Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. First articulated in 1941 by Franklin D Roosevelt and enshrined into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seven years later, these Four Freedoms, so iconic as to be always capitalised, are as good a benchmark as any for the health of a body politic. Right now, however, this country’s falling short in every one of them, and FDR – a man whom Churchill called “the greatest American friend we have ever known” – would surely be dismayed if he could see it.
At first glance, freedom of speech – a key bulwark against authoritarianism and a prerequisite for proper democratic engagement – seems intact. There’s no official state censorship, politicians and journalists speak openly, and social media allows everyone to debate everyone else. Yes, there are strict legal limits to this freedom, but it’s always been thus. Even in the USA, the safeguards aren’t absolute: at least ten categories of speech are wholly or partially exempted from protection under the First Amendment.
Look closer, though, and you’ll see why the free speech advocacy organisation Article 19 has for the first time downgraded us from its highest category, “Open”, to its second band, “Less Restricted” – a tier that also includes Colombia, Nigeria, Romania and South Africa. And of course why JD Vance said during his trip to the UK this summer that we risk going down a “very dark path” of becoming “a little too comfortable with censoring rather than engaging with a diverse array of opinions”. Vance is a monstrous hypocrite on this issue – he’s Vice-President of an administration that banned the Associated Press from privileged White House access because it refused to fall in line with Donald Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America – and, as his treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the infamous Oval Office meeting in February shows, he can also be a repellent bully. But neither of those make him wrong here.
You say the wrong thing, they’ll lock your ass up quick
Late last year, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper issued Apple with a Technical Capability Notice (TCN), compelling the company to provide access to encrypted user data stored in the iCloud: in essence, requiring Apple to break the end-to-end encryption that protects its customer data and to which even Apple has no access. The TCN wasn’t a reactive request, it was a demand for permanent re-engineering of Apple’s systems, effectively creating a pre-emptive government surveillance infrastructure. Apple is challenging the order, of course – if it cedes this then it would have to cede similar changes to any government that asks – but the issuing of the TCN should worry us all.
Then there’s the Online Safety Act, which has faced widespread public blowback since coming into force last month: more than 500,000 people have signed a petition demanding its repeal. Ostensibly designed to protect children by demanding age verification for certain websites, the Act has simply caused a spike in the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as people seek to bypass the restrictions, which has in turn prompted the government to consider banning VPNs altogether. It’s an idea that Graeme Stewart of Check Point Software says would “put the UK in the company of China, Russia, and Iran.” He adds that “enforcement of age verification is often outsourced to unaccountable third parties, relying on fragmented databases that offer no guarantee of security, legitimacy, or transparency.”
Trust in service provider confidentiality is a key aspect of freedom of speech, not just for those whose work relies on it, such as journalists and whistleblowers, but also for ordinary citizens who rightly regard their conversations and viewing habits as private. This isn’t a question of the old adage that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about, it’s a question of who decides what’s hidden. Privacy and freedom of speech are mutually reinforcing rights: you can’t erode one without undermining the other.
The picture’s no better when it comes to public statements, be they online (The Economist states that police now arrest more than 30 people a day for social media posts, double the 2017 rate) or in the physical world. Should people really be detained for silently praying outside abortion clinics, as has happened to Isabel Vaughan-Spruce three times since 2022? Or for unloading placards from a van, as protestors from the anti-monarchy group Republic were doing before King Charles III’s coronation in May 2023? Or for holding up a Private Eye cartoon during a Palestine solidarity rally, like Jon Farley last month? It doesn’t matter whether you agree with all, some, or none of these stances. It doesn’t even matter whether you believe protest can be an effective way to bring about change. As Ice-T pointed out as far back as 1989: “Freedom of speech, that’s some motherfuckin’ bullshit. You say the wrong thing, they’ll lock your ass up quick.”
Police recording of non-crime hate incidents – actions not criminal in themselves but perceived as being hostile towards another person’s race, religion, sexual orientation or disability – is yet more official overreach. By definition, the police shouldn’t concern themselves with something that’s a “non-crime”, no matter how distasteful it may seem. Being offensive isn’t in itself an offence.
