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Nigel Farage’s obsession with free speech has become the mood music of his own party, the Conservatives and the BBC, so it shouldn’t have been shocking or troubling to learn that he’d testified in the US Congress on 3 September on the subject of this elemental liberty, and how profoundly at risk it is in the UK.
His position we could recite in our sleep – it hasn’t deviated, and remains nonsense on stilts. Free speech is only at risk in the UK insofar as 80-year-olds can now be arrested for opposing genocide with homemade placards, and that’s quite a big “only”. But in Nigel’s upside-down world he is remorselessly censored, and a leftist cabal is still calling the shots – and will only get stronger. The troubling element wasn’t what he said, but who orchestrated his appearance.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is a conservative Christian lobby group whose allies include JD Vance and speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who used to work as an ADF lawyer. While their focus, brokering Farage’s appearance in Congress (the formal invitation came from the House judiciary committee) is on free speech, the legal challenges they bring, both in the US and internationally, tend to use the issue instrumentally as a way to gain allies in their battle against reproductive rights.
ADF UK has given legal support to people who’ve been prosecuted for protesting outside abortion clinics, breaching the UK’s “buffer zones”, and to the midwife who was suspended from her job for making anti-abortion statements on social media. It also uses the existence of legislation against this harassment as proof of a free-speech crisis in the country. The two issues are thus conjoined in a ratchet, where any victory in one becomes grist for the other.
The buffer-zones debate works particularly well, appealing as it does to a progressive sense of fair-mindedness – come on, liberal, if you want to be allowed to call out a genocide, who are you to stop a Christian calling out a pregnant woman for murdering a baby? It’s an argument whose bad faith you can smell a mile off, but it’s enough to sow confusion and turn the wokerati against itself.
When Farage was head of the Brexit party, it had no stance on abortion. The New York Times could find no record of his having done so, anyway, and knowing him as we all do, you can’t imagine it: it doesn’t chime at all with the smoking, pint-loving, British pound sterling and sovereignty guy, to be digging around in women’s business. Yet as if by magic, suddenly last November, he wanted to talk about rolling back the abortion time limit “given that we can now save babies at 22 weeks” (the time limit is 24). By May this year, the current limit was “absolutely ludicrous” , according to Nigel. Although he did say to New York Times reporters that it was “bollocks” to say he had found a new interest in the topic of reproductive rights.
ADF lawyers have told journalists explicitly that their goal, long term, is to see abortion rights curtailed in the UK – to which one’s every synapse screams, “in your dreams, you hubristic fantasists”. But we’ve seen how fast the current Labour leadership and the Conservatives scramble to meet Reform UK halfway.
We have already seen how influenced by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 the Conservatives are: from seeing renewable energy as a way to future-proof the economy to now seeing it as a woke conspiracy we can’t afford. Five years ago, it would have been considered tawdry to be interested in the physiology of whoever was in the toilet cubicle next to you, and now it is a matter for the UK supreme court. Attitudes to migration were becoming steadily more positive from 2015. However, in 2023, they flipped negative, and have since galvanised a hardcore of protesters whose aggression has since torched asylum hotels and left foreign-born carers scared to get out of their cars.
Which politicians do you trust to stand up to what is basically authoritarian empire-building? Because the time to start supporting them is now, not five to midnight.
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
