prince, Du Guesclin, Salisbury, Fastolf, Talbot and Dunois. We know a great deal more about them than we do about the heroes of earlier ages, not least because the records of government survive more plentifully than for any previous period. But the war’s chroniclers, waspish and prejudiced forerunners of today’s tabloid papers, are supplemented for the first time by contemporary sources of a more personal kind: intimate poetry, biographies, memoirs and personal letters.

Some of the great figures of the time, like Edward III and Henry V have come down to us as cardboard cut-outs, their personalities half hidden behind the mask of government and the clouds of incense in which their contemporaries enveloped them. Others conformed to no established pattern. In an age when power was a prerogative of great noblemen, others broke the mould. Bertrand du Guesclin, the most famous French paladin of the period, came from an obscure gentry family in Brittany. Sir Robert Knollys, the terror of 14th-century Burgundy, probably begun his career as an archer. The same was true of Sir John Hawkwood, the crude English thug who ended up as one of Italy’s most successful soldiers of fortune. His painted monument by Paolo Uccello, an official commission of the Florentine Republic, still dominates the nave of Florence cathedral.

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The war made these men. Geoffrey Chaucer, known to most people only as the author of The Canterbury Tales, was also a soldier and diplomat, a polyglot who read widely in Latin, French and Italian. Charles, Duke of Orléans, was captured at the battle of Agincourt and passed the best years of his life in various English prisons, a pawn in the diplomacy of the period. Yet he was also a fine poet, pouring out his frustration in nostalgic ballads, some of them in English. At the other end of the social scale, Joan of Arc was an illiterate peasant when she turned the course of the war at the age of seventeen. She was only two years older when she defended herself with consummate skill at the trial which led to her execution. These extraordinary individuals would be worth meeting in any age.

There was, however, more to the Hundred Years War than exotic heroes and picturesque incidents, more than ever occurred to Froissart or Shakespeare. Until quite recently, war was the main collective activity of mankind. The origin of the modern state lies in the immense feat of organisation required to deploy a community’s resources for war. Most English soldiers were archers, which meant that armies were recruited across a wide social spectrum and in every part of the country. In Scotland, an extraordinarily high proportion of the manpower of the Lowlands fought in Scottish armies on the French side.

But, except in the most primitive societies, wars are not just fought by soldiers. They also depend on countless officials high and low, on recruiting officers and tax collectors, on shipbuilders and seamen, on armourers and metal-founders, on the men who read out proclamations in market squares or built bonfires on coastal hills to warn of invasion. These activities brought the war home to entire populations. A web of rumour united disparate communities. The state was omnipresent. It made people conscious of the state’s ambitions, but also of its failings. They were brought together by the triumphs of Edward III, the Black Prince and Henry V, but also by common grievances, many of which arose from the hardships of war and the bitterness of ultimate defeat. The Hundred Years War was not a total war in the sense that the world wars of the 20th century were total wars. But it came closer to the 20th-century model than any previous wars, perhaps closer than any later one before the age of Napoleon.

England and France responded to these challenges in different ways, with very different consequences. William Pitt the Younger once remarked that the prime material of war was money. Already in medieval Europe, the critical test of the power of the state was its ability to levy taxes. Following a widely accepted maxim of Roman law, most lawyers and philosophers of the time accepted that taxes required the consent of the community that had to pay them. In England, this was a reality. In France it was not. The English Parliament was niggardly in agreeing to war taxes, but at least it generally acknowledged an obligation to support the King’s wars, and its consent bound the whole nation. As a result the financial dependence of the English kings on Parliament was firmly established as a principle. With control of the purse, came political authority. The prominent role of the English Parliament intensified political activity in the communities represented there: the gentry of the shires, royal officials, clients and councillors of the nobility and the oligarchies of the towns. It dispersed political power among a large and coherent political community, forcing a more consensual style of government on the monarchy.

In France events took a different turn. The national and provincial estates were notoriously reluctant to authorise taxation, and when they did their authority was not always recognised by the communities from which they came. In the end, the kings lost patience and levied taxes by royal command, backed up by force. Before the wars, the political institutions of France and England had developed on very similar lines. But writing in the 1460s, Sir John Fortescue, a former chief justice and the author of one of the earliest treatises on the English constitution, distinguished between the “political” monarchy of England and the absolute monarchy of France. Fortescue overstated the power of the French kings, but he was right in a broader sense. The origins of the absolute monarchy of 17th- and 18th-century France lay in the methods needed to defeat the English in the Hundred Years War. France became a military state with a standing army and an aggressive foreign policy. England had only very small permanent forces, and did not become a major player in European politics again until the 18th century.

The English have always rejoiced in their insular status. As early as the 13th century, an English chronicler described it as “set at the end of the world, the sea girding it around”. It was the sentiment which Shakespeare put into the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt. “This precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.” It is part of the classic canon of English patriotism. Yet it was a myth. Politically, England was not an island until defeat in the Hundred Years War made it one. It had been part of a European polity.

Its fortunes were closely intertwined with those of France and the Low Countries. Its kings were peers of France, ruling a large part of western France by hereditary right. They conceived vast continental ambitions. Henry III measured himself against his great contemporary Louis IX of France, once trying to make himself King of Sicily. Edward III claimed the Crown of France as his own. He planned to make one of his sons count of Flanders and another Duke of Milan. A third son claimed the Crown of Castile and tried to make good his claim by armed invasion. Henry V’s errant brother Humphrey had ambitions to rule Hainault and Holland. It was the Hundred Years War that deprived the English kings of their continental dominions, encouraging an insularity that persisted for centuries.

And what if the English had won, as they so nearly did in the early 1420s? If Henry V and the Duke of Bedford had achieved their ambition of uniting France and England under the house of Lancaster, England’s subsequent history would have been very different. In an age when the state was not readily distinguished from the person of the monarch, the concept of the dual monarchy would sooner or later have broken down. England would of necessity have remained a continental power, but in a very particular sense. It would have become a subordinate part of a continental empire whose centre of gravity would inevitably have moved eastward towards its richer and more populous French territory, until the resulting tensions became intolerable. Defeat proved to be as decisive for the future of England as it was for that of France.

