Preston Byrne, the radical American lawyer, says his new Free Speech Bill, which the Adam Smith Institute publishes today, was inspired by something I wrote. To better protect free speech, I said, we don’t need to transplant the first amendment into British law. Rather, we just need to pull up the weeds obscuring the beautiful rose garden that is English common law. The American Bill of Rights, after all, was an attempt to embed the best of the common law tradition in the US constitution.

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I’m flattered because there’s much to admire in Preston’s proposal. This is his second attempt at drafting a free speech bill and an improvement on the first, which urged lawmakers to create an ‘inviolable liberty’ that would be ‘immune from interference by parliament itself’. By this he meant a departure from the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, with a British version of the first amendment enjoying the same constitutional status as the American one. But I can’t see how that would work. 

Let’s suppose the Preston Byrne Party wins a majority at the next election and........

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