Why is the US lecturing Britain on free speech?

0:00You ever get the feeling the city walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating your soul? You crave wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe chase some elk, fish a private stream. Well, listen up. There's a whole world out there and finding your own piece of it just got easier. Head over to Land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, you name it. Search by acreage, location, the kind of hunting or fishing you dream of. Land.com. It's where the adventure begins.

0:35This is a Global Player original podcast. I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies. But we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British. of course what the british do in their own country is up to them but also affect american technology companies and by extension american citizens so that is something that we'll talk about today at lunch we've had free speech for a very very long time in in the united kingdom and uh and it will last for a very very long time well no i mean certainly we wouldn't want to reach across u.s citizens and we don't and that's absolutely right but um in relation to free speech in the uk i'm very proud of our history there.

1:20That was Keir Starmer pushing back with the Vice President J.D. Vance back in February before J.D. Vance turned up and took over the Cotswolds. A report has come out today from the State Department saying that there has been backsliding on free speech, that there have been serious restrictions on free speech in the UK. Does America have a point or is this a flagrant case of pots and kettles. Welcome to the News Agents.

1:56The News Agents. It's John and, well, it's just John. Anyway, given that Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and then banned the Associated Press from the White House briefing room because they wouldn't call it the Gulf of America. Are the Americans really in a position to lecture on free speech? Given that people's social media accounts are being examined when they arrive in the United States, and if the US authorities find things they don't like, they can be refused entry. Again, are you in any position to lecture? And given that some people have had visas revoked by the United States, People who live there on the basis of maybe their opposition to the war in Gaza.

2:46Again, who are you to lecture others? But lecture is what America is doing right now. And this State Department report has come out, which is highly critical of various countries, including Britain, about its backsliding on free speech. Does it stack up? With us, I'm delighted to say, is Natasha Clarke, LBC's political editor. So first of all, for people who haven't read this, take us through the report. So this is actually a report that happens every year. It's called the Human Rights Report 2024-2025. So it looks at a variety of things. It looks at, you know, extrajudicial killings. It looks at coercion.

3:27It looks at how governments respond to the population. It looks at free speech. It looks at loads of different things all across society and basically gives everybody marks on how well they think they're doing. And this United Kingdom one that you've just mentioned, it's not brilliant, let's be honest, for the United Kingdom. It's basically saying the human rights situation has worsened in the United Kingdom in the last year. It talks about significant human rights issues. It talks about credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement or threats of criminal or civil laws.

4:03It talks about threats of violence motored by anti-Semitism. And it talks a lot, a lot about freedom of speech. I really feel that reading this, basically it's sort of a 20 page report. It's quite short, actually, for many reports. They've done one into every single country around the world. But for this and especially the sort of big chunk on free speech at the sort of start of this report, you can absolutely feel the fingers of Trump's administration all over the language of this. They talk about, you remember the Lucy Letby New Yorker article that was geo-blocked. They're using that as an example of freedom of speech being limited.

4:40They talk about the Southport attacks and how online afterwards they talk about how various government and local authority figures basically intervened to block the identity, the motivation of the Southport attacker. they don't reference it directly but we know how much J.D. Vance and other people in the US administration Elon Musk of course formerly of the administration have talked about the idea of freedom of expression being under threat and this report feels to me like it's them saying here's all the list of all of the things that we think the UK has done wrong in freedom of expression in the last year and put it all in one report.

5:18Does it stack up? I mean let's leave aside whether it's hypocrisy or not given and America's own less than perfect record in this. But do you think that these complaints about lack of free speech, I mean, you know, we do this podcast. I've never felt that there are things I cannot say. There are things I cannot say because they break the law of libel. We have offences of, you know, kind of hate speech and whatever else. But those are the laws of the land. Yeah, and it does talk about contempt, actually. And obviously that's a discussion that we're very much having in the UK right now, isn't it?

5:50where are the laws of contempt and where should they basically be drawn? And Nigel Farage very much has been testing the limits of that. You know, we're unable to take Nigel Farage press conferences at the moment live because of the risk of contempt and what he and his party have been saying has regularly breached those broadcast restrictions. And this report does talk about the Online Safety Act, which obviously at the moment is just being enforced. There is obviously a lot of chat about whether the debate there has gone too far and people on X claiming that they're having their freedom of speech censored.