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The passions generated by ancient wars eventually fade, but those provoked by the wars of the English in 15th-century France have proved to be surprisingly durable. England’s monarchs continued to call themselves Kings of France long after the title had lost any meaning. In 1797, in the midst of another war with France, when the House of Commons debated peace proposals which would have required George III to abandon the title, one member protested against Pitt the Younger’s description of the title as “a harmless feather”. It was, he said, “gallantly won in the same glorious wars by which we first asserted the claim of our monarchs to that harmless feather… A great nation can never safely be disgraced.”

In France, the memory of English conquests lived on. The foundations of scholarship on the Hundred Years War were laid by patriotic French historians of the 19th century, writing under the shadow of Waterloo and Sedan. The passage of time did nothing to soften their indignation about the fate of their country in the time of Edward III, Henry V and the Duke of Bedford. The extraordinary life and death of Joan of Arc defied historical objectivity until quite recently. For centuries, her story was the focus of powerful political passions: nationalism, Catholicism, royalism and intermittent Anglophobia. Such myths are powerful agents of national identity. The great French historian Marc Bloch subscribed to none of these “-isms”, but even he thought that no Frenchman could truly understand his country’s history unless he thrilled at the story of Charles VII’s coronation at Reims in 1429. Writing in the summer of 1940 in the aftermath of a terrible defeat, Bloch looked to an earlier recovery from the edge of disaster for reassurance about the survival of France.

We are no strangers to long-term conflicts. The struggle of Russia to dominate eastern Europe is three centuries old. The three wars which France and Germany fought between 1870 and 1945 can plausibly be regarded as one conflict finally settled only by the internal transformation of Germany. The Hundred Years War was a conflict of that order. It is a powerful story, a story of the emergence of the two great nation-states of medieval Europe, nations which once had much in common, but gradually grew apart in a tide of organised violence. It is above all a story of the impact of war on those who directed it, on those who fought it and on those whose lives were disrupted or destroyed by it. It happened six centuries ago, but the themes are timeless.

In November 2022, the Wellcome Collection, a museum dedicated to the history of medicine, announced the closure of Medicine Man, an exhibition of artefacts relating to the history of medicine collected by its founder Sir Henry Wellcome. The decision to close this exhibition was itself perfectly reasonable. As a collector, Sir Henry Wellcome was a bit of a magpie, and the exhibition, which was 15 years old, was rather fusty. However, what mainly attracted attention was the statement which the curators published on Twitter that they had closed it because it “perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language”. To understand this statement, it is necessary to go back two and a half years to an earlier announcement from the Wellcome Collection in June 2020 in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Under the heading “Anti-Blackness and Racism”, it declared that the Collection was built on “racist and patriarchal narratives” and that institutional racism was enmeshed within its fabric. It went on to suggest that not only the Wellcome Collection but museums generally were “built on a foundation of white supremacy” and had replicated “racist behaviours” for decades. The curators declared their intention of “continually ask[ing] questions about power, representation and the civic role of public museums” and focussing on the “lived experiences of those who have been silenced, erased and ignored”.

What does all that mean? It is palpably untrue that medical history, as presented in Medicine Man, was based on racist, sexist and ableist theories. Certainly, museums reflect the historical outlook of those who assembled their collections and their successors who curated them. In Britain, they were generally able-bodied white males. But museums do not, just by virtue of that fact, replicate racist behaviours. Nor does our culture silence or ignore non-European experience where it is relevant. I think that what the curators meant to say was that the exhibition treated medicine as a western science of which non-white groups were passive consumers with no worthwhile contribution of their own. This, they felt, implied a hierarchy of cultures in which the west was superior to the rest, a notion which was offensive to non-western racial groups.

The Wellcome Collection is not alone. The Museum Association, which represents museums generally, has called on them to “address colonial structures and approaches to all areas of museum work”. At about the same time as the curators of the Wellcome Collection published their June 2020 statement, the Director of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew, probably the world’s leading institution dedicated to plant science, issued a similar statement on its behalf. He began with the usual cringing confession that its history “shamefully draws from a legacy that has deep roots in colonialism and racism”. The only fact cited to support this surprising assertion is that during the nineteenth century, the Royal Botanical Garden studied the movement of plants around the British Empire as part of its world-wide botanical mission. This is said to have made the Botanical Garden at Kew a “beacon of privilege and exploitation”. The director went on to declare that Kew would in future decolonise its collections and “tackle structural racism in plant and fungal science”, with a view to achieving “transformative and societal change” in modern Britain. The inference is that merely by having existed and collected information and specimens in the great age of imperialism Kew Gardens is in some way complicit in modern inequalities in Britain. Finally this. “There is no acceptable neutral position on this subject [racial injustice;]; to stay silent is to be complicit”. This is a particularly odd thing to say. It seems obvious that one can be an excellent plant scientist and an outstanding plant historian without taking any view at all on racial injustice.

These statements have certain points in common.

The first is that they are proposing a political program for the modern day, supported by a highly selective approach to the past which sees everything through the prism of race. Race becomes the supremely important phenomenon, masking every other aspect of a complex culture. Racial politics provide the framework of values by which every institution concerned with the past is to be judged. There are many important factors in the way that human societies develop. Race is only one of them and not necessarily the most important. Any serious commentator on the current state of historical studies ought to welcome attempts to present aspects of history which have previously been ignored or marginalised. That includes the story of ethnic minorities and non-European societies. But it does not mean that the whole of Britain’s modern history should be viewed through their eyes. It does not mean that the role of slavery or empire in Britain’s economic, cultural and social history should be exaggerated beyond recognition. And it does not mean that current political priorities should determine how we understand the past.

