Preston Byrne reposted
Michael Reiners
@MCRReiners
·
8m
Today's Mail estimated 60,000 arrests for speech in the last 5 years. An order of magnitude lower than the reality, but progress in addressing the fact Britain is a world-laughingstock on speech.
The Home Office itself gives 12-18k convictions, not arrests, for expression related offences under the Public Order Act (1986) every year – that is only one act, not the wide array of criminal sanctions for speech. The arrests annually, just under the POA, will be approximately double that, at a conservative estimate.
Actual figs pa are about 1.2million speech contingent criminal incidents per year. This is just criminal, and does not reflect the immense amounts of employment and regulatory cases that lie underneath the iceberg.
Thankfully I was involved in writing a bill to ameliorate these issues, with free speech extraordinaires
@prestonjbyrne
and
@legalstyleblog
, published with
@asi
– available here: https://adamsmith.org/research/the-freedom-of-speech-bill-2026