Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on 14 February, US Vice-President JD Vance censured Western governments’ curtailing of free speech, not least in the UK where several pro-life Christians have been prosecuted for silently praying near abortion facilities.
“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”, said Vance, citing the case of Adam Smith-Connor, an army veteran who was found “guilty” of praying in silence for his dead son (lost to abortion) outside an abortion facility in Bournemouth, England, in 2022.
Smith-Connor was conditionally discharged for two years and ordered to pay £9,000 in prosecution costs after last year’s verdict. He is set to appeal his conviction in July, supported by ADF UK. “I am tremendously grateful that the vice-president is showcasing the deterioration of fundamental freedoms in the UK… and holding the UK accountable for prosecuting innocent people”, Smith-Connor told The Telegraph.
Vance’s namechecking of Smith-Connor had extra significance since the VP, speaking at a security conference attended by Western leaders, was a US Marine in Iraq; Smith-Connor served a tour in Afghanistan. The irony certainly wasn’t lost on Vance who made the point that Western nations risk turning into the very despotisms they oppose abroad.
“It was a very weird speech” was the BBC’s Frank Gardner’s incisive commentary on Vance’s Munich address. The mainstream media desperately attempted to reframe Vance’s message as pure grandstanding for “US domestic consumption”. The BBC might be surprised to learn that Vance also spoke to the profound concerns of many UK citizens who are aghast at the imposition of thoughtcrime for the first time in Britain.
As Vance indicated, Smith-Connor’s arrest was not a “fluke”. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a noted pro-life Catholic, has been repeatedly arrested for praying silently outside an abortion facility in England. While she received an apology from the British police and £13,000 in compensation after two wrongful arrests, she was recently targeted again and told that her “mere presence” in a public area near an abortion facility was potentially criminal.
On 19 February, just five days after Vance’s speech, a 74-year-old grandmother became the first person to be arrested and charged under Scotland’s buffer zones law. The pensioner was handcuffed and removed from the street by several police officers. MSP Gillian Mackay, who authored the Scottish buffer zones law, ominously warned other Scots “to think again” or “there will be consequences”. All the lady did was stand silently near a hospital with a sign that read: “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.”
The UK Parliament imposed “buffer zones” of 150m around abortion facilities in England and Wales in 2024, following the example of several local English councils. While silent prayer is “not necessarily” a crime, according to Crown Prosecution Guidance, Christians continue to fall prey to the interpretation of this illiberal law. Scotland enacted its own buffer zones last year, outlawing all pro-life activity within 200m, including silent prayer that might “influence someone’s private decision to use abortion services”. In Northern Ireland, too, a Christian woman named Claire Brennan was prosecuted for kneeling in prayer inside a buffer zone.
Here in the UK, we are now in the farcical situation in which Christians are found guilty of spreading the gospel to women in crisis pregnancies, but not before the prosecuting court has the accused swear an oath on the Bible to tell “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth… by Almighty God”. Is this an Orwellian dystopia or a Monty Python sketch?
Vance also referred to “letters [sent] to citizens whose houses lay within so-called ‘safe access zones’ warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law”. While MSP Gillian Mackay, the Scottish politician who created the Scottish buffer zones law, accused Vance of spreading “shameless misinformation”, the content of the letter is sufficiently vague to make a Scot close their curtains before praying the Rosary in their own home.
As the letter reads: “Activities in a private place (such as a house) within the area between the protected premises and the boundary of a Zone could be an offence if they can be seen or heard within the Zone and are done intentionally or recklessly.”
Then, this week, Mackay finally admitted that “performative” prayer inside the home might, indeed, break the law “depending on who passes the window”.
Christians, especially Roman Catholics, potentially face the worst persecution by the British state since the nineteenth century when Catholics weren’t allowed to vote in elections or hold positions of power. Mainstream opinion today has even suggested that having pro-life views is enough grounds to disqualify citizens from seeking office, as happened when Christian MSP Kate Forbes announced her candidacy to become leader of the Scottish National Party.
Meanwhile, pro-life students on UK campuses continue to be threatened with “cancellation”. Last year, students required a police escort out of a pro-life meeting at the University of Manchester as their fellow scholars abused them from all sides and even followed them home. A law designed to protect the free speech of students and academics was delayed by the new Labour Government, which later reduced it to a “toothless tiger” with no real power to hold universities to account for failing to protect student freedoms.
The situation is bleak in the UK, once a beacon of liberty and the home of John Milton who authored the classic free speech text Areopagitica in 1644. At least the United States appears to have woken up to the assault on freedom in Europe, and Vance’s scolding of its politicians is entirely deserved.
The motto of the US Marine Corps, Vance surely knows, is “Semper Fidelis”, which means “always faithful”. While it is right that Western nations call out attacks on liberty and democracy abroad, they should take care not to become the thing they fight. Has the UK remained faithful to the security that British soldiers fought for in Normandy, in the skies above Europe, and most recently, in Kandahar Province?
In a fallen world of duplicitous leaders and failing states, it is incumbent on the Anglosphere that it set the moral standard and live it almost religiously. While there’s no equivalence between buffer zones and concentration camps, we must call out any double standard before the suppression of free speech becomes the only standard. It’s the West’s complacency on this vital issue that has brought us to this point, and pro-life men and women are on the frontline of this battle.
For the ordinary British citizen, especially the elderly Catholic pro-life activist and the young anti-abortion student, the great existential threat isn’t a column of T-72 tanks rolling up Whitehall or a rusting Russian frigate chugging along the English Channel, but rather, the censorious instinct of their own political elite, as represented at Munich and other such conclaves. Vance’s leadership on this matter is a welcome step, finally holding our leaders to account for their failure to uphold the Western traditions of liberty and democracy at home, which is just as important as any foreign battlefield.