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The second thing these statements have in common, is that they lose sight of the broader evolution of human history. Benjamin Disraeli once observed in response to an antisemitic taunt in the House of Commons, that “while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon”. Victorian elites undoubtedly regarded their own civilisation as superior to others. This been a universal habit of humanity ever since the Greek city-states and the ancient dynasties of China dismissed the whole of the rest of the world as barbarians. If these prejudices are ever justified, it is only for short periods of time, two or three centuries at the most. Empires and cultures are transient. They have their periods of power and creativity, before fading away. Medicine is as good an example as any. White males have not always dominated medical science. There have been periods when major contributions came from non-European cultures: Chinese, Indian and Arab in particular. Historians have not ignored this. Great books have been written about it, almost all in European languages. The 26 volumes of the History of Science and Technology in China by the Cambridge scientist and historian Joseph Needham is one of the most remarkable works ever written on the multicultural origins of modern science. But this should not blind us to the fact that the three centuries before the Second World War were the European centuries, in medicine as in other sciences.

With very few exceptions, such as the use of some medicinal plants, indigenous non-Europeans contributed very little. If one looks across a broader chronological range, the picture is very different. But calls for the decolonisation of academic disciplines do not do that. They generally focus narrowly on the 18th and 19th century and seek to debunk one of the few indisputable facts about that period, namely that it was a period in which cultural and scientific developments fundamental to the modern world almost all emanated from Europe or from European settlements elsewhere.

Decolonisation has been demanded of many other disciplines which were never in any meaningful sense colonised: the visual arts, music, literature, philosophy and even the physical sciences and mathematics. The only connection between these fields of study and Europe’s imperial past is that the West achieved a dominant position in them during the imperial era. The decolonisation statement of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at Oxford reveals the same obsession with race and the same tendentious attempt to portray racism as a perennial theme of western thinking. It begins by seeking to discredit its own subject by referring to the scientific racism of the 19th century, which posited a racial hierarchy identified by physiological characteristics, a view which no serious scientist has entertained for many decades and which has no current relevance to the subject.

It goes on to identify science with empire by pointing to the Victorians’ collection of material samples and botanical specimens across the globe. Moving to the present day, it calls for a study of deep-rooted racial biases in digital technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning. One would not have thought that the subject was capable of racial bias. But as the statement proceeds, it becomes clear that the object is to redefine knowledge itself, in a way which artificially devalues western science. “As we work towards greater inclusion”, it declares, “we need to have a broader understanding of what constitutes ‘scientific knowledge’. Among other things, this is said to involve “challenging western-centric ideas of ‘objectivity’, ‘expertise’ and ‘merit’”, and “removing structural hierarchies that privilege certain knowledge and certain peoples over others”. It is clear that the authors of this document believe that the empirical scientific method as conceived in the west since the 17th century is just one of a number of equally valid approaches to the subject, and that it is racially biased to prefer this to any other.

There are two basic ideas behind statements like these. One is about the nature of historical truth. The other is about inherited collective guilt.

The repeated emphasis on challenging the structures of power is an echo of the teaching of postmodernist philosophers such as Michel Foucault. Foucault was the leading exponent of the idea that objective truth is unattainable, because truth is by nature subjective. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), he taught that the structures of power within a society determine what is generally perceived to be true. Few people outside the discipline of philosophy have read Foucault’s opaque works. But many more have read Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism, published in 1978, which applied Foucault’s ideas to the legacy of the great European empires. Said argued that powerful groups control the intellectual framework within which ideas are discussed and determines what constitutes knowledge. Historical truth, he claimed, is not discovered. It is made by historians, in accordance with unconscious prejudices moulded by the power structures of society. The power structures which had enabled Europeans to dominate much of the world between the 18th and the 20th centuries had generated a view of the world based on a hierarchy of civilisations which patronised and marginalised non-European peoples. According to Said, this frame of mind persisted. It led modern scholars to construct a narrative of the past which treated non-western races as representing an earlier stage of human evolution, less valid than the more developed experience of the modern west. The task of the historian was therefore to deconstruct the hegemonist West and substitute a different power structure in which other people’s truth could be acknowledged.

These ideas have been extremely influential among many people who know nothing of their origin and have never heard of Foucault or Said. In 2015, the organisers of the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from its niche outside Oriel College issued a pamphlet entitled Our Aims. Their purpose, it said, was to suppress the frame of mind which the statue symbolised. It was to “remedy the highly selective narrative of traditional academia—which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge—by integrating subjugated and local epistemologies…” When, three years ago, the Director of the Pitt-Rivers Museum decided to ask a Maasai shaman to divine which objects from the Maasai collections of the museum had been stolen from their original owners and to repatriate the items that he designated, she was giving practical effect to the idea that modern historical and archaeological methods are no more valid as a route to truth than mystical divination employed in other cultures. If truth is subjective, then every ethnic group may have its own truth, and the whole concept of objective knowledge disappears.

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As for inherited collective guilt, the argument is that if people once suffered what we now regard as injustice at the hands of our forebears, we owe it to their descendants to make that good. One thing that the study of history teaches us is that injustice as we conceive it has been the lot of much of humanity at most times. Much of the history of the world is a history of the brutal exercise of force: tyrannies, wars, massacres, persecutions. Historically, most people at most times have abhorred democracy, rejected political and religious tolerance and regarded the very idea of gender or racial equality as ridiculous. What should we do about this now that we think differently?

Logically, perhaps, humanity at large ought to atone for its own past. But at that level of generality, the gesture would be largely meaningless. After all, injustice is indiscriminately distributed across the centuries and continents. It would deprive what is really a political program of its political force. So the call for atonement for heritable guilt is directed against some specific sector of humanity, say, white people, the British or Oxford University. This is not only irrational. It is also morally repellent. Historically, the idea that particular groups bear an inherited responsibility for some past iniquity has been the basis of ugly prejudices and vicious persecutions.

The desire to visit moral responsibility for the past on some identifiable sector of mankind has generally focused selectively on Britain’s involvement with empire and slavery. No one would today defend the worst moments of the British Empire: the rapacity of the East India Company before its political and military operations were brought under government control at the end of the 18th century; the Opium wars; the Amritsar massacre, and so on. But it is a gross offence against historical honesty to take all the worst features of some historical phenomenon and then serve them up as if they were the whole.

