The UK’s different nations operate under different laws and live with different memories and traditions. I am writing as a long-time Londoner, a city that has its own atmosphere and has prided itself on its open-minded hospitality to different viewpoints and open debate, and relished argument and dissent as being productive of greater social vitality, in itself a good for one and all.

Freedom of speech has been a founding principle of this self-image of the country and its citizens. Hyde Park Corner, where anybody can take a stand on a soapbox and proclaim their creed, ideology and programme for reform or revolution, has been a symbol of this openness – my father took me there in l953, when we were first back in London from Egypt, to show me with pride what a splendid open-minded community we English belonged to.  There was a John the Baptist calling us to Jesus and announcing the end of the world was at hand, while a Socialist far to the left of the then government, called to the crowd to rise up and drive off the toffs with their grouse moors and their stately homes. 

Social media have now taken over the role of these street orators, and at a hugely amplified level.  At this point, I find it useful to adopt the term ‘freedom of expression’, to distance myself from the Right and its practices in the name of freedom of speech, especially in America (though they do not observe it, being eager to stamp out any form of dissent or criticism). Freedom of expression, by contrast, can be applied to forms of speech that attempt to foster a structure of feeling that still aims at values now derided as woke – hospitability, reciprocity, and affirmative responses to difference. But the principle of freedom of expression is not at all stable, and in public and in private, its observance is fitful and extremely fractious. Public prohibition at one end of the spectrum and unacknowledged self-censorship at the other have attenuated the exercise of the right. Over my lifetime, I have encountered explosions of fury over a publication or an utterance. I remember for example that the Institute of Contemporary Arts bookshop, back in the Eighties, refused to stock a little Indie magazine called The Fred, very avant garde in content and design, because some of its contents were allegedly misogynist and depicted violence against women. In l989, Visions of Ecstasy, a short film dramatizing the voluptuous writings of Saint Teresa of Avila, was charged with blasphemy and the film was suppressed (I was called as a witness for the defence). The Blasphemy law, which allowed direct censorship, was abolished in 2008, its function partly replaced by laws against hate speech; the film was at last released in 2012.   

 Today, flare-ups around freedom of expression are fierce and extremely distressing to all sides, but especially to someone like me, who does not see herself as a reactionary but is perceived to be so when rejecting censorship in certain matters. For example, the quarrel over whether trans women are women has grown even more bitter since the Supreme Court ruling in April 2025 that a woman is defined by biology. The continuing war in Israel/Palestine presents another issue in which saying certain things leads to censure and in some cases to silencing. Those who protest on behalf of Gaza and the Occupied West Bank are accused of antisemitism, by government as well as in the press and within institutions, leading to muffling and muting discussion of the situation. In both intense disputes, freedom of expression is the chief arena of struggle: what the limits are on what is permitted to be said.

What is said does not, under these constraints, fit with what is thought.

The Supreme Court added that their normative definition does not diminish the rights of transgender people to equality and protection under the law. But it has caused anguish and rage. Legal speech can’t capture the psychological complexity of expressing these states of being.

My own position is that expressing complexity is literature’s role, and that freedom of expression is necessary – and that while we still enjoy it, in part, we writers need to exercise it and bear witness to what is thought, on all sides and not give the official line. I have just re-read The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, and what a warning it issues about the consequences of censorship and repression, the climate of fear they produce, the corrupt, toadying, mediocre writing! I realise freedom of expression often leads to a very uncomfortable situation. But it is the freedom – the privilege of fiction and of all its sister arts – that it can, by representing what is thought, by struggling against the current, open possibilities of doing things differently.