Should Bobby Vylan have been arrested over his “death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury in June?
All this leaks from the legal sphere into the cultural one. Toxic online spats make many people hold their tongue, either because they don’t want the stress of unpleasant arguments or because they fear for their professional livelihoods. JK Rowling is a heroine to millions for her uncompromising defence of women’s rights, a stance that has made her Public Enemy Number One to many transgender activists, and it’s no dismissal of either her eloquence or her bravery to note that she can in every way afford to take the heat her comments draw. A 2024 Office for Students (OfS) poll found that one in five academics, irrespective of political leaning, don’t feel completely free to teach controversial topics such as sex and gender, and one in three are afraid to discuss them outside strict campus conditions.
It’d be nice if all public debate was passionate but mutually respectful, adversarial without being poisonous, but that ship sailed long ago and isn’t returning to harbour any time soon. Small wonder that individual incidents are seized on and weaponised as exemplars of the culture wars. Did Lucy Connolly deserve a sentence of more than two-and-a-half-years for tweeting “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. If that makes me racist, so be it,” after the Southport murders last year? Should Bobby Vylan have been arrested over his “death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury in June? How would police and public reactions have differed if, say, someone had tweeted that every Jewish shop in Hatton Garden should be destroyed, or if a Jewish rapper had chanted “death to Hamas?”
The case of Simon Pearson provides a neat segue into the second freedom: that of worship. Pearson, a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at Preston College, wrote on a restricted-access Facebook group last summer that though Lucy Connolly’s “appalling comment” was “obviously wrong, she should not have been jailed,” adding that those “calling for the genocide of Jews from the river to the sea are also free to express their opinions and make Jewish people afraid to walk the streets.” As a result of that post, one which he said no student at the college could have accessed, he was suspended from his job for six months before being formally dismissed in February.
Pearson’s case is relevant for two reasons. First, his remark about “Jewish people being afraid to walk the streets” reflects a more than doubling of reported attacks on Jewish people in the year ending March 2024, along with a less pronounced rise in attacks on Muslims in the same period (though the latter total remains slightly higher overall). The two categories between them accounted for more than 70% of the 10,000 religious hate crimes recorded.
Secondly, Pearson explicitly linked the treatment he’d suffered to his own religious leanings. “It’s really from a background of Christian values of fairness that I felt compelled to say something,” he said, adding that the disciplinary process (in which he was represented by a Christian legal organisation) “went into other things that relate to my Christian beliefs.” Leaving aside Pearson’s own well-documented support of Muslim students and asylum seekers as part of his job – and an ESOL teaching post in Preston seems an unlikely choice of profession for a supposed racist bigot, to say the least – his case also speaks to the downgrading of Christianity in this country.
The most recent census in 2021 saw, for the first time, less than half the population of England and Wales describing themselves as Christian. While the 46.2% is still higher than the 37% who described themselves as having no religion, the current rate of travel in both directions means that “no religion” will be the single largest category by the time the next census comes around in 2031.
It’s been six months now that we’ve had no Archbishop of Canterbury: has anyone even really noticed?
In a secular state, of course, there’s quite rightly no automatic right of primacy for any religion, and a plurality of faiths is surely a good thing (several members of Strathclyde Police gave their religion in the 2011 census as “Jedi”, prompting the unimprovable headline MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU.) Freedom to worship also means the freedom not to do so, and religious observance certainly doesn’t in and of itself make someone a good person or valuable member of society. In many ways, the Church of England’s got only itself to blame in coming across as outdated and irrelevant. It’s been six months now that we’ve had no Archbishop of Canterbury: has anyone even really noticed?
But it’s hard to escape the feeling that Anglicanism in particular has been a bedrock of the quiet decency on which this country’s long prided itself, a social glue binding people together: the vicar having tea with lonely or troubled parishioners, the sanctuary that an empty church provides for silent contemplation, the beauty of hymns and stained-glass windows. Even for agnostics and atheists, churches are still waypoints for many of life’s most important occasions: christenings, weddings, funerals.