Throughout history, empire and armed migration have been part of the dynamic of human development. The values which we regard as characteristic of western civilisation were born in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome both of which were founded on slavery and imperial conquest. The bloody conquests of the Arabs in the seventh and eights centuries gave rise to a remarkable middle eastern civilisation, far more impressive than anything to be found in Europe in the same period. The rise of modern Japan as a technical and industrial giant had its origin in the forcible opening up of the “hermit isle” in the 1850s by the American navy. The European colonial empires between the 16th and the 20th centuries had the same catalytic effect on the world.

The British Empire was created and sustained by force or the threat of it, as all empires, indeed all governments, ultimately are. It denied self-determination to its indigenous populations until its final years. Yet it was also a remarkable administrative and cultural phenomenon. Those who governed it were guided by a variety of motives, patriotic, economic, military, geopolitical, evangelical. But at least in the last century and a half of the empire’s existence they were also infused with a strong streak of humanitarianism and idealism. The empire suppressed a variety of barbarous practices which it would have been convenient to tolerate, including cannibalism, suttee, human sacrifice and slavery. It brought spectacular economic development, creating global networks of shipping, railways and telegraph and injecting capital and enterprise into local economies. It brought relative peace, honest administration and the rule of law to much of the world. It built great world cities: Mumbai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney.

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Our forebears believed that good government was better than self-government, and that trade and economic development were better than cultural autarky. These are unfashionable views now, but there is nothing inherently disreputable about them. Would sub-Saharan Africa be better off today if Europeans had left its peoples to their own devices? Would modern India be better off if it had not inherited its subcontinental identity and economic infrastructure from Britain? Would the world as a whole be a better place if Europeans had never settled in the Americas or Australia? I do not think so.

Slavery was once among the most ancient and persistent institutions of mankind. The Arabs and the indigenous rulers of precolonial Africa were probably the greatest slavers who ever existed. The involvement of the Atlantic nations is, by comparison, relatively recent. It began with the Portuguese in the 15th century and the Spanish in the 16th. Britain was the last country to take to slave trading and the first country to reject it. In societies imbued by Christian moral teaching, slavery was only defensible on the footing that black people were not really human. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the rise of evangelical Christianity in Britain led to a major movement of moral revulsion against that idea. In 1772, the Court of King’s Bench declared that the English common law did not recognise property in another human being. The slave trade was criminalised throughout the British Empire in 1807, earlier than any other country except Denmark. Slavery itself was abolished by statute throughout the empire in 1834.

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For the remainder of the 19th century, Britain deployed its considerable diplomatic and naval power in suppressing the practice, initially on the Atlantic coasts of Africa, then in the African interior and the Indian ocean. The polemics surrounding Britain’s involvement in the slave trade concentrate on its participation in the 17th and 18th century slave trade while ignoring or belittling its involvement in the suppression of the trade. Yet historically the latter was very much more significant. The 17th and 18th century slave trade was in line with the conventional moral values of the age. But its suppression was revolutionary. It went against the tide of opinion elsewhere in Europe and against Britain’s economic interest. The global consequences were immense. The sheer size and global reach of Britain’s colonial empire was the biggest single factor in the suppression of a practice that had existed across the world from time immemorial.

To many people, all this is beside the point. Their real concern is with the present, and with those aspects of the past which serve their arguments about the present. Their anger against the past is provoked by a small number of totemic issues, of which race and empire are the most sensitive. These issues are totemic because the position which one takes on them is seen as a symbolic statement of which side one is on in the broader battle to shape the future. When an issue acquires totemic status, the actual facts disappear from view. The issue becomes a mere occasion for political self-expression. Hence the vandalism of statues and the campaigns to rename streets and buildings.

The statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was erected to honour his foundation of schools, hospitals and almshouses in Bristol. Tobias Rustat’s monument in Jesus College Cambridge was put there to mark his generous gifts to his college. All Souls College Library was once named after Christopher Codrington to mark his funding of one of Oxford’s great institutions of learning. All three individuals had some involvement in slavery, but none of these memorials and dedications commemorated that aspect of their lives. The objection to them suffers from the same partial vision of the past as the unbalanced historical accounts of Britain’s imperial record. Once a person or an institution is touched by slavery or empire, nothing else about them matters, however important or admirable. This marks the extreme point which tendentious selection can reach. David Hume is thought unworthy of commemoration by Edinburgh University because he shared the patronising indifference of his contemporaries to other races. Yet this is a fact about Hume which is of very little importance when measured against his stature as one of the intellectual giants of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment. In the eyes of a significant minority of the British population, mostly young, Winston Churchill has become a mere symbol of English imperialism and racism. Far more significant aspects of his life, such as his contribution to Britain’s survival in the Second World War and the destruction of Nazism, are swept aside.

Does this matter? I believe that it does.

The civilisation of mankind since the 17th century has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as objective truth. It may be more or less difficult to identify with confidence, but it exists. In history, the difficulty in discovering the truth is due to the uneven survival of sources and to the problems of interpreting those that we have, not to inherited prejudices or ideological mental blocks. We have traditionally built our intellectual world on the basis that we get closest to the truth by objective study of the available material, by abandoning immovable preconceptions, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just western constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. There is no alternative route to truth dependent on different racial identities or different hierarchies of power. Yet these basic principles of rational discourse are now under challenge.

The repudiation of Britain’s past in the name of a modern political agenda is currently a minority position. But there is a serious risk that it will become the orthodoxy of the next generation. It is strong in some important groups, notably the young and politically active, and a vocal contingent in the academic world. It may not be a passing phase. The habit of reinforcing one’s political instincts by adopting whatever facts suit them is too deeply ingrained in human nature. Today, it is intensified by the social media. They are a major source of information, especially for the young. But they are curated by algorithms which amplify views that already exist, suppressing nuance, balance or doubt and giving a misleading impression of a great tide of opinion when the material is often generated by a handful of fanatics.

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Those who believe that knowledge and truth are mere social constructs are almost bound to end up by suppressing competing views. If what we think we know is actually no more than an artificial consensus created by power structures invisibly controlling our schools, universities, publishers and museums, then there is no point in debate. You have to change the power structures, take control of those institutions and create a new consensus. This is what is now happening. It is happening with the enthusiastic support of many of the institutions themselves. They lack the self-confidence to stand up for a rational approach to empirical research and knowledge which alone justifies their existence. I am not going to suggest that modern academic scholars on the British Empire and slavery are all determinists in the mould of Foucault and Edward Said. However, their treatment of the past often shares the three main vices of postmodernist history: tendentious selection, exaggeration and intolerance of dissent.

