The UK (and Europe's) free speech problem

Great Debates
238

Maybe mining the net for supportive data points for a given position isn’t the best way to approach this. So let’s again look at data from professional research institutes that have at least tried to define objective metrics by which to assess effective freedom of expression in different countries. Using the methodology of googling “freedom of speech ranking by country” and then looking at the first pages that appeared, I get:

  1. A page entitled ‘Countries with Freedom of Speech 2025’ at worldpopulationreview.com. The highlighted graphic lists data for a few countries, with the US coming in third, after Norway and Denmark. However, the data shown there is the Future of Free Speech (FoFS) index (link goes to PDF report), which tracks rather the support for free speech in each country. The page links to further data from the Pew Research Center which comes to a similar conclusion: US Americans most strongly support the right to free speech. However, it also shows in the table below the graph the Freedom of Expression Score by the Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoD), where the US ranks 28th out of the surveyed countries, behind Germany and the UK, but ahead of e.g. Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.
  2. The wikipedia page for the World Press Freedom index as compiled by Reporters Without Borders. The US is classified as ‘problematic’ in 56th place, while most of Europe and Canada rank either ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’.
  3. The Global Expression Report. Here, at a ranking of 85, the US is in the highest category ‘open’, along with much of Europe; the UK scores only a ‘less restricted’.
  4. The Freedom House dataset, which ‘rates people’s access to political rights and civil liberties in 208 countries and territories through its annual Freedom in the World report’. Here, the US is ranked 57th, although with a rating of 84 (interestingly with an increasing trend) still classed as ‘free’ (but again trailing behind many European states, Canada, and the UK).
  5. The Reporters sans Frontieres index—we’ve seen that data already. Most of the further links I found reuse the ‘Vatieties of Democracy’ (V-Dem) data I already posted about above, which seems to be the most widely cited dataset, e.g. here at theglobaleconomy.com. The US here ranks 17th.

In total, I think the lesson we should take away from this is that freedom of expression is under threat globally—‘more than two thirds of us have less freedom of expression than we had a decade ago’, as it is put on globalexpressionreport.org. Largely, this is due to a sustained attack from the right—countries which lag behind in freedom of expression in Europe, e.g. Italy or the Netherlands, have all seen shifts to the right in recent times (and I fear the same is in store for my home country Germany). This is not a UK/Europe problem, but a global issue, and I think can only be properly opposed as such.