Next week, Donald Trump will become the first US president to make a second state visit to Britain. If the vulgar American puts a foot wrong in the social minefield of Windsor Castle or verbally swats Sir Keir Starmer at a press conference, his faux pax will set off a frenzy of contempt. <\/p>\n
But the real misstep has already been made, and not by the Americans. The suppression of free speech in the UK is not just an insult to the British people; in Washington, it\u2019s seen as a threat to the national security of the United States.<\/p>\n
The arrest of Graham Linehan<\/a>, an Irish citizen, for jokes made from his home in America on X, an American-owned website, was worse than stupid. It was a serious blunder. It confirms the view, now unanimous on the American right, that Britain is an accelerated case study in the willed decline of the West. <\/p>\n \u2022 Graham Linehan\u2019s posts about trans activist were \u2018vindictive\u2019, court hears<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Its kamikaze ruling class is on a Spenglerian suicide mission. It\u2019s so intent on self-destruction, it doesn\u2019t see that key American interests will be collateral damage \u2014 and that the Trump administration cannot afford to accept it.<\/p>\n I was in Washington last week for the National Conservatism conference (NatCon). No one wanted to know about Angela Rayner\u2019s property purchases<\/a>. No one cared about Starmer\u2019s imminent reshuffle of deckchairs on the Titanic. The American right wants to know why the British police are arresting foreign citizens and why the British government is threatening American tech companies. Several US officials told me the Trump administration sees free speech in Britain as a national security interest.<\/p>\n The Labour government, they say, is so focused on trade relations it doesn\u2019t get the big picture. The Brits know free speech matters to Americans, but they just don\u2019t get why. They think it\u2019s just historical and cultural.<\/p>\n But free speech is more than that. Britain\u2019s soft-power self-harm, through its non-crime hate incidents and the Online Safety Act<\/a>, is now so advanced that the national brand may be wrecked for a generation. It\u2019s only the hard stuff of strategic interest that\u2019s going to halt the suppression of free speech in Britain.<\/p>\n The internet was the most successful American export of globalisation, but its power and potential were never equally distributed. Autocrats saw that Silicon Valley wasn\u2019t just hyping its stock when it promised the new tech would change the deep structures of government. <\/p>\n The American internet was digital Coke, the real thing. But most users got the local rip-off: the sour taste of the Chinese internet, the Russian internet, the Iranian internet \u2014 and now the internet of the EU\u2019s Digital Services Act, which presumes, in European tradition, that speech is in the gift of the governors, not the governed.<\/p>\n British users fell inside the American sphere by happy accident, and with it got a taste of American freedom. They speak American on the internet. They are starting to act American in the streets. They know what their government is trying to take away from them.<\/p>\n Digital communications are the lifeblood of our economic exchanges and social lives. The success or failure of nations, alliances and ideas like \u201cthe West\u201d now depends on remounting the elements of national interest \u2014 industrial policies, trade policies, defence strategy \u2014 on the new technology.<\/p>\n The Trump administration gets all this because the American right is the internet\u2019s natural partner. The Democrats had a gerontocratic lock on the old institutions, so the uncredentialed young adopted the internet. While the right learnt to meme, the core American value of patriotic libertarianism completed its post-Reagan migration from left to right. I saw the outcome last week at NatCon. Self-made intellectuals and internet controversialists mingled with Maga heavyweights such as Tulsi Gabbard and deep thinkers like the neo-Kissingerian strategist Elbridge Colby.<\/p>\n