Oxford’s 2017 “Ethics and Empire Project” was set up to explore the moral and factual basis of the conventional hostility to empire. It provoked vocal opposition from many academics. One opponent of the project, a professor of history at King’s College London, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that “any attempt to create a balance sheet of the good and evil of empire can’t be based on rigorous scholarship”. It is rare to find a serious scholar overtly rejecting the very idea of balance in the assessment of controversial evidence. But it is not as rare as it should be. The fact that his protest was supported by 170 academics in various open letters sends a depressing message about the current state of scholarship on this issue. It also explains why scholars who dissent from the current orthodoxy find it wise to keep quiet about it if they value their careers.

Every human society depends for its cohesion on a sense of collective identity. The French historian Ernest Renan, in his Sorbonne lecture of 1882 “What is a Nation?”, argued that the solidarities which created a nation were primarily historical. Renan’s target was the ethnic nationalism and social theories preached by overt racists such as Johann Herder and Arthur Gobineau. National identity, Renan declared, did not depend on ethnic or linguistic solidarities, but on a history of collective effort, collective sacrifice and collective devotion. It depended on a consciousness of having done great things together in the past, and wanting to do more of them in future. His definition is pithier in French: “avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore”.

There is a great irony to modern debates about the past. Those who claim to be the champions of ethnic minorities are seeking to undermine Britain’s past as a source of collective solidarity. They are reverting to morally questionable notions of conflicting ethnic identities which can only fragment our society, obstruct the integration of minorities and undermine any sense of community. The problem is aggravated in the case of race by a notion of hereditary moral responsibility, which requires one to recognise an entirely artificial class of modern victims defined by race. The result is to perpetuate grievances on account of past events that have no practical relevance to modern lives.

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Democratic institutions only work if people accept the legitimacy of their decisions even where they disagree with them. For that to happen, they have to identify themselves with the wider society to which they belong. The fragmentation of a society’s historic identity can only hinder that process. The problem is aggravated by the intolerant and polemical tone that characterises much of what is written and spoken about Britain’s past. The great apostle of Victorian liberalism John Stuart Mill foresaw that the main threat to its survival would come not from the authoritarian state but from the conformity imposed by public opinion. Current campaigns to vilify parts of our history are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to express contrary opinions for fear of provoking outrage and abuse. These are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world. Recently, publication of a book written by the director of the Oxford Ethics and Empire project was indefinitely “deferred” (in effect rejected) by Bloomsbury, the publisher which had commissioned it, on the ground that “public feeling” did not support its publication at the moment. This is the mentality which Mill and other apostles of liberal values dreaded.

We will never understand the past unless we recognise that human beings are light and shade and acknowledge both. Few individuals and no societies have ever been wholly good or wholly bad in any age. This mixture of darkness and light is a critical part of the process by which human societies develop. We can celebrate the achievements of our forebears as well as learning from their mistakes and iniquities. To reject what is wonderful and fascinating about humanity in favour of a monochrome view of the past, dictated by current priorities, is obsessive and fanatical. It is also very bad history

These New Roundheads,with their destructive campaigns against historical objectivity, share a deadly combination of dogmatic intolerance and sanctimonious philistinism with the original Roundheads. The earlier Roundheads ultimately failed in their attempt to produce a uniform culture in England according to their own narrow vision of virtue. A civilised society should wish the same fate upon their modern successors.

This is an edited version of the Pharos Lecture, which Jonathan Sumption delivered on February 27 in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford

When Adams chose the word “suicide” to describe the death of democracies, he was making a deliberate and important point. Democracies fail from within. They are not usually overwhelmed by external forces, such as invasion or insurrection, or overthrown by internal coups. They fail because people spontaneously turn to more authoritarian forms of government.

Adams had in mind the democracies of the ancient world, the only precedents available before the foundation of the United States. According to the orthodox narrative, the democracies of the ancient world had died because people succumbed to the appeal of demagogues, who promised them security at home and triumphs abroad in return for their acceptance of autocracy. People simply lost interest in democratic government.

John Adams’s sombre prediction did not come true in his own day. The question I want to address is whether it is becoming true in ours.

The Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy in different countries for some 30 years. Dissatisfaction with democracy has been rising in advanced democracies for most of that time. This is especially true of young people living in the oldest democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom and France. In the most recent survey, the United Kingdom has had one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction in the world, at 69%. It seems that only Bulgaria and Greece think less of democracy than the British.

Dissatisfaction with democracy does not necessarily imply a preference for some other system. But more disturbing findings emerge from the regular surveys of political engagement conducted in the UK by the Hansard Society. In the 2019 survey, the latest available, 54% of respondents agreed with the statement that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules”. Only 23% disagreed. Nearly half of those who wanted a strong leader willing to break the rules thought that he “shouldn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament.”

Polling evidence is not infallible, but these polls track attitudes over a considerable period of time, and indicate the direction in which we are travelling. They are consistent with the historically high levels of electoral support for authoritarian figures such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and the leading lights of Alternative für Deutschland.

The first thing that we need to be clear about is what we mean by democracy. We are so familiar with its use as a general hurrah word that some definition seems necessary. What I mean by democracy is a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government. Democracy is a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable.

But the institutional framework is not enough. Plenty of countries have the institutional framework of a democracy without being one. This is because democracy can only work in a legal and social culture where there is freedom of thought, speech and association, uncontrolled access to reliable information, and a large tolerance of political dissent. A culture of this kind is fragile. Where democracies fail, it is not usually because the institutional framework has failed. It is because the necessary cultural foundation has gone.

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Lord Sumption: civil disobedience has begun

By Freddie Sayers

The opposite of democracy is some form of authoritarian government. It is of course possible for democracies to confer considerable coercive power on the state without losing their democratic character. But there is a point beyond which the systematic application of coercion is no longer consistent with any notion of collective self-government. The fact that it is hard to define where that point lies does not mean that there isn’t one. A degree of respect for individual autonomy seems to me to be a necessary feature of anything which deserves to be called a democracy.

