OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:40 PM – Thursday, February 27, 2025
When Vice President JD Vance met with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the Oval Office on Thursday, to speak on the UK’s deteriorating freedom of speech, tensions arose between the politicians.
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Vance had reportedly angered Europeans, according to media outlets in the UK, earlier this month at the Munich Security Conference — when he denounced what he described as “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values—values shared with the United States of America.”
“I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies,” Vance said in response to a reporter’s question on Thursday.
“But we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British, of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them,” he added, “but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens. So that is something that we’ll talk about today at lunch.”
Starmer, who was seated a few feet away from Vance, spoke up in support of his nation’s regulations.
“We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time,” said the Labour Party politician.
“Certainly, we wouldn’t want to reach across and U.S. citizens, and we don’t, and that’s absolutely right,” he told Vance. “But in relation to free speech in the UK, I’m really proud of that — our history there.”
In Munich, Vance had cited instances of criminal convictions in Europe for actions that would be protected by the First Amendment in the United States. One such instance was a 51-year-old physiotherapist and veteran of the British Army, Adam Smith-Connor, who was ordered to pay £9,000 ($11,346) for praying outside an abortion clinic, claiming he “violated a buffer zone.”
“I wish I could say that this was a fluke—a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person,” Vance voiced at the time. “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”
Vance previously explained that he planned to speak with the British prime minister, who assumed office in July 2024, regarding his worries over free speech before Starmer’s visit to the White House.
During the discussion in the Oval Office, Starmer also got into a lengthy argument with Trump after the GOP president brought up how European nations were planning to “get their money back” — speaking on the financial funds sent to Ukraine.
“We’re not getting all of ours,” the PM responded. “I mean, quite a bit of ours was gifted. There were some loans, but mainly, it was gifted, actually.”
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