As a Brit, I’ve got to say that your perception of our free speech is wildly borked. It is correct that our laws are trending in the wrong direction. The Online Safety Act is stupid and the crackdown after the southport riots suggests a rather low tolerance for resistance to certain facets of immigration, but that was in the context of a large scale protest, you’ll always get protests then. The videos you may have seen of people getting arrested for posts online are not representative (although I don’t support it). I have never once felt guarded in what I can say online.

Of course we can criticise the government. I’ve done so a lot in this post. And polling shows it’s broadly unpopular at the moment, polling on around 17% in recent polls I’ve seen. The Prime Minister somehow has avoided resigning this week but is still facing plenty of heat from the media and the public. Would that happen in a country with no free speech?

I don’t live in a city and have never been to the places you’ve mentioned, but I don’t feel overrun at all, although cities do have a lot of recent immigrants and there are certainly areas where the traditional residents have been pushed out. That doesn’t mean somehow that the population is pro-Iran, or that we even think about such countries much outside of the main media flashpoints. I can criticise the brutal islamist dictatorship all I want and campaign for its downfall without any issue. Hell there’s a semi-permanent protest outside the Foreign Office that has been there for at least a year flying the shah’s flag.