The polling evidence which I have cited suggests that democracy is now increasingly vulnerable in the very countries that gave birth to it. Why has this happened?

The chief enemies of democracy are economic insecurity, intolerance, and fear. Let me first address economic insecurity.

Historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic optimism. Except for two short periods, the United States has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity, both absolutely and relative to other countries, until quite recently. Britain’s economic history, like that of other European countries, has been slightly more chequered. But the trajectory has generally been upward.

Today, the outlook is darker. We face problems of faltering growth, relative economic decline, redundant skills and capricious patterns of inequality. In most western democracies, including ours, GDP is still rising, albeit slowly. But people measure their wellbeing against their expectations. 60 years of post-war expansion have raised those expectations to a very high level.

Economic misfortune usually bears hardest on the poorest members of society. It marginalises them, and makes them feel that the current organisation of their country has nothing to offer them. But in a more fundamental sense, the impact of economic hardship is likely to be felt at every level of society. The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any community. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterised by a resort to totalitarianism in much of Europe. Britain, the United States and France escaped that fate, but in all three countries there were powerful authoritarian movements of Left and Right which drew their strength mainly from economic misfortune. Russia and Germany were widely regarded as the models which showed the way out, just as China sometimes is today.

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Has China rescued the West?

By Aris Roussinos

The second of democracy’s great enemies is fear. People who are sufficiently frightened will submit to an authoritarian regime which offers them security against some real or imagined threat. Historically, the threat has usually been war. In the two world wars of the twentieth century Britain transformed itself into a temporary despotism with substantial public support. Wars, however, are rare. This country has generally conducted its wars at a distance. It has not faced an existential threat from external enemies since 1940, unless you count the high point of the nuclear threat in the 1960s.

The real threat to democracy’s survival is not major disasters like war. It is comparatively minor perils, which in the nature of things occur more frequently. This may seem paradoxical. But reflect for a moment. The more routine the perils from which we demand protection, the more frequently will those demands arise. If we confer despotic powers on government to deal with perils, which are an ordinary feature of human existence, we will end up doing it most or all of the time. It is because the perils against which we now demand protection from the state are so much more numerous than they were that they are likely to lead to a more fundamental and durable change in our attitudes to the state. This is a more serious problem for the future of democracy than war.

It arises because of the growing aversion of western societies to risk. We crave protection from many risks which are inherent in life itself: financial loss, economic insecurity, crime, sexual violence and abuse, sickness, accidental injury. Even the late pandemic, serious as it was, was well within the broad range of mortal diseases with which human beings have always had to live. It is certainly within the broad range of diseases with which we must expect to live with in future.

We call upon the state to save us from these things. This is not irrational. It is in some ways a natural response to the remarkable increase in the technical competence of mankind since the middle of the nineteenth century, which has considerably increased the range of things that the state can do. As a result, we have inordinately high expectations of the state. We are less inclined to accept that there are things that it cannot or should not do to protect us. For all perils, there must be a governmental solution. If there is none, that implies a lack of governmental competence.

Attitudes to death provide a striking example. There are few things as routine as death. “In the midst of life, we are in death,” says the Book of Common Prayer. Yet the technical possibilities of modern, publicly-financed medicine have accustomed us to the idea that, except in extreme old age, any death from disease is premature, and that all premature death is avoidable. Starting as a natural event, death has become a symptom of societal failure.

In modern conditions, risk-aversion and the fear that goes with it are a standing invitation to authoritarian government. If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so that nothing can go wrong. We have had a spectacular demonstration of this during the pandemic, where coercive measures with radical effects on our lives were made by ministers with strong public support but minimal parliamentary input. A minister told me some months ago that he thought liberal democracy an unsuitable instrument for dealing with a pandemic, and that something more “Napoleonic” was needed. He was making a more significant point than he realised. Whatever one thinks about this — and my own views are well known — it unquestionably marks a significant change in our collective mentality.

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We are hostages to Government fear

By Timandra Harkness

The quest for security at the price of coercive state intervention is a feature of democratic politics which was pointed out in the 1830s by the great political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville in his remarkable study of American democracy, a book whose uncanny relevance still takes one by surprise even after nearly two centuries. His description of the process cannot be bettered. The protecting power of the state, he wrote,

“extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered. But it is softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom forced to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes. It stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

In many ways, the biggest threat to democracy is not oppression by the state, but the intolerance of our fellow citizens. In the early years of British democracy, the great apostle of Victorian liberalism John Stuart Mill foresaw that the main threat to its survival would be the conformity imposed by public opinion. Roger Scruton once wrote that “the freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive… [is] the precondition of a political society.” Roger had more personal experience of this than any of us. He was a persistent, and joyful dissentient. In the same article, he identified the problem with unerring accuracy. To guarantee freedom of opinion,” he wrote,

“goes against the grain of social life, and imposes risks that people may be reluctant to take. For in criticising orthodoxy, you are not just questioning a belief — you are threatening the social order that has been built on it.”

The deliberate campaigns of suppression conducted by pressure groups against politically unfashionable or “incorrect” opinions on, for example, race, gender reassignment, or same-sex relationships; the attempts to impose a new vocabulary which implicitly accepts the campaigners’ point of view: these things are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world.

The tests recently imposed on freshers at the University of St. Andrews and the campaign against Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex suggest that intellectual persecution is alive even in our universities, for the first time perhaps since Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake just 200 yards from here. Demonstrations, such as those organised by Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain, are based on the notion that the campaigners’ point of view is the only legitimate one. It is therefore perfectly acceptable deliberately to bully people and disrupt their lives until they submit, instead of resorting to ordinary democratic procedures. This is the mentality of terrorists, but without the violence.

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Kathleen Stock: I won't be silenced

By Julie Bindel

Democracy can only survive if our differences are transcended by our common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process, even when we disagree profoundly with the outcome. This implicit bargain breaks down if a society repeatedly finds itself resorting to coercion to enforce the majority view about controversial moral issues. It breaks down if people feel more strongly about the issues than they do about democratic procedures for settling them. The result is the abandonment of political engagement and a growing resort to direct action of one kind or another.

