But here’s my concern: As a citizen of both Britain and Australia, I’m all too aware that these countries don’t have anything like the First Amendment. Free-speech protections in both countries are faltering, not least because both governments feel threatened by the right-wing populist parties that have surged as a response to high levels of immigration in recent years.
We are seeing a censorious instinct bubbling up in politicians alarmed by these developments. One senior Australian politician has been explicit on this point: “We don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States,” New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said last year while defending controversial hate-speech laws, “and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community.”
As I wrote for the Journal’s Free Expression newsletter, the British government has been disregarding free-speech norms, including several cases of British citizens’ being imprisoned or threatened with imprisonment for comments on social media that could plausibly be described as political dissent.