The UK has never had unqualified free speech. For most of our history we haven't had it at all. This wiki article is quite good on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.

The UK has never had unqualified free speech. For most of our history we haven't had it at all. This wiki article is quite good on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kin... Further back we had punitive taxes on newspapers, laws on blasphemy, laws on obscenity, laws against "sedition" and most kinds of assembly.. The idea that the UK is a bastion of liberty is mostly a confection, really. The only thing we are a bastion of is liberty for the very wealthy - and only in the last twenty years or so have we really had a strong conception of rights in law. Our supreme court only got created in 2007: in all those historic free speech cases before then (and all the rest) the outcome was decided by literal aristocrats who had inherited a title.