Direct action is an invitation to authoritarian government, because it implicitly rejects diversity of opinion. It assesses the value of democratic institutions by one criterion only, namely the degree to which the activists’ program has prevailed. Those who engage in direct action instinctively feel that the end is so important that it justifies the means, but they rarely confront the implications of their acts. What holds us together as a society is precisely the means by which we do things. Since we are never likely to agree on controversial issues of principle, what holds us together is not consensus, but a common respect for a method of resolving our differences, whether or not we approve of the resulting decisions.

Conflicts of opinion and interest are natural features of any free society. The task of a political community is to accommodate them so that we can live together in peace without systematic coercion. This is necessarily a political process, which is why the contempt for politics expressed by so many people is potentially a mortal threat to our democracy.

The successive surveys of the Hansard Society paint a picture of a society in which interest in public affairs is strong, but willingness to engage actively in politics has declined. The Conservative Party has been the dominant party of government for the past century. It obtained 43.6% of the vote at the last election. Yet its membership has declined from about 2.8 million in the mid-1950s to about 180,000 according to the latest (three-year-old) figures. Labour party membership is larger, at about 430,000, but still a long way below its earlier peak.

This pattern is fairly typical internationally. The membership rolls of established political parties have declined steeply in most European democracies. By comparison, support for new parties dedicated to the wholesale rejection of normal party politics has increased, jerkily but noticeably: La Republique en Marche in France, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and Podemos in Spain have all presented themselves as representatives of a new electorate, spontaneous expressions of the popular will and not as traditional political parties. Podemos has declared that there is no left or right. There is only “the people”, identified with Podemos itself, versus “the caste”, that is to say the caste of professional politicians. In Italy, the Five Star Movement claims not to be a political party but a movement, and has promoted direct democracy with electronic voting. Remarkably, lack of political experience was a central part of the successful candidates’ pitch in the US presidential election of 2016, the French Presidential election of 2017 and the Italian legislative elections of 2018.

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By Mary Harrington

These facts reflect a fundamental problem about democracy, which was pointed out more than two millennia ago by Aristotle. Democratic representation creates a class of professional politicians. Aristotle regarded professional politics as an evil because he thought that any political elite would end up serving its own interests. This has been the received opinion for centuries, from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky. In my experience it is untrue. Professional politicians can never be intellectually pure. They are constrained by the need to compromise in order to build majorities. But the great majority of them are public-spirited individuals with a genuine ambition to serve the interests of their country. Most of them would achieve a great deal more money and status by pursuing other careers. Nevertheless, the old trope that politicians are a bunch of corrupt, self-interested and power-crazed hypocrites is deeply embedded in the public mind and always has been.

Aristotle’s solution was to abolish the political class, and replace it with a system in which public offices would be held for short periods by men chosen by lot or serving in rotation. Everyone can then feel that they were at least potentially engaged in a system of self-government. This is hardly realistic in an electorate of 47 million or so. But Aristotle had put his finger on the reason why many people reject democracy. They feel alienated from the political class which democracies inevitably generate. They do not regard politicians as representative of themselves, even if they voted for them.

There is no cure for this condition. Successful politicians are in the nature of things unlikely to be representative of the electorate. They require an altogether exceptional degree of ambition, application and intellect. Those of them who are in government have to apply themselves to complex issues with an intensity for which most of us have neither time nor inclination. If one object of representative politics is to choose politicians who are best-qualified to perform the exceptionally difficult job of governing, then our representatives will always be unrepresentative.

None of this has stopped enthusiasts for constitutional innovation from exploring a variety of ways of side-lining the political class. Referenda are one possibility, but Britain’s experience with referenda has not been entirely happy. They only work if people are voting about precise proposals (necessarily formulated by politicians) whose acceptance or rejection by the electorate will resolve the whole issue. Otherwise, they are simply the prelude to further rounds of political infighting, as we have seen.

Citizens’ Assemblies are the current favourites. They are the modern equivalent of Aristotle’s selection by lot. They seek to substitute for our semi-permanent political class a succession of focus groups. They are chosen to be socially representative, on the assumption that each individual will be politically representative of the categories to which they belong. That assumption seems likely to be wrong. Groups such as manual workers, members of particular ethnic groups or over-65s are no more uniform or consistent in their political opinions than the electorate at large. It is therefore largely a matter of accident whether our divisions are replicated in a Citizen’s Assembly of, say, 100 people. But the fundamental problem about these assemblies is that they have not been chosen by the electorate and are not answerable to anyone. They have no democratic or other legitimacy.

There are measures which might palliate the current problems of democracy, but without solving them. Foremost among them is proportional representation. Proportional representation would probably create a multiplicity of political parties. That would more fairly reflect the diversity of opinion among the electorate than the current two-party system. It would also, partly for that reason, increase the degree of participation in the political process. It is not going to happen, because it is contrary to the interests of the two major national parties and there is no real demand for it among the electorate. The alternative vote referendum of 2011 suggests that the British prefer the crude simplicity of first-past-the-post to anything more elaborate. The critical point for present purposes is that it would do nothing to address the alienation of the electorate from the political process. Indeed, it might well increase it, since it would lead to less stable governments and more political infighting.

I am not about to suggest my own solution to that problem, because I do not believe that there is one. Whatever we may think of our politicians, it is an inescapable truth that we cannot have democracy without politics or politics without politicians. We have to learn to accept the vices and virtues of professional politics, because they are inherent in the whole nature of government. Getting rid of professional politics would almost certainly lead to the replacement of the current political elite by a different one, which would be more permanent, more authoritarian and less representative. Ultimately all political systems are aristocracies of knowledge. Democracies are no different, except that the aristocracies of the moment are removable — something which profoundly affects their exercise of power.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

A generation ago, the enemies of democracy were small groups of cranks and extremists of Left and Right. But today democracy needs a coherent defence, not just against those who would like to dispense with it in favour of more authoritarian models, but against those who would like to redefine it out of existence. We have to say something to the 54% of our fellow-citizens who would apparently prefer to be ruled by a British Putin. Why are they wrong?

