During his recent visit, US Vice-President JD Vance said he did not want the UK to go down a “very dark path” of losing free speech.
The US business magazine Forbes carried an editorial this month that took this argument further still.
In it, editor-in-chief Steve Forbes condemned the UK’s “plunge into the kind of speech censorship usually associated with tin pot Third World dictatorships”.
He argues that, in stark contrast to the United States – where free speech is protected by the first amendment to the constitution, “the UK has, with increasing vigour, been curbing what one is allowed to say, all in the name of fighting racism, sexism, Islamophobia, transgenderism, climate-change denial and whatever else the woke extremists conjure up”.
So, how exactly did we get to the point where the UK is being compared to a dictatorship and, given how inflamed the conversation has become, what – if anything – would it take to turn down the heat?