6:24It's only just come in, but I think they probably do have a few of a point there. Well, I was just going to intervene there because I thought it would be worth, you know, if you're not a journalist and you're not covering court cases in the way that you and I have done, you don't know what the Contemptive Court Act is. But essentially, if someone is arrested, you can say someone has been arrested following an incident in which such and such is alleged to have happened. And once they've been charged, a man has been charged or a woman has been charged. It follows an incident in which dot, dot, dot, dot.

6:54And then until it gets to court, you can't say much more than that. Or you can't do anything that would make a fair trial less likely to succeed. Because if you say something that jeopardises a fair trial, then you can be us, the journalists, the broadcasters can be hauled up before the judge for contempt of court and face potential imprisonment. So, yeah, you know, you could argue that the Contempt of Court Act is out of date in a social media setting. Of course it is. And that's absolutely why the law commissioner looking into this right now. But, you know, when they've got when you've got a big chunk of this report, which is talking about potentially prejudicial reporting on ongoing court cases, specifically talking about how UK contempt laws forced the US magazine, The New Yorker, to geoblock British subscribers from reading this article, which was about the Lucy Letby case at the time those laws were put in place for a reason but they are being incredibly critical of that, of the Online Safety Act of the Scottish Government implementing hate crimes they talk about as well, you know, the abortion buffer zones that J.D.

7:56Vance seems to be very, very interested in that's another one of the cases which is critical in this report basically saying that people should be able to go and stand within those abortion buffer zones they call that a limitation on freedom of speech. Even though in certain states in America those laws exist as well so it's not just that britain and again it's just a different attitude towards i think it's such a fascinating area this because you know if i walked into a theater and screamed fire and then people panic for the exits and people die because of that well i'm exercising my right of free speech but i've caused social disruption in the process of doing so you've caused some harm in some way, right?

8:38So that's exactly what the Online Safety Act is sort of trying to put in place for the social media age. Yeah, I mean, I know that it's a popular thing among the hard right to say, you know, the mainstream media, I suppose, I don't know whether a podcast would be ever considered mainstream media. Oh, this is definitely MSM. Yeah, you think we're definitely MSM? Yeah, absolutely. The definition of. Yeah, so that we are suppressing free speech. I don't think we are at all. But, you know, am I going to say, call someone something racist use hate speech i mean no because i think it's unpleasant and vile that's decency that's not a suppression of free speech so it seems to me that this is a really curious definition that the u.s administration has alighted on that essentially it's free speech that they don't like yeah that they want to suppress but everything else if it's you know expressing their viewpoint it's fine but counter viewpoints and it's fine i think that you know we have a scabrous free press in this country where there is freedom of speech i don't know do you feel limited i think the contempt laws are definitely out of date and i think it's right that the home secretary that the law commission are looking at those because they do feel out of date and it does feel today the police for example have said actually that we should be releasing more information about the identities the nationalities the immigration status in some cases of particular individuals because it obviously did mix up quite a lot of hatred and obviously misinformation around the Southport attacker and I think the police probably could and should have done more in that case and now they're they're saying actually that is a good thing to have that information out there to have that transparency but yeah just looking at this report it's it does like I say have the fingers of the administration all over it you know the the line that really jumps out to me is this this idea of two-tier enforcement two-tier care had that one before.

10:33It's this idea that, you know, Nigel Farage keeps repeating that we've got two different types of law in this country and standards are different, basically, in different cases. But, you know, it says following the Southport attack, censorship of ordinary Britons was increasingly routine. That doesn't feel right to me. That doesn't feel right to me at all. And it does feel like I'm reading a report, which obviously has got lots of ideas about what actually is happening in my country, but it doesn't feel like I'm reading a report about my country it also talks quite a lot about the british virgin islands and bermuda which are two jurisdictions we have absolutely nothing to do with it is not governments that we actually can control in this report either so yeah i mean it's just it does feel a bit like pot calling kettle black in some ways right yeah and the other thing that i've noticed and we've got to talk about jd vance being in the cotswolds right the timing couldn't be crazier and crazier and this is the story that someone for in the village of dean which is where vance is staying this person said told the observer we've had the police knocking on every door they wanted the names of everybody living there and details of their social media i know several people refused bloody right none of your bloody business if you want to come to the cotswolds you're very welcome we hope you enjoy dalesford and all the super expensive fare that is on sale there we hope you enjoyed the honey coloured stone of all the beautiful buildings in the Cotswolds.

