Britain 'out of whack' on free speech, warns Nick Clegg

Britain has "fallen out of love with the future" and is "out of whack" on free speech, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has warned.

The ex-Liberal Democrat leader, who was David Cameron's second-in-command during the coalition of 2010-2015, said the country was suffering from a sense of "underlying grumpiness".

Following last summer's riots, the implementation of the Online Safety Act, and this year's protests outside asylum hotels and in support of the now-banned group Palestine Action, the government has been accused of cracking down on freedom of speech.

Speaking to Sky's Wilfred Frost on his The Master Investor Podcast, Mr Clegg said the UK needed to "think long and hard" about "whether we've overdone it".

"When I've looked at some of the examples, I thought to myself, 'yeah, that's really unpleasant speech or egregious speech'," he said.

"But really, surely part of the definition of being in a free society is people say ghastly things, offensive things, awful things, ugly things, and we don't sweep them under the carpet."

He added: "I do think the balance [on free speech] is out of whack here."

It comes as the police watchdog called for a more "common sense" approach to policing, telling Sky News there should be a clear difference between "what is offensive and what is criminal".

Sir Andy Cooke hit out after the wide condemnation of comedy writer Graham Linehan's arrest, publicly, by five armed officers for tweeting messages about trans issues, which allegedly incited violence.

Mr Clegg lost his seat at the 2015 general election and went on to join Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, where he became largely responsible for efforts to enhance moderation standards and improve the company's image.

He quit as head of global affairs in January ahead of Donald Trump's return as US president.

Defending the austerity policies pursued by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, Mr Clegg claimed Britain's recovery from the 2008 financial crisis had been "messed up" by Brexit - and that, compared to the US, the economy had struggled to bounce back from the pandemic.

But America won't have things all its own way in the years ahead, he suggested, as he makes China the favourites to win the artificial intelligence race.

"I don't believe that America is going to beat China in this AI race in the way that they appear to imagine they might. I think China is far, far too powerful and technologically gifted and adept to be sort of treated like that," he said.

Mr Clegg's former employer is just one of several US tech giants investing massively in AI. Others include OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, and Google, which is behind the Gemini chatbot.

China's DeepSeek made headlines in the West earlier this year after releasing a ChatGPT-like AI model that performed faster - and more cheaply - than its rivals.

Mr Clegg said while he was "a little sceptical about some of the hype" around so-called artificial general intelligence, which experts say could match or surpass humans, competition between the US and China would be intense.

Nick Clegg was speaking on The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost, available to watch in full here and listen here.

Sky News