The Adam Smith Institute has published the Free Speech Act 2026, a model bill that would dismantle virtually the entire legal architecture the British state uses to police speech.
Written by Preston Byrne, an Adam Smith Institute Senior Fellow, alongside co-authors Elijah Granet and Michael Reiners, the legislation runs to 32 sections and seven schedules.
It would repeal seven entire Acts of Parliament, create a statutory right to free expression, ban the state from censoring lawful speech directly or through third parties, and give citizens a private right of action to sue when their rights are violated.
Byrne, a dual-qualified English solicitor and US attorney, is best known as the lawyer who responds to Ofcom’s enforcement notices with cartoon hamsters.
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He represents 4chan in its federal lawsuit against the UK’s speech regulator in Washington, D.C., and acts for every current US-based enforcement target of the Online Safety Act.
He is also the architect of the GRANITE Act, the first foreign censorship shield bill in American history, which passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 before running out of time in the state Senate.
All of that, Byrne writes, was prologue. “The big fight, the real fight, is to restore free speech in the UK. Publishing this Model Bill today, we mean to start it.”
The Bill’s stated purpose is to answer a single question: “If the UK wanted to enact something like the First Amendment, what would the resulting statute look like?”
The answer is a controlled demolition.
What Goes
Schedule 1 of the Bill is the wrecking ball, and the list of repeals is long. The Online Safety Act 2023 would be repealed in its entirety, along with the Public Order Act 1986, the Public Order Act 2023, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, and the Obscene Publications Act 1959.
Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, used to prosecute “grossly offensive” social media posts, would go. So would sections of the Terrorism Acts that have been applied against non-violent protestors for political speech, Article 10(2) of the Human Rights Act 1998 (the provision that permits restrictions on expression), and the strict liability rule for press reporting on court proceedings under the Contempt of Court Act 1981.
Freedom of information data compiled by The Times found that over 12,000 people were arrested under section 127 of the Communications Act and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act in 2023 alone, roughly 30 a day. That figure had nearly doubled since 2017. A separate investigation by The Telegraph found 292 people charged under the Online Safety Act between its enforcement and February 2025.
The US State Department’s 2024 human rights report on the United Kingdom noted these arrests with the kind of language it typically reserves for countries with less established democracies, recording that “numerous individuals were arrested for online speech” and that the government “called on companies, including U.S. firms, to censor speech deemed misinformation or ‘hate speech.'”
Article 19, the free speech advocacy organization, has downgraded the UK below the threshold for “Open” status in its Global Expression Report for the first time since the index began. The Free Speech Act would repeal the laws responsible for that decline.
Byrne and his co-authors acknowledge openly that the Bill, if enacted, would decriminalize expressions they personally find repugnant. “In a free society, fools, bigots, and assholes get to speak and remain free men,” the post reads. “That is not the price of liberty. It is liberty, and the rest of us get it too.”
Bryne asks readers to consider who the existing laws actually catch. Not hardened extremists operating in encrypted channels, he argues, but ordinary people.
What Gets Built
The Bill does more than tear down. It constructs a new framework from scratch.
Part 2 establishes a statutory right to free expression. The right of any United Kingdom person to hold opinions and engage in lawful expression cannot be violated by the State. That right covers expression that is “offensive, grossly offensive, insulting, abusive, shocking, blasphemous, indecent, or otherwise objectionable.”
Section 5 states it plainly: there is no right in law not to be offended by the expression of others.
Expression on matters of public interest, politics, morality, philosophy, and religion receives special protection under Section 6. No person may be convicted or sanctioned for such expression unless it falls within a defined category of unprotected speech and the legal conditions are strictly satisfied. Speech is presumed protected. The burden falls on whoever wants to restrict it.
The narrow exceptions are defined in Part 3, which adopts the American Brandenburg test for incitement. Speech is unlawful only where it is directed to a specific audience, intended to produce imminent lawless action, and likely to produce it.
General advocacy, praise, or defense of unlawful conduct is not incitement. Beyond that, criminal liability is preserved for perjury, contempt of court, unlawful threats, fraud, blackmail, offenses under the National Security Act 2023, procuring or assisting crime, criminal conspiracy, defamation, and harassment.
The Bill also tightens the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 so that a person does not harass another merely by posting content the other person chooses to seek out or monitor. This directly addresses cases where citizens reporting on police conduct without contacting the subjects have been arrested under harassment provisions.
Part 4 bans the state from censoring lawful expression directly or indirectly, including through conditions on licenses, funding, or benefits that require a person to hold a particular political or ideological opinion.
Non-crime speech monitoring, including the recording of lawful expression as a “non-crime hate incident,” is prohibited, and any existing records must be destroyed. The outsourcing loophole is closed: the state cannot fund, procure, or arrange censorship through third parties. Any contract designed to suppress lawful expression is void.
