FREE speech is under threat in Britain — according to the United States.

Its State Department charges the British government with restricting our freedoms. Its Vice-President JD Vance, whose British “holiday” has included hosting unsavoury characters from Tory Robert Jenrick to Reform leader Nigel Farage and right-wing “influencers” James Orr and Thomas Skinner at his rented manor, makes no secret of his concern that Britain is suppressing free expression.

And, of course, it is. The mass arrest of 522 people last weekend for peacefully protesting against the ban on Palestine Action is chilling.

People have been arrested under anti-terrorism legislation for sitting down holding placards. Arrested even when they do not “express support” for the group, but deploy inventive formulations to express their disapproval, such as “I support Palestine, Action is necessary,” and even “I don’t support Palestine inaction.”

That’s not Vance’s worry, or that of the US government. Their posturing is hypocritical: the Donald Trump government is so keen on freedom of speech it bans media outlets from White House press conferences for referring to the “Gulf of Mexico” rather than the “Gulf of America.”

If the State Department’s annual country-by-country human rights lecture is now more brazen in giving top marks to mass-incarcerating and even genocidal regimes (El Salvador, Israel) while shunting countries which have annoyed Trump down (Brazil), it only affirms what has long been obvious: this is a political list of who’s in and out of Washington’s good books, and no help to anyone trying to assess the human rights record of a particular country.

On this occasion,, though, the US criticism is helpful.

It has seldom been more obvious to more people that the biggest threat to free speech in Britain is directed against the Palestine solidarity and peace movement.

Defiance against that is growing, as the consistently enormous national demonstrations for Palestine show eight months after police tried to terrorise the movement by arresting and charging its leaders, and despite ever worsening determination to obstruct routes and expand no-go areas; and as we see in the continuing protests against the Palestine Action ban specifically.

The age profile of those arrested — with people of pensionable age disproportionately represented — gives the lie to the stereotype of angry youths “radicalised” online, and shows how widely across British society disgust at Israel’s genocide in Gaza and our government’s support for it has spread.

For the US government — with its admirers like Farage this side of the pond — to step in now with their selective gripes, while winking at the highest-profile civil liberties struggle in the country, explodes the hypocrisy of the right and provides ground to challenge their apparent commitment to free speech.

It is past time that this cause — a defence of the citizen and of the working class, against the Establishment and the state — was reclaimed by the left. It is no lie that our freedoms of assembly, protest and speech have been whittled away by recent governments, or that this dangerous trend continues.

To do so the left must look itself in the mirror, and acknowledge its own sometimes inconsistent attitude to free speech. Parts of the labour movement joined witch-hunts and no-platforming campaigns for voicing unfashionable opinions on Brexit or sex and gender; parts acquiesced in misuse of the term “safe spaces” to shut down frank discussion of controversial subjects on the grounds they might give offence, a tactic exploited by the right so effectively on the subject of Israel.

Unless we stand up for the principle of free speech and debate, we will earn the same accusations of double standards as the right: and entrench a division of the working class into two camps talking different languages, that excludes the possibility of a united front against the misleaders of Washington and Westminster.