11:57But I'm sorry, US Secret Service, if you want to come, Britons live there. They do not have to give over their social media account details to see whether they are a supporter or an opponent of J.D. Vance. If you want to come to Britain, you're very welcome. But you accept Britain for what it is. And I just think this is such a glaring example of the ludicrous nature of them, this kind of very powerful country where the vice president comes and we've got to sing to their tune? No way. And look, Thames Valley police have pushed back saying, no, this hasn't happened. This hasn't happened. You know, there are reports that this has happened.

12:32If they are true, that's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? Like I say, this is our jurisdiction, our laws, our country. And, you know, we've heard, and there's been newspaper reports today that J.D. Vance has raised with David Lammy cases of freedom of speech in this country. The Online Safety Act, of course, has been something that Elon Musk has been talking about for a long time, that others in government have been talking about it for a long time. sure, raise it, let's have a discussion about it, let's talk about it. Allies can disagree. And, you know, Keir Starmer in his pushing for the recognition of Palestine is very much of the opinion that we can disagree with the US in many, many ways.

13:04And, you know, the Allies should be able to have these frank, honest conversations. But, you know, just three or four weeks before the state visit, you've got such a report, which is incredibly critical about us. I mean, just I can't remember a time where usual diplomatic rules would apply in this case. There are reports as well that this report has been basically hammed up by the US administration that's been sort of tilted away from away from criticism of Israel, for example. And obviously El Salvador. We know that Trump has a close relationship with the president there. That's with the supermax prison where these people are being shipped off to.

13:37The migrants are being shipped off to where there is no respect for human rights, where they were filmed having their heads shaved, having to bow, being filmed in their underpants. Yeah. But that's OK. But that's OK. But apparently, according to many reports that we've seen here, the Trump administration has been rewriting and scaling back that news report in retrospect to human rights in El Salvador. And, you know, it talks about the war in Gaza and Israel and says the government took credible steps to identify officials who committed human rights abuses in Gaza. Well, I think there are a lot of people in Gaza that have something to say about that.

14:10yeah just while we've got you so jd vance has obviously been with lammy uh which is kind of seems an unusual relationship she loves the cotswolds why not but jd vance is not meeting kemi badenock the tory party leader no he's not he's meeting with robert jenrick um he's meeting with chris philt the shadow home secretary but not kemi badenock they claim a diary clash but i'm not sure about that one if i were kemi badenock i'd be bending over backwards to me with jd vance but yeah seemingly something that's that's not being worked out it's not a great look Look for her to not get that face time with him.

14:41Well, you'd have thought that the photo would be worth quite a lot, particularly when Nigel Farage is. Exactly. And that's exactly it. And I'm sure that we're going to have the whole situation when the Trump visit, the actual Trump state visit happens in a couple of weeks time where we all have the who did get face time with Donald Trump, who didn't. And we had that with, you know, Nigel Farage a couple of weeks ago. He wasn't invited to that state dinner with Emmanuel Macron when he came because, you know, he has five MPs. He's not on the political radar in terms of that third party and he doesn't get that access.

15:11But, yeah, it seems quite crazy that Kemi Baden-Ock's not leaning into that a little bit further. I thought she would be, but maybe not. Natasha, thank you very much. In a moment, we will be back with what is going to come out of the summit in Alaska between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

15:32We all have routines. I'm Jabron, and with diabetes, mine was finger sticks. Sometimes, I skip them because they hurt. The Freestyle Libre 3CGM changed that. It gives me glucose insights without finger sticks. Learn more at freestyllibre.us. Finger sticks are required if your glucose alarms and readings do not match symptoms or when you see check blood glucose symbol for the first 12 hours. The views expressed should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment as a substitute for professional medical advice. Individual circumstances may vary. For prescription only. Safety info found at freestyllibre.us.

16:02You ever get the feeling the city walls closing in? The concrete jungle suffocating your soul? You crave wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe chase some elk, fish a private stream. Well, listen up. There's a whole world out there and finding your own piece of it just got easier. Head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forest, mountains, you name it. Search by acreage, location, the kind of hunting or fishing you dream of. Land.com. It's where the adventure begins.

16:36This is the News Agents. This is a listening exercise for the president. Look, only one party that's involved in this war is going to be present. And so this is for the president to go and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end. That's Caroline Levitt, Donald Trump's spokesperson in the White House briefing room, really lowering expectations about what people can expect to come out of this meeting in Alaska. Now, if you want to be kind of glib, you'd say, well, it's a far cry from the I'm going to solve this on day one of my presidency.