Compelled speech is also prohibited. No public authority may require any person, as a condition of employment, education, professional licensing, funding, or citizenship, to declare or affirm any political, moral, religious, or ideological belief (the sole exception being allegiance to the Crown).
Part 5 amends the Employment Rights Act 1996 to protect workers from detriment and dismissal on the ground of lawful expression made in a personal capacity outside the workplace. It also amends the Equality Act 2010 to make “lawful expression” a protected characteristic alongside race, sex, disability, and religion. A freedom from compelled expression is inserted into the Equality Act as well.
Part 6 prohibits essential service providers, including banks, payment services, telecoms, and domain registries, from refusing or withdrawing services because a person has engaged in lawful expression. Financial deplatforming has become a censorship mechanism that operates entirely outside the reach of speech protections.
Section 20: The Most Controversial Provision
The provision likely to generate the most debate is Section 20, which replaces the entire Online Safety Act regime with a rule modeled on Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. In other words, online platforms cannot be held legally responsible for what their users say or post, which is a major censorship pressure point in the Online Safety Act.
One mandatory obligation remains: platforms must detect and remove child sexual abuse material and report it to law enforcement within 24 hours of obtaining actual knowledge. Failure to comply is already punishable under existing UK criminal law. The immunity applies to civil liability only. Criminal law is unaffected.
Byrne addresses the obvious objection directly: “I lived in the UK as recently as 2017, and it wasn’t a post-apocalyptic anarchist hellscape; repealing the Online Safety Act in full, as this Model Bill proposes to do, won’t make it one. It will, however, end the UK’s exercise of censorship powers over political speech online.”
Enforcement and Wiped Records
Part 7 gives individuals a civil right of action against the State or essential service providers that violate the Bill, with a presumption of costs in the claimant’s favor. Without cost protection, the right to sue is hollow when the defendant is a state with limitless resources.
Section 22 creates an anti-SLAPP mechanism so that defendants in strategic lawsuits designed to silence public participation can apply for early dismissal, with mandatory costs and possible damages if the claim is struck out.
Section 24 annuls and vacates all convictions, cautions, and binding-over orders entered under the laws being repealed, where the conduct at issue would constitute lawful expression under the Free Speech Act. Every person convicted of “grossly offensive” posting, every person cautioned for an “indecent” message, every person bound over for causing “distress” through speech: their records would be wiped.
Schedule 2 rebuilds public order law from the ground up, preserving riot, violent disorder, affray, and unlawful assembly as content-neutral offenses stripped of any ideological element. Two new communications offenses are created: fear or provocation of violence, and threatening communications.
Both punish conduct rather than ideas. The Bill also redefines breach of the peace so that a person cannot be arrested for lawful expression alone, “even if a likely or predictable consequence of that person’s lawful expression would be the unlawful actions of another.”
The Political Fallout
Byrne told GB News ahead of the publication that “a couple” of parliamentarians know the Bill is coming, and that he emailed the final text to one member of the House of Lords. The Bill will be available for any MP to introduce.
“This bill is designed to do something very simple: It gets the Government out of the business of policing the opinions of the British people,” Byrne said.
“The Government doesn’t get a say in the future that we see and what people say and think. It’s not going to be able to arrest people for it, it’s not going to be able to penalize them for it, it’s not going to be able to force them to say things that they don’t want to say.”
The timing is deliberate. The intervening years since Byrne’s 2020 paper Sense and Sensitivity, an earlier prototype for a UK Free Speech Act, have seen the Online Safety Act passed, Ofcom set loose on the world, Scotland’s hate crime law enter force to widespread ridicule (despite public opposition from then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who did nothing about it), fresh speech prosecutions through the summer of 2024, and the Online Safety Act’s entry into force accelerating the decline.
The Bill is published in a climate where polling by YouGov for Prospect magazine has found that nearly half of Britons say they are not allowed to say what they think about key issues. The Free Speech Union, founded in 2019 by journalist Toby Young, has seen membership surge from 14,000 in July 2024 to 35,000, alongside a record number of requests for help.
The Model Bill’s authors do not pretend this is moderate or incremental. The post makes the point explicitly: “In publishing the Model Bill, and in proposing the extent of repeals we propose, the Model Bill’s authors ask readers one question, and one alone: do you want the UK to have a free speech right that is equivalent to the First Amendment?” The question, Byrne notes, “has a binary answer: yes or no.”
“The Model Bill is not a sacred text,” Byrne writes. “It is simply three lawyers’ vision for a free Britain.” He expect readers to propose improvements, amendments, and additions, or to throw the Bill out and propose their own approaches entirely.
Whether any MP picks it up is an open question. That the Bill exists at all, drafted in full statutory language with schedules, enforcement mechanisms, and repeals ready to go, represents a move from complaining about the censorship state to offering a complete legislative blueprint for dismantling it.
