Is the UK cracking down on press freedoms?

Questions over the freedom of the British press have resurfaced following the arrests of several journalists covering the Just Stop Oil protests on the M25.

LBC reporter Charlotte Lynch was one of a number of journalists arrested by police. She recalled the “absolutely terrifying” ordeal in a series of tweets that detailed being handcuffed, having her phone taken and being placed in a police cell for more than five hours. Lynch said it was “blindingly obvious” she was a reporter as she had shown the officers her press ID.

In a statement Hertfordshire Police did admit that “though the actions of the officers at the scene are understandable, in retrospect an arrest would not have been necessary”.

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‘Climate of hostility’

Lynch’s arrest came just a day after two other journalists were arrested at the same protest, including documentary maker Rich Felgate and photographer Tom Bowles. The Financial Times reported that both men made “repeated attempts to show their press cards”, with the paper adding that the arrests have prompted “an outcry from press associations and human rights groups”.

Jun Pang, policy and campaigns officer at the human rights group Liberty, told the paper that police action against journalists must be seen in the context of political rhetoric, suggesting police had been “enabled and encouraged by the government’s wider, continued assault on protest rights”.

OpenDemocracy’s Mary Fitzgerald said that the Conservative government’s “record on the issue is appalling”. She added that politicians’ attitudes to the press have contributed towards the “long-growing climate of hostility to journalism here in the UK”.

‘End of Britain’s free press’

The UK’s press freedom index in 2022 was 78.71, according to Statista, “a slight improvement from the previous year when it was 78.41”. But the situation for journalists has “got worse” over the last ten years as the rating “decreased by 4.4 index points overall” since 2013, said the website.

Journalists believe there are other contributing factors to the decline. The “spectre of state press regulation”, said Spiked’s Hal Conte, means “the end of Britain’s free press”. Conte was writing last month in response to a lawsuit brought by public figures including Elton John, Prince Harry and Baroness Doreen Lawrence in which they claimed they’d been the victims of “abhorrent criminal activity” at the hands of Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday.

“There is already a culture of self-censorship in the press, but this could soon get even worse,” said Conte. The trial “only needs to become notorious in the court of public opinion to have repercussions for media freedom – regardless of the actual verdict”, he added.