The U.S. Embassy in London is making as much as $500,000 in grant funding available for projects aimed at strengthening shared U.S.-U.K. principles, among them free expression, due process and limited government. But the initiative is already drawing political pushback in Britain, where one lawmaker has dismissed it as “MAGA money meddling.”
Liberal Democrat MP Lisa Smart described the funding offer as “Trump’s MAGA money meddling in democracy” in comments reported by The Guardian.
“We have a proud tradition of liberty and freedom of speech in this country,” Smart said.
Free speech advocates, however, argue that Britain’s reputation for open debate is increasingly at risk.
Lisa Smart, the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson for Home Affairs and MP for Hazel Grove, speaks to delegates during the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference at Harrogate Convention Centre on March 21, 2025, in Harrogate, England. Smart criticized a U.S. grant intended to promote shared values between the United States and the United Kingdom as “Trump’s MAGA money meddling in our democracy.” (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
Greg Lukianoff, president of the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, told News Outlet that the situation in the United Kingdom has become alarming. “It is a true free speech disaster in the U.K., and they don’t even seem to know what’s happening,” he said.
Lukianoff argued that Britain’s current approach to speech rights shows the country may need outside support, regardless of where it originates.
“Whether the help is coming from JD Vance or Trump or maybe some future Democrat who sees the light on this stuff, the U.K. should be accepting help on freedom of speech because they are in crisis, and it’s unsustainable,” Lukianoff told News Outlet.
The U.S. Embassy in London, in response to Smart’s criticisms, noted that Liberal Democrats did not push back on Biden-era grants that could be viewed as political.
In response to the accusation that the U.S. is “meddling in British democracy,” the U.S. embassy said in a statement to News Outlet, it “is mindful of such concerns, and has discontinued Biden-era public diplomacy spending on divisive ideological projects such as ‘climate justice,’ LGBTQ activism, and race-based hiring initiatives — none of which, to our recollection, raised such complaints from officials.”
President Donald Trump’s State Department as a whole is axing Biden-era guidelines that directed personnel to push a woke diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) agenda on foreign officials and governments, News Outlet has learned.
Meanwhile, the FIRE boss rejected the notion that foundational values like free speech are MAGA constructions.
“When it comes to the idea of these being fundamentally tainted ideas, that is very much a higher education, elite-educated concept,” he told News Outlet.
Supporters of British activist Tommy Robinson walk through central London waving flags during a “Free speech” march, on Sept. 13, 2025. (CARLOS JASSO/AFP via Getty Images)
The U.K. has imposed a number of new laws restricting speech in the country in recent years, perhaps most notably the 2023 Online Safety Act, which gives the country’s regulators the power to slap hefty fines on digital platforms if they don’t enforce the U.K.’s increasingly stricter speech codes.
Lukianoff compared the U.K.’s new direction to the first Red Scare, the period in U.S. history in the early 1920s that saw thousands arrested on charges related to suspected communist ties.
“I always have to put this in context. In the first Red Scare in the United States — 1919 and 1920 — we arrested about 2,000 people per year, and that’s bad. They’re arresting around 12,000 a year in a country that’s about 50% smaller than the U.S. was at the time. They are in free fall and also in complete denial of it,” Lukianoff said.
Ahead of a House of Lords debate last year on arrests for online communications and free speech, the House of Lords Library cited a Times of London analysis that found more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 under two communications laws.
Both the U.S. and U.K. allow authorities to prosecute threats of violence, but the U.K. has no direct equivalent to the First Amendment and also criminalizes certain communications deemed “grossly offensive.”
Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, walks to a morning session at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 10, 2025, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Lukianoff, in an interview with News Outlet, called the U.K.’s increasingly censorious speech laws “insane” and “unsustainable.” (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The outsized number of arrests in the U.K., Lukianoff argued, don’t “even include the large number of non-crime hate incidents or the stuff that they’re currently trying to suppress, also in the United States, by the way, through their online laws.”
“So it is a true free speech disaster in the U.K., and they don’t even seem to know what’s happening,” he added.
A non-crime hate incident, according to the U.K. government, is defined as “an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated — wholly or partly — by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.”
The government, according to FIRE, creates a registry of people who participate in these NCHIs, which the organization calls “censorship with extra steps.”
“Non-criminal hate speech incidents can be anything from just someone saying something like, we want to reduce immigration because it raises crime rates. That’s an empirical question. If you’re a free person or free society, you should be able to actually have that debate. You should be able to show numbers. You better persuade, et cetera. You can’t just deem it illegal to have that argument,” Lukianoff told News Outlet.
“I think that there’s so much the U.K. could have to offer if it would get off its own feet. Essentially, I think that it’s in a process of kind of rejecting everything that made it great at one point. And if we can help out a friend — even when they don’t know they’re in need — when they’re in need, I think we absolutely should. But I really don’t know how Britain can get a better view of itself at the moment, because currently the message isn’t getting through that what’s going on there right now isn’t sustainable,” Lukianoff said.
News Outlet contacted Smart for further comment.
