Is free speech under threat in Britain?

Free speech is a bulwark of open societies, because it allows ideas and information to be shared, authority to be questioned, and abuses of power exposed. In "On Liberty" (1859), John Stuart Mill gave these ideas their most influential expression. But freedom of speech has long had its critics, even in liberal societies, and the US scholar Stanley Fish argued that, because there are so many exceptions, it doesn’t really exist as a principle. But though imperfect, free speech is still by most measures better than the alternative: speech more closely regulated by government.

How old is the idea of free speech?

It’s relatively modern. For most of human history, it was regarded as self-evident that words can have dangerous consequences. In his recent book “What Is Free Speech?”, the historia