And there’s not necessarily anything obvious that’ll fill the gap. “We are witnessing a drift from our Christian roots, more by default than by conviction,” says Mark Davies, Bishop of Shrewsbury. “People cannot live long in a vacuum, and unless Christianity is rediscovered as our guiding light, society will be increasingly vulnerable to passing and often dangerous ideologies.”
These ideologies are especially enticing in times of want, the third of FDR’s freedoms. (It’s at this point that the quartet’s subtlety – it’s actually two pairs rather than a foursome – comes into play. Freedom of speech and worship are legally enshrined liberties; freedom from want and fear are holistic standards of living: it’s the perfect mix of rights and responsibilities which between them make up society.)
The cost-of-living crisis, inadequate infrastructural and institutional resilience, and regional disparities have left millions in poverty: to be precise, 14.3 million people, more than one in five of the population. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)’s UK Poverty 2025 report finds that six million of those are in deep poverty (incomes far below the standard poverty line), and almost four million have experienced some form of destitution, unable to afford basic needs such as food, housing or heating. There are more than twice as many food banks in the UK as there are McDonald’s outlets, and the numbers using them are on the rise.
The statistics are alarming enough in themselves, but they only hint at the myriad ancillary problems that each person among those millions faces: the relentlessly enervating strain of never having enough money, the vertiginous knowledge that there’s neither margin for error nor workable safety net, the shame and humiliation of having to rely on charity, the thousand cuts chipping away at mental and physical health.
There’s a reason why violence broke out in Southport rather than South Kensington, in Blackpool rather than Blackheath
That more than four-fifths of those experiencing destitution don’t have complex needs (defined as ticking at least two boxes from a list that includes homelessness, drug or alcohol abuse, offending, domestic violence or begging) makes the picture even bleaker. These people aren’t vagrants, criminals or junkies: they can’t be “othered” like that. They’re just like us, except they’ve fallen further through the cracks.
And a country where so many citizens aren’t free from want is a country whose citizens won’t accept that situation indefinitely, and who’ll sooner or later start seeking scapegoats. The riots that followed the Southport murders – it’s telling how that episode is in one way or another a touchstone for so much that’s wrong in today’s Britain – didn’t take place in isolation. There’s a reason why violence broke out in Southport rather than South Kensington, in Blackpool rather than Blackheath: these are the places where there’s not enough of the pie to go round. Sure, there were many unrepentant racists among the rioters, and many more who just fancied a ruck or two. But there were also plenty of people with no other outlet for their frustrations at low wages, housing shortages and crumbling public services.
One year on, the New Statesman journalist Anoosh Chakelian went to Epping, where she found plenty of people willing to discuss the situation. “You’ve got to look after your own first.” “We need stuff given to English people, they haven’t got houses themselves.” “This town is empty, it’s dead; people haven’t got money to shop anymore. I worry about my future grandchildren: life is shit now, what will life be for them?” These are the kind of towns that voted Brexit nine years ago, partly as a howl of rage against their marginalisation from national discourse. They’re places to which middle-class commentators hurried after the referendum to try and explain what they’d thought was inexplicable; places where politicians of all stripes professed to finally see and hear the residents. But in those nine years, how much has changed for the better?
It’s the shortest of steps from want to fear, the fourth of Roosevelt’s freedoms (and between them, want and fear comprise the tinder easily sparked into anger). One of the most common reasons people give for their hostility to immigrants is fear: specifically, fear of the danger that groups of young men from sexually conservative societies are seen as posing to women and girls.
The ONS reports that in the year to March 2025 one in eight women were victims of sexual assault
Reports of harassment and assault are commonplace, and of course the Rotherham grooming-gangs scandal looms large in the public psyche – an episode itself grossly exacerbated by concerns around the first two freedoms which led to the authorities soft-pedalling investigations into the abuse of more than 1,400 children, mainly by men of Pakistani heritage, for fear of being thought racist or threatening community cohesion. No matter that defending vulnerable and exploited young girls should have trumped any other consideration, and no matter that plenty of local Muslim community leaders were as horrified by the revelations as anyone else.
