The fallout from American Vice President JD Vance‘s brutally honest speech in Munich continues to reverberate around Europe.
Knee-jerk reaction across the political spectrum has been entirely predictable. Vance has been dismissed as giving succour to the ‘far Right’ – the catch-all insult hurled at anyone who dares to disagree with the cosy ‘liberal’ consensus.
European leaders spat the dummy when confronted with Vance’s home truths. In Britain, Labour ministers have condemned his remarks, while trying desperately not to say anything which might damage what remains of the ‘special relationship’.
It was left to rookie Tory leader Kemi Badenoch to support Vance’s concerns about the erosion of basic freedoms both in Europe and here in Britain.
She said free speech was under threat and the law had over-reached as politicians try to police sincerely-held opinions which run contrary to what they consider ‘acceptable’.
I’m with Kemi. My reaction to Vance’s speech was: ‘Sock it to ’em, JD!’
Leave aside the indisputable truth that all European nations, including Britain, have allowed their armed forces to run down alarmingly while frittering billions on welfare and relying on America to protect us militarily.
This column does not intend to get into the arguments about how best to end the war in Ukraine. Suffice to say that without American largesse and materiel, Kyiv would have fallen in weeks, if not days.
My reaction to Vance’s speech was ‘sock it to ’em, JD!’, writes Richard Littlejohn
I’d rather concentrate on what Vance had to say about the state of our democracy. The Vice President said what he worried about was the ‘threat from within’ – a bigger danger that the military threat from Russia.
That might be debatable, but he struck a raw nerve. He is concerned over ‘the retreat from Europe from some of its more fundamental values – values it shares with the United States of America’.
Perhaps that should read ‘shared with’, past tense. Over the past couple of decades, the European and American ideal of civil liberties and the rule of law have drifted oceans apart, especially when it comes to freedom of expression and respect for public opinion.
Vance went on: ‘Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.
‘I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or, worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing.
‘Perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.’
Vance singled out the case of the ex-serviceman prosecuted for praying silently in a ‘buffer zone’ near an abortion clinic in Bournemouth. He also accused the Scottish government of criminalising prayer.
The Vice President claimed that governments across Europe are encouraging people to report those suspected of ‘thought crime’ to the authorities.
Sir Keir Starmer is now desperately trying to ingratiate himself with Trump
While his allegations were not entirely accurate, he has a broader point. And it would be wrong not to recognise that freedom of religion and access to abortion are red hot political issues in the US in a way which does not apply here.
Our Government is effectively introducing a blasphemy law by the back door to appease the Islamic lobby, and cracking down on what it labels ‘hate speech’ at every opportunity.
Since the introduction of the Online Safety Act in October 2023, almost 300 people have been charged with ‘speech crime’ on social media.
While no one disputes that those who incite violence deserve exemplary punishment, those who express controversial opinions which some find ‘offensive’ should not be facing jail.
Fresh law also makes it an offence to spread ‘disinformation’ – which would have extended to anyone who, at the time, maintained the now widely accepted fact that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan and not from a dodgy pangolin at a downtown wet market.
If you criminalise ‘disinformation’, who gets to decide what’s true and what isn’t? It opens the door to state censorship.
Meanwhile pro-Hamas demonstrators spewing genuine anti-Semitic hatred on the streets of London almost weekly are given a police escort and are seemingly immune from prosecution.
None of this goes unnoticed on the other side of the Atlantic.
Our newspapers and broadcasters are already tightly regulated, unlike our counterparts in the US. Cancel culture is rampant, with people losing their jobs for expressing ‘inappropriate’ views.
Much of this has happened by stealth, without any reference to public opinion.
Against a backdrop of fresh terrorist attacks by asylum seekers in Europe – including carnage on the conference doorstep in Munich itself – Vance said: ‘No one on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.
‘But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it.’
Yet now we have a Labour Prime Minister who, along with most of the political class, strained every sinew to overturn the referendum result, refuses to exploit the many benefits of Britain’s independence and is crawling back to Brussels and aligning us with the EU by stealth.
The Brexit vote was widely welcomed in America, where the idea of national sovereignty is taken extremely seriously. It’s the main reason the two British politicians Trump most admires are Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, who made Brexit happen, however imperfectly.
Starmer is now desperately trying to ingratiate himself with Trump, although it won’t have helped that he has appointed a Washington ambassador and Foreign Secretary who have previously slandered the President as a racist, sexist, white supremacist.
So the PM would do well to heed Vance’s speech, which despite its fairly hostile tone towards Europe in general still displayed a residual warmth towards Britain, which Trump himself shares.
The Vice President is bang on when he talks about the erosion of free speech and civil liberties in particular in the UK. He’s also right about shutting people out of the political process and closing down elections. That’s precisely what Deputy PM Ginge Rayner is doing as she creates a new breed of super-councils even more remote from the people they will be elected to serve.
Americans still admire Britain as the birthplace of parliamentary democracy. They revere the Magna Carta and much of American law stems from our common law.
We’re still considered the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Churchill and The Beatles. But on my more recent visits to the States, I’ve encounted a change in attitudes.
More than once, I’ve been asked: ‘What the hell is going on with you guys?’
Social media has exacerbated this trend, but when our American cousins look across the Atlantic these days, they see an increasingly dysfunctional country, populated with grooming gangs and angry pro-Palestine mobs given free rein in a capital city run by a far Left Muslim mayor who makes no secret of his hatred for their President, Donald Trump.
They read about people being jailed for expressing unfashionable opinions on the internet.
And although they have their own problems on their Southern border, they can’t understand why we are welcoming millions of foreign migrants despite widespread opposition from voters.
The idea that Keir Starmer will send British troops to help police a post-war Ukraine is risible, especially when we can’t defend the Kent coast against an invasion by thousands of military age men from goodness knows where, about whom we know nothing.
Sometimes it would do our political class good to pause and see ourselves as our friends in America see us. If Starmer was paying attention to the US Vice President’s speech in Munich, then Vance may have done us all a favour.