There’s no threat to free speech, you idiot. For a decade or more that’s been the high-status opinion in Britain where censorship is concerned. The same liberal-ish sections of society who might once have railed against encroachments upon speech and thought – back when Mary Whitehouse was suing Gay News and the Thatcher government was the one passing the censorious legislation – have become remarkably chilled out about state and legal censorship, even as it has proliferated around us.

I hope they’re not snarking now. A Times investigation published at the weekend has surely knocked the censorship deniers’ legs out from under them. Not only do people continue to be arrested in Britain for things they say online, it’s also been rising in recent years. There are now 30 arrests a day for ‘grossly offensive’ speech under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. And that’s only two bits of legislation, and some police forces didn’t respond to The Times’ inquiries, meaning the true number of speech arrests is likely to be much higher.

To put that into perspective, purely going by those incomplete numbers, Britain is comfortably arresting more people over speech today than America did during the First Red Scare, when the First Amendment was essentially toothless and the American elites were gripped by anti-Communist hysteria. Greg Lukianoff, president of the US’s Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (or FIRE), crunched those numbers a few years ago, back when the number of ‘grossly offensive’ arrests we knew about was significantly lower.

We now know just how trivial an indiscretion can earn you a knock at the door. Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine had their home raided in Borehamwood because they’d criticised their daughter’s school too vigorously. They were cuffed in front of their kids, held for hours and subjected to a five-week investigation for harassment and malicious communications. They were eventually told there would be no further action, along with a growing proportion of suspects accused of communications offences. The Times reckons arrests are up by 58 per cent since the pandemic, even though convictions have simultaneously gone down. The combination of vaguely worded laws and overzealous policing has apparently led to an explosion of entirely unnecessary arrests.