The simplest thing to be said in favour of democracy is that it is an efficient way of getting rid of unsatisfactory governments without violence. But there are at least three other more profound reasons why people living in a country like ours ought to believe in democracy.

In the first place, it is the best protection that we have for liberty. Since a large measure of individual autonomy is a necessary condition for human happiness and creativity, this is a consideration of some importance. I am well aware of the oppressive possibilities of democracy. I do not doubt that democracy has an immense potential to oppress not just ethnic or social minorities, but political or moral minorities — people who believe something which majorities object to. That was pointed out by Madison and Mill at the birth of modern democracy, and indeed by Aristotle more than 20 centuries before that.

In most periods of history, the best guarantee of liberty has been the powerlessness and ignorance of the state. Historically, it was relatively easy to escape its scrutiny, and take shelter in the domain of private life. The immense power of the modern state, and its almost unlimited access to information, makes it harder to hide. Access to the levers of state power by democratic majorities is therefore potentially more dangerous today than it has ever been before. But democracy at least offers the possibility of redemption. Its values can be turned against those currently in power. By comparison, authoritarian states entrench themselves in power. They institutionalise repression and cultural control in a way that is more difficult to reverse.

Secondly, the creation of a political class, which Aristotle regarded as the great vice of democracy, may well be its chief merit. Political parties operate in what I have previously called the political market. They are coalitions of opinion, united by a loose consistency of outlook and the desire to win elections. To command a Parliamentary majority, parties have traditionally had to bid for support from a highly diverse electorate. Their policy offerings mutate in response to changes in the public’s sentiments which seem likely to influence voting patterns. Their whole object is to produce a slate of policies which perhaps only a minority would have chosen as their preferred option, but which the broadest possible range of people can live with. This has traditionally made them powerful engines of national compromise and effective mediators between the state and the electorate. It has also served as a good protection against extremes. Autocracy offers no protection at all against extremes.

Thirdly, democracy is more efficient in implementing policy choices. There is a common delusion, which I suspect is shared by many of the 54%, that strongmen get things done. They do not waste time in argument or debate. Historical experience should warn us that this idea is almost always wrong. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enables authoritarian governments to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, it promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. The want of criticism encourages self-confidence, and self-confidence banishes moderation and restraint. The opacity of authoritarian governments is a standing invitation to corruption.

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Covid safetyism has gone mad

By Adam King

These have always been the obvious advantages of representative democracy, and they are just as obvious today. But will they prevail? I am a natural optimist, but I have to say that I am not optimistic about the future of democracy, in this country or elsewhere in the West. All of the threats to democracy discussed above seem likely to intensify in the coming years.

The essential problem is that the public attitudes that I have been talking about are all too natural to human beings. Democracy has existed for barely two centuries in Europe and the United States, less time in other places. It was the creation of an exceptional combination of political and cultural factors, which would never have been easy to sustain and whose impact is now fading. The craving for security is too deeply embedded in human nature to go away. Three centuries ago, Thomas Hobbes made it the foundation of his case for absolute government and it is certainly stronger in out day than it was in his.

Fear will never lose its capacity to distort our collective judgments. The decline of political tolerance and the rise of moral absolutism are trends which are just as unlikely to be reversed, for tolerance too is not natural to mankind. Again, it was Hobbes who expressed it best. People, he observed, are too fond of their own ideas, for they see them from close quarters but other men’s at a distance.

The major challenge to democracy in the coming years will, I believe, be climate change. Climate change will be the main generator of collective fear in the decades to come and quite possibly the main temptation to direct action. It is of course possible that we will do nothing very much about climate change and simply chug along dealing locally with the consequences as and when they arise. But I do not doubt that measures to deal with climate change are necessary, and on the assumption that some action is taken, it is likely to run into strong democratic headwinds. Most of the measures to deal with climate change involve curtailing economic growth. This will not be popular and may not be accepted by democratic electorates, especially if groups come forward to offer easier and perhaps specious alternatives.

The main problem is that climate change can only be dealt with at an international level. This will require major decisions to be made internationally, in a world where democracy is still national. That will be hard to square with traditional notions of democratic accountability. Democracy depends on a common sense of identity and a large measure of mutual solidarity, a feeling that we are “in it together”. Otherwise people are unlikely to feel a common loyalty to the decision-making process, which is strong enough to transcend their disagreements about the issues. At the moment this sense of solidarity exists, if at all, only at the level of the nation state. We have had a stark reminder of that in the Brexit referendum.

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

Perhaps in future, climate change will generate a measure of international solidarity, but I would not count on it. National identities are becoming stronger, and climate change is likely to make them stronger still. This is because although all humanity has a common interest in dealing with climate change, they do not have a common interest in the measures necessary to do it. We have seen this on issues like fossil fuels and deforestation. Countries like India, China, Malaysia and Brazil are not likely to accept measures which will restrict their ability to achieve the same standard of living as the West. Especially when they reflect that historically the West has to some degree achieved that standard of living by polluting the world. Countries like the United States and Britain are not likely to accept a disproportionate reduction of their own standard of living as the price of international agreement. The logical outcome of the threat of climate change is not international harmony in the face of a common danger. It is a world of competitive despotisms.

The transition from democracy to authoritarian rule is generally smooth and unnoticed. It is easy to sleepwalk into it. The outward forms, the language of politics, are unchanged. But the substance is gone. These things do not happen with a clap of thunder. Democracy is not formally abolished but quietly redefined. It ceases to be a method of government, and becomes instead a set of political values, like communism or human rights, which are said to represent the people’s true wishes without regard to anything that they may actually have chosen for themselves.

Historically, the default position of human societies has always been some form of autocracy. The world is full of countries which have reverted to type. The democratic label is still on the bottle, but the substance has been poured out of it by governments, usually with substantial public support. Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, Russia. The list gets longer every year. Will Britain will end up on that list? A generation ago, it would have seemed strange even to ask the question. But I think that I have persuaded you that it is a real issue.

This is the fourth and final lecture in the inaugural series of Sir Roger Scruton Memorial Lectures delivered at the Sheldonian Theatre on 27 October 2021.