17:17It's all got a lot more complicated. Now they're not even talking about the possibility of a deal. But Donald Trump is going there to listen. And you think, is that really what a kind of coming together of Putin and Trump is about? That it's just about Donald Trump having a good old listen to what Vladimir has got to say? because the normal kind of process of summits between world leaders and a summit with so much at stake as this one is that your civil servants your foreign office advisors will have been working like crazy on a draft communique of things that could be agreed of testing the ground of where there are still differences and essentially you don't have the summit until such times as you are so close that you know that you can get the two leaders together and with a flourish they produce their fountain pens from their inside jacket pocket and sign a document which will kind of set the seal on this great coming together of two great powers.

18:23It seems like nothing of the sort is happening here and that is of a piece with what happened in Donald Trump's first term. The summit with Putin in Helsinki, the first summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, which was just effectively a handshake and giving Kim Jong-un huge presence on the world stage and bringing him in from the cold. Great victory for Kim Jong-un. And then they had their meeting in Vietnam and that all went to shit and there was no agreement. There was no joint press conference at the end of it. With this one, it seems that the White House is already saying, don't expect too much so what can we expect well let's speak now to professor mark galiotti historian and writer specializing in russia and security affairs and he's the author of putin's wars we need to talk about putin and the vori russia's super mafia mark what do you think i mean we focus so much on trump and what trump hopes for this summit in alaska what about on the other side of it, Putin and Russia?

19:28Well, I think from Putin's point of view, it's almost like one can see this operating at three levels. Just simply the fact of having a sit down with Trump on American soil, even if until 1867, it was Russian soil in Alaska is a win. And it's particularly a blow to all those efforts to try to isolate him and Russia. Secondly, on Ukraine, he I think hopes to get a deal which would essentially be freezing the front line lifting of sanctions and anything more he can squeeze out of it knowing full well that this deal may never actually materialize because the Ukrainians still do get a say but in that case it then makes the Ukrainians the villains of the peace as far as Trump's concerned and thirdly a lot of the discussion in the Russian media is actually about a whole new chapter in Russian-American relations cooperation on the arctic on oil exploration and all that kind of thing again i think he's trying to basically bypass europe and the all the various attempts to undermine the russian economy and isolate the country so let's unpack uh almost try and be methodical about it now to unpack those three things let's start with putin as well there has always been that part of russian superpower relations where it wants to be seen as the great power, as the country, as the leader of which cannot be ignored.

20:55And so from that point of view, it is quite a gift that Donald Trump is bestowing given recent history, the last three and a bit years. It is a gift. But on the other hand, you know, we have to be blunt. Attempts just simply to isolate Putin haven't worked. I mean, actually, what they have done is they have driven him closer to China, closer to India. I mean, I think there is a point where we have to realize that however much, yes, it is a gift, sometimes you just have to talk to bad people in order to hope that either you get something positive out of it, or at the very least, you stress test their expressed commitment to peace.

21:36So yes, it's a gift, but that shouldn't be the reason to not do it necessarily. But do you think it will be any different from the summit that they held in Helsinki with that bizarre news conference afterwards where kind of Trump more or less said, yeah, I know what my intelligence agencies say about Russian interference in the election, but Vladimir's assured me it didn't happen. And I don't see why he would have done. Well, in that time, and it was indeed a rather surreal experience that time, in some ways, Trump had a very clear personal objective. You know, he didn't want the Russiagate story continuing further.

22:11So he was happy to try and kill it off. In this case, it's a lot more complex. And it's interesting that even Trump has been actually walking back slightly his expectations. He's now more or less saying, well, it's a chance to get to talk and find out what happens. So I think from Trump's point of view, in some ways, he can make this whatever he wants. He can say, look, I spoke to Putin. He wasn't able to convince me. That's it. We walk away. Or he can say we've got a deal and then essentially blame the Ukrainians or the State Department or whoever if it never materializes on the ground. This is all about theater.

22:48And that's what really Trump enjoys. Does it present any risks for Putin? Does Putin get cornered if he doesn't play nicely? does Trump say, right, we're slapping additional sanctions and secondary sanctions on, you know, India and China and the like for what they're doing? There are risks inevitably. And it's one of the reasons why the Kremlin, likewise, has been very much trying to control expectations and suggest that they don't think necessarily some grand bargain is going to come out of this. Yeah. Look, if this turns out to be Putin's equivalent of that horrible Oval Office meeting where Zelensky, Vance and Trump near enough ended up in an open row, then exactly there is the risk that Trump will double down on support for Ukraine.

