It is an exquisite irony, perhaps bordering on the absurd, that the United States—under the second Trump administration—has chosen this year to chastise the United Kingdom for a purported “worsening” of its human rights record. Washington’s rebuke, delivered with an air of moral certitude, homes in on perceived erosions of freedom of expression in Britain. The report cites restrictions on political speech deemed “hateful” or “offensive”, buffer zone laws outside abortion clinics, and prosecutions related to online misinformation.
This is the sort of language Britain once reserved for its former colonies. Many in Southern Africa will remember the tone: paternalistic, patronising, and invariably couched in the rhetoric of civilisational duty. From Rhodesia to the Gold Coast, London fancied itself the moral tutor, instructing African peoples on the supposed virtues of free expression—albeit always under the watchful eye of the colonial administrator and subject to the caveats of imperial convenience.
Yet this lecturing did not vanish with the Union Jack from African capitals. In the decades since independence, successive British governments have continued to position themselves as arbiters of African governance, using public criticism, aid conditionalities, and diplomatic pressure to steer domestic policies.
When Zimbabwe’s 2008 elections descended into violence, then–Foreign Secretary David Miliband declared in the House of Commons: “The regime in Harare has demonstrated an utter contempt for democratic principles. We must make it clear to the people of Zimbabwe that Britain stands with them against tyranny and will not rest until their rights are restored.”
In Uganda, the reaction to the 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act was swift and moralistic. Then–Foreign Office Minister Hugh Robertson told MPs: “It is our moral duty to use every lever at our disposal to urge Uganda to abandon this abhorrent legislation. The denial of basic human rights is incompatible with our continued support.” When President Yoweri Museveni signed similar legislation in 2023, the UK Foreign Office reiterated its stance, calling the law “deeply discriminatory” and warning that “respect for human rights is fundamental to our relationships and partnerships.”
In Nigeria, the British High Commission publicly condemned security abuses during the #EndSARS protests. In the House of Lords, Baroness Sugg stated: “Nigeria’s security forces must be held accountable for the violence against peaceful protesters. Freedom of expression and assembly are cornerstones of democracy, and Britain will always stand in defence of these principles.”
Such interventions, whatever their moral merit, are delivered with the assumption that Britain itself is the gold standard for democracy—a conceit that the current American rebuke now throws into sharp relief.
One might therefore be tempted to relish the spectacle of the former metropole receiving a lecture on liberty. Yet the present accuser is hardly an unimpeachable standard-bearer. That the United States—particularly under Donald Trump—should position itself as the global sentinel of free speech is to demand a certain suspension of disbelief. For while the State Department’s prose may drip with First Amendment idealism, the recent record of press freedom in the US tells a more compromised tale.
During Trump’s first term (2017–2021), American journalism faced unprecedented hostility from the executive. The president famously branded the media “the enemy of the people”—a phrase with a long and ignominious lineage in authoritarian discourse. His administration repeatedly attempted to bar certain outlets from White House briefings, including CNN and The Washington Post, after critical coverage. CNN’s Jim Acosta was temporarily stripped of his press credentials in 2018, prompting a federal judge to intervene and restore them. In parallel, Trump and senior officials openly threatened to withdraw broadcast licences from networks whose reporting displeased them.
It was not merely verbal sabre-rattling. In 2020, the Justice Department secretly seized phone records from journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, ostensibly in pursuit of leak investigations. Such actions sent a chilling message to reporters and editors: the state was willing to breach the traditional firewall between government and newsroom in order to root out sources. Press freedom watchdogs, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, described these measures as a “grave threat” to investigative reporting in the United States.
And yet, here stands the same administration—renewed and reinvigorated in 2025—issuing lofty admonitions about the sanctity of speech. The irony would be delicious, were it not so steeped in double standards.
Britain, for its part, is hardly without blemish in this affair. The State Department report singles out the government’s handling of the aftermath of the 2024 Southport attacks, when online misinformation about the perpetrator’s immigration status provoked violent unrest. The UK’s legal response included arrests and prosecutions for posts inciting retaliation—a course of action its defenders frame as public safety, and its critics as overreach. Added to this are buffer zone laws prohibiting protests near abortion clinics, which have already produced convictions for individuals engaging in silent, non-obstructive protest. Such measures, though defended in Westminster as necessary protections, undeniably test the elasticity of Britain’s commitment to free expression.
For African readers, the episode may conjure a deeper reflection. The colonial era was punctuated by Britain’s stern lectures on the need for “responsible” speech in its territories, often accompanied by laws criminalising dissent, controlling the press, and curbing nationalist agitation. The notion that public order justified curtailing liberties was as familiar in colonial Lusaka or Lagos as it is in modern London. In the post-colonial era, Britain’s willingness to admonish African governments—sometimes in Parliament, sometimes in the press, and sometimes via the conditionalities of the Department for International Development—has been unrelenting. Now, at last, London finds itself on the receiving end of a lesson it has so long delivered to others.
And what of the United States? Though it never formally colonised Africa, Washington has long wielded its own brand of moral diplomacy, issuing human rights reports on the rest of the world while domestic realities—police violence, voter suppression, and, yes, assaults on the free press—remained unresolved. In this sense, the US role is not unlike that of Britain’s imperial past: the assumption of moral authority, even when the home record is patchy.
The real lesson lies in recognising that the high language of rights is too often deployed selectively, and that nations with chequered histories are rarely the pure arbiters they claim to be. Freedoms are never secured by rhetoric alone; they require vigilance, humility, and an honest reckoning with one’s own failings.
Until then, the spectacle of Washington scolding London on liberty will remain what it is: a curious mirror in which both nations might glimpse their own contradictions—if only they cared to look.