These fears of immigrants in general and young immigrant men in particular are real enough, but they’re also not remotely the whole picture. Two in every five of those arrested during the Southport riots had police records for reported or convicted domestic violence: in other words, harming the very women they purported to defend. More generally, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) reports that in the year to March 2025 one in eight women were victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking. One in eight! In an allegedly civilised country!
Then there are the fears we all share, to a greater or lesser degree. The Doomsday Clock stands at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been, and few of us are immune from worry about the three factors that most tap into the clock’s placing: the prospect of global nuclear conflict, the risk from AI and other new technologies, and climate change. The world’s always been a scary place – those of us who grew up during the Cold War will remember the fear of Soviet nuclear strikes, and for our generation there’ll never be a piece of television as remotely terrifying as Threads was – but perhaps never before have the threats seemed to come so fast and from so many different angles at once.
This is where the Four Freedoms become an ouroboros in which the fourth, freedom from fear, loops all the way back into the first, freedom of speech. Two years after FDR first outlined them, the freedoms were immortalised by a quartet of Norman Rockwell paintings, each with an accompanying essay. Pulitzer Prize winner Booth Tarkington penned the essay about freedom of speech, imagining a 1912 conversation between a painter and a journalist “in a small chalet on the mountain road from Verona to Innsbruck.”
The two men – and Tarkington allows you to feel clever by making it obvious who they are, a few paragraphs before he reveals their names – discuss how their ideas would never gain traction in England or America, because “in those countries the people create their own governments. They make them what they please, and so the people really are the governments. They let anybody stand up and say what he thinks. If they believe he’s said something sensible, they vote to do what he suggests. If they think he is foolish, they vote no…. Speech is the expression of thought and will. Therefore, freedom of speech means freedom of the people. If you prevent them from expressing their will in speech, you have them enchained, an absolute monarchy. Of course, nowadays he who chains the people is called a dictator.”
A nation that suppresses proper debate or conducts debate in tribally confrontational terms is a nation storing up endless trouble for itself along the very path Tarkington outlines, because restricting what people feel they can say eventually erodes rather than ensures social harmony. It’s a nation which refuses to listen to the things it finds uncomfortable; a nation whose policymakers ignore inconvenient truths like want and fear in the hope they’ll become someone else’s problem further down the line; a nation whose governments compensate for their incompetence by becoming ever more intrusive in their citizens’ lives.
As Thomas Jefferson said, “the government you elect is the government you deserve.”
Into the vacuum caused by the absence of the four freedoms come men like the two Tarkington wrote about: “I have heard him called ‘Benito,’ my dear young Herr Hitler.” They are men promising simple answers to complex questions, men promising to restore nations to what they once were, because even if those pasts weren’t actually golden they seem a lot more appealing than the present and future. Men promising they’ll listen to you when no-one else has, even though literally every historical example proves the opposite is true. And men who’ll take every existing piece of overarching state apparatus and use them with impunity while building yet more of the same.
You can get odds of 5-2 on Nigel Farage – a man whose party name speaks not to a coherent political philosophy but a simple desire to upend the entire system – becoming the next UK prime minister; the next nearest, at 7-1, is Angela Rayner. As Thomas Jefferson said, “the government you elect is the government you deserve.”
More and more, a line from my favourite movie comes to mind. Of the many reasons I love Se7en, not least is its perceptiveness about human nature. It feels as relevant now as it did on release 30 years ago. And never is this truer than in the last line, given to Morgan Freeman’s spiritually weary but profoundly decent Detective William Somerset: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”
Boris Starling is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. He has written ‘Open Side’ with Sam Warburton, ‘Rise’ with Siya Kolisi, and ‘Leap Of Faith’ with Frankie Dettori