23:36But I think, first of all, unfortunately, Putin has demonstrated himself to be quite a good Trump wrangler. Secondly, actually, the amount of leverage that America has is not as great as I think Trump might assume. Sanctions and secondary sanctions, more as have reached the limit of their likely value without it being essentially self-harming for America. And when it comes down to it, look, Trump, I don't think, wants to be involved in Ukraine. He's looking for an excuse to walk away. So let us come to the second point that you raised in your, you know, that first answer that you gave, which is about the war in Ukraine.

24:16What might happen? We've just had a statement from the Russian foreign ministry essentially saying our position has not changed one iota, one Kopech. It stays exactly where it is. We want the same demands. Effectively, they want total victory. They want capitulation from Ukraine. So, again, this seems rather pointless to be having a summit about it when the Russians are going in and saying, you know what? we've already made clear what our stance is. The problem is this, that the Russian style of negotiation, and this goes back to Soviet times and even before, tends to be exceedingly hard-nosed.

24:57You always go in demanding a ludicrously maximalist set of positions because you anticipate that you're going to be haggled down in the end and everything you want to present it as some kind of terrible concession. So we don't know. And again, this is the value of testing. we don't know if this is a negotiating position, the foreign ministry comes off hard, and then Putin can say, but Donald, I'm willing to make a deal with you because you are such a master dealmaker, or whether it is genuinely the case that they will say, no, no, no, we demand that the Ukrainians withdraw from Donetsk, we demand that the Ukrainians reduce the size of their armed forces, which is a complete non-starter.

25:39You know, absolutely, if the Russians stick to that, there is no deal to be made. There have been hints coming out of Washington and Moscow that, at least in the Putin-Witkov discussions, the Russians sounded more conciliatory. Now, it may be that Witkov just didn't really understand what was going on. That's been posited. It may be that, in fact, Putin was just simply soft-soaping him. But again, until we actually get those two guys together in a room, we can't test that. Presumably that moment, though, has potential huge risk for Zelensky. If it comes out and Trump says, I think what Vladimir has proposed is perfectly reasonable.

26:17Ukraine, what are you going to do? And then suddenly Ukraine become the naughty boys who apparently look like warmongers for not going along with whatever the plan is that Putin and Trump have cooked up. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there is an extent to which the Russians, this is their main expectation. They don't really think that they're going to get a deal, but they do think they're going to be in a position to have something that looks enough like a deal that Trump will be sold on it. And then it'll be Zelensky's job and indeed the Europeans job to say, no, this this will not work. And then they hope that Trump will be angry with them, not Russia.

26:52The only thing that has to be said is that one of the advantages of, for example, the current sort of meeting that is taking place today, hosted by the Germans, which includes Trump and Vance involved, is that although on one level the Europeans are very much the outsiders in this process, Nonetheless, given that the Americans would expect the Europeans to be doing the heavy lifting of any post-deal settlement, the reconstruction of Ukraine, the securing of Ukraine and so forth, this does give the Europeans an unexpected degree of leverage to say, if you expect us to do X, Y and Z, well, these are our counter demands.

27:32And that's the kind of transactional hard-nosed politics that Trump actually does tend to understand. Is there a danger that this becomes seen like a, I don't know, a Yulter 2.0? Yulter at the end of the Second World War, you see Churchill, Stalin, Truman getting together to carve Europe up without any of the European nations there being represented. In a sense, it was the superpowers deciding the future. Isn't there an element of that in the Putin-Trump meeting? And you think, well, come on, what about the Ukrainians? What about the Poles and the, you know, the Baltic states in all of this who have got real concerns?

28:10Yeah, of course, the difference at the end of World War Two was precisely that there were American and Soviet troops arrayed across the continent. And there was a lot of, you know, much more sort of direct leverage. Look, I think Putin would love this to be a Yalta 2.0. precisely because he hankers after as a good sort of last generation homo sovieticus those good old days when the soviet union was an undisputed great power russia is not that russia cannot i mean frankly russia can't even at the moment suppress the ukrainians desire for independence let alone anything greater so yes i think the notion of the alta 2.0 fits into how putin would like russia to be, it also fits into Trump's